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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.

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
Ends
Concede
Never
Consumption
Would
Providence
Men
Near
Suicide
Prepared
Century
Society
Burke

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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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A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.
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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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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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We cannot make a heaven on earth, though we may make a hell.
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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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Despite much talk in this land about religious freedom, churches and their schools now confront grave difficulties.
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Privilege, in any society, is the reward of duties performed.
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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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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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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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Ordinary human laws are the means - however imperfect - by which we express our understanding of the enduring moral law.
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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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...only the unscrupulous or shortsighted can defend pollution and degradation of the countryside.
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Locke contended that government originates out of the necessity for protecting property.
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The natural law is an instrument for progress, not a weapon of revolution.
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The ACLU has been able to harass out of existence public expressions of faith.
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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.
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