Quote

...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.

Russell Kirk

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Ends
Ruins
Without
Conservative
Solace
Must
Ambition
Pious
Men
Failure
Obscurity
Poverty
Involving
Common
Restraint
Often
Ruin
Beautiful
Reverence

More quotes by Russell Kirk

Image
If men are discharged of reverence for ancient usage, they will treat this world, almost certainly, as if it were their private property, to be consumed for their sensual gratification and thus they will destroy in their lust for enjoyment the property of future generations, of their own contemporaries, and indeed their very own capital.
Russell Kirk
Image
The Secular City, having legislated and litigated itself out of any entanglement with the City of God, would be a hell upon earth .
Russell Kirk
Image
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
Image
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
Image
If you want to have order in the commonwealth, you first have to have order in the individual soul.
Russell Kirk
Image
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.
Russell Kirk
Image
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
Image
There are no lost causes because there are no gained causes.
Russell Kirk
Image
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
Image
...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
Image
Despite much talk in this land about religious freedom, churches and their schools now confront grave difficulties.
Russell Kirk
Image
The natural law is an instrument for progress, not a weapon of revolution.
Russell Kirk
Image
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.
Russell Kirk
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The ACLU has been able to harass out of existence public expressions of faith.
Russell Kirk
Image
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.
Russell Kirk
Image
Ordinary human laws are the means - however imperfect - by which we express our understanding of the enduring moral law.
Russell Kirk
Image
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.
Russell Kirk