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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.

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
Gives
Tolerable
Cannot
Violence
Attained
Anything
Justice
Marked
Better
High
Civil
Giving
Law
Degree
Good
Society
Degrees
Freedom
Laws
Primacy
Social
Among
Enforced

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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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Despite much talk in this land about religious freedom, churches and their schools now confront grave difficulties.
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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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The natural law is an instrument for progress, not a weapon of revolution.
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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 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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We cannot make a heaven on earth, though we may make a hell.
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Common Reader for Everyday Ecologists
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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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Ordinary human laws are the means - however imperfect - by which we express our understanding of the enduring moral law.
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Privilege, in any society, is the reward of duties performed.
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The ACLU has been able to harass out of existence public expressions of faith.
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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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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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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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There are no lost causes because there are no gained causes.
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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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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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If you want to have order in the commonwealth, you first have to have order in the individual soul.
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