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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 .

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
Secular
Would
City
Cities
Hell
Religious
Upon
Legislated
Christian
Entanglement
Earth

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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.
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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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...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 ACLU has been able to harass out of existence public expressions of faith.
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Politics moves upward into ethics, and ethics ascends to theology.
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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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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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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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Schooling deprived of religious insights is wretched education.
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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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Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by subtle threads of moral and intellectual principle.
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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.
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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.
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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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The natural law is an instrument for progress, not a weapon of revolution.
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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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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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We cannot make a heaven on earth, though we may make a hell.
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