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

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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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...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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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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Locke contended that government originates out of the necessity for protecting property.
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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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We cannot make a heaven on earth, though we may make a hell.
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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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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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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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Despite much talk in this land about religious freedom, churches and their schools now confront grave difficulties.
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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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Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by subtle threads of moral and intellectual principle.
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Privilege, in any society, is the reward of duties performed.
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The natural law is an instrument for progress, not a weapon of revolution.
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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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Schooling deprived of religious insights is wretched education.
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