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The natural law is an instrument for progress, not a weapon of revolution.

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
Law
Natural
Weapon
Instrument
Instruments
Weapons
Revolution
Progress

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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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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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Despite much talk in this land about religious freedom, churches and their schools now confront grave difficulties.
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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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Privilege, in any society, is the reward of duties performed.
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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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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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A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.
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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.
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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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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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We cannot make a heaven on earth, though we may make a hell.
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Politics moves upward into ethics, and ethics ascends to theology.
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Locke contended that government originates out of the necessity for protecting property.
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Schooling deprived of religious insights is wretched education.
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There are no lost causes because there are no gained causes.
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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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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 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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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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