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It is good for a student to be poor. Getting and spending, the typical American college student lays waste his powers. Work and contemplation don't mix, and university days ought to be days of contemplation.

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
Getting
Lays
Poor
University
American
Spending
Work
Waste
Good
Students
Contemplation
College
Typical
Ought
Student
Days
Powers

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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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Locke contended that government originates out of the necessity for protecting property.
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...so mankind is now trapped by the failure of its energies and by the depletion of those natural resources that men have plundered wantonly.
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Politics moves upward into ethics, and ethics ascends to theology.
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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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Ordinary human laws are the means - however imperfect - by which we express our understanding of the enduring moral law.
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...ambition without pious restraint must end in failure, often involving in its ruin that beautiful reverence which solaces common men for the obscurity and poverty of their lot.
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...only the unscrupulous or shortsighted can defend pollution and degradation of the countryside.
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Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings.
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Privilege, in any society, is the reward of duties performed.
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Schooling deprived of religious insights is wretched education.
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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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The libertarian thinks that this world is chiefly a stage for the swaggering ego the conservative finds himself instead a pilgrim in a realm of mystery and wonder, where duty, discipline, and sacrifice are required-and where the reward is that love which passeth all understanding.
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Every right is married to a duty every freedom owes a corresponding responsibility and there cannot be genuine freedom unless there exists also genuine order, in the moral realm and in the social realm.
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Either order in the cosmos is real, or all is chaos. If we are adrift in chaos, then the fragile egalitarian doctrines and emancipating programs of the revolutionary reformers have no significance for in a vortex of chaos, only force and appetite signify.
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There are no lost causes because there are no gained causes.
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If you want to have order in the commonwealth, you first have to have order in the individual soul.
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A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.
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We cannot make a heaven on earth, though we may make a hell.
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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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