I remember reading Joseph Sobran's essay Pensees: Notes for the reactionary of tomorrow.  Along with some Buckley, Gilder, Murray, Johnson (Paul) and a few Commentary articles by P.T. Bauer and Gottfried Haberler, Pensees helped to define the worldview I hold to this day.

I could place my curser randomly throughout Sobran's essay and haul in samples like this over and over again:

"'To be happy at home,' Johnson also remarks, 'is the end of all human endeavor.' That is a good starting-point for politics, just because it is outside politics. I often get the feeling that what is wrong with political discussion in general is that it is dominated by narrow malcontents who take their bearings not from images of health and happiness but from statistical suffering. They always seem to want to 'eliminate' something--poverty, racism,war--instead of settling for fostering other sorts of things it is beyond their power actually to produce."

I'm adding another essay to a growing file of seminal works.  Angelo Codevilla's piece, America's Ruling Class -- And The Perils of Revolution is well worth your time.

Thanks, David.