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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
May
Make
Hell
Though
Heaven
Cannot
Earth

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...only the unscrupulous or shortsighted can defend pollution and degradation of the countryside.
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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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Schooling deprived of religious insights is wretched education.
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Privilege, in any society, is the reward of duties performed.
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There are no lost causes because there are no gained causes.
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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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Individualism is a denial that life has any meaning except the gratification of the ego in politics it must end in anarchy. It is not possible for one man to be both Christian and Individualist.
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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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A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.
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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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Politics moves upward into ethics, and ethics ascends to theology.
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The natural law is an instrument for progress, not a weapon of revolution.
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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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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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The ACLU has been able to harass out of existence public expressions of faith.
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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 you want to have order in the commonwealth, you first have to have order in the individual soul.
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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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...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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Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by subtle threads of moral and intellectual principle.
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