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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.

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
Order
Fragile
Signify
Real
Significance
Adrift
Revolutionary
Vortex
Doctrine
Reformers
Chaos
Doctrines
Program
Cosmos
Either
Programs
Emancipating
Force
Appetite
Egalitarian

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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.
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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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...only the unscrupulous or shortsighted can defend pollution and degradation of the countryside.
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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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The ACLU has been able to harass out of existence public expressions of faith.
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Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by subtle threads of moral and intellectual principle.
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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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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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Politics moves upward into ethics, and ethics ascends to theology.
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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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Locke contended that government originates out of the necessity for protecting property.
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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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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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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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Ordinary human laws are the means - however imperfect - by which we express our understanding of the enduring moral law.
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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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The natural law is an instrument for progress, not a weapon of revolution.
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If a conservative order is indeed to return, we ought to know the tradition which is attached to it, so that we may rebuild society if it is not to be restored, still we ought to understand conservative ideas so that we may rake from the ashes what scorched fragments of civilizations escape the conflagration of unchecked will and appetite.
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