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If you want to have order in the commonwealth, you first have to have order in the individual soul.

Russell Kirk

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Russell Kirk
Age: 75 †
Born: 1918
Born: October 19
Died: 1994
Died: April 19
Historian
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Peace Activist
Philosopher
Political Scientist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Plymouth
Michigan
Soul
Firsts
First
Moralist
Commonwealth
Critics
Individual
Order

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Despite much talk in this land about religious freedom, churches and their schools now confront grave difficulties.
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If men are discharged of reverence for ancient usage, they will treat this world, almost certainly, as if it were their private property, to be consumed for their sensual gratification and thus they will destroy in their lust for enjoyment the property of future generations, of their own contemporaries, and indeed their very own capital.
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Privilege, in any society, is the reward of duties performed.
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We cannot make a heaven on earth, though we may make a hell.
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Prejudice is not bigotry or superstition, although prejudice sometimes may degenerate into these. Prejudice is pre-judgment, the answer with which intuition and ancestral consensus of opinion supply a man when he lacks either time or knowledge to arrive at a decision predicated upon pure reason.
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There are no lost causes because there are no gained causes.
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...only the unscrupulous or shortsighted can defend pollution and degradation of the countryside.
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Ordinary human laws are the means - however imperfect - by which we express our understanding of the enduring moral law.
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Locke contended that government originates out of the necessity for protecting property.
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The natural law is an instrument for progress, not a weapon of revolution.
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The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called the permanent things-the norms of human action.
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Some 'separation' zealots would expunge any vestige of religious observance in public schools. Many of the same anti-religious fanatics would like to wipe out of existence all church-related schools, by regulation or taxation, so that universal ignorance of the life of spirit should prevail.
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Principle #6: Recognition that change and reform are not identical, and that innovation is a devouring conflagration more often than it is a torch of progress.
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The Secular City, having legislated and litigated itself out of any entanglement with the City of God, would be a hell upon earth .
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Schooling deprived of religious insights is wretched education.
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The good society is marked by a high degree of order, justice, and freedom. Among these, order has primacy: for justice cannot be enforced until a tolerable civil social order is attained, nor can freedom be anything better than violence until order gives us laws.
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Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it: they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light.
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And Burke, could he see our century, never would concede that a consumption-society, so near to suicide, is the end for which Providence has prepared man.
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Politics moves upward into ethics, and ethics ascends to theology.
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The principle of real leadership ignored, the immortal objects of society forgotten, practical conservatism degenerated into mere laudation of private enterprise, economic policy almost wholly surrendered to special interests.
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