Quote of the Day (Michael Oakeshott, on Conversation)

“Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, not is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. It is with conversation as with gambling, its significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering. Properly speaking, it is impossible in the absence of a diversity of voices: in it different universes of discourse meet, acknowledge each other and enjoy an oblique relationship which neither requires nor forecasts their being assimilated to one another.”— English philosopher and political theorist Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990), The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind (1959)