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Politics moves upward into ethics, and ethics ascends to theology.

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
Ethics
Politics
Interesting
Moving
Ascends
Upward
Theology
Moves

More quotes by Russell Kirk

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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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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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The natural law is an instrument for progress, not a weapon of revolution.
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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 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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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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Schooling deprived of religious insights is wretched education.
Russell Kirk
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Ordinary human laws are the means - however imperfect - by which we express our understanding of the enduring moral law.
Russell Kirk
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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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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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...only the unscrupulous or shortsighted can defend pollution and degradation of the countryside.
Russell Kirk
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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.
Russell Kirk
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There are no lost causes because there are no gained causes.
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Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by subtle threads of moral and intellectual principle.
Russell Kirk
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Privilege, in any society, is the reward of duties performed.
Russell Kirk
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Locke contended that government originates out of the necessity for protecting property.
Russell Kirk
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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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Common Reader for Everyday Ecologists
Russell Kirk
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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.
Russell Kirk