"Burke was liberal because he was conservative."

My favorite line from Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind comes to mind reading David Bromwich's suggestion that "Burkean conservatism must be as much about civil liberties as property rights" — Right Reflections.

The author calls it "an odd fact of American society in the past 60 years that a section of the party of improvers—the improvers of wars—have so often called themselves conservatives... It is no less strange—except that one saw it also in the 1950s—that property libertarians have so often failed to live up to their duties as civil libertarians."