Unforgettable

This is one of my favorite (and indeed, one of the most quoted) passages in our conservative heritage. It's really hard to condense Burke's idea into a "quote" of reasonable length...but I think that this captures the essence, at least, of the conservative's instinct that society is intergenerational:

"Society is indeed a contract...It is to be looked on with other reverence, because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society..."

Edmund Burke

Reflections on the Revolution in France