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We cannot make a heaven on earth, though we may make a hell.

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
Cannot
Earth
May
Make
Hell
Though
Heaven

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...only the unscrupulous or shortsighted can defend pollution and degradation of the countryside.
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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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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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A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.
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Politics moves upward into ethics, and ethics ascends to theology.
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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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Privilege, in any society, is the reward of duties performed.
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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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Common Reader for Everyday Ecologists
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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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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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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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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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The ACLU has been able to harass out of existence public expressions of faith.
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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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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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Schooling deprived of religious insights is wretched education.
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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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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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There are no lost causes because there are no gained causes.
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