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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
Common
Ecologists
Everyday
Reader

More quotes by Russell Kirk

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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.
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.
Russell Kirk
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A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.
Russell Kirk
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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.
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.
Russell Kirk
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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.
Russell Kirk
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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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...only the unscrupulous or shortsighted can defend pollution and degradation of the countryside.
Russell Kirk
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Despite much talk in this land about religious freedom, churches and their schools now confront grave difficulties.
Russell Kirk
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Politics moves upward into ethics, and ethics ascends to theology.
Russell Kirk
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The ACLU has been able to harass out of existence public expressions of faith.
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
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Locke contended that government originates out of the necessity for protecting property.
Russell Kirk
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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.
Russell Kirk
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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.
Russell Kirk
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Schooling deprived of religious insights is wretched education.
Russell Kirk
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We cannot make a heaven on earth, though we may make a hell.
Russell Kirk
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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.
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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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.
Russell Kirk