Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Progress
Devouring
Principles
Torch
Often
Torches
Change
Identical
Recognition
Reform
Innovation
Principle
Conflagration
More quotes by Russell Kirk
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
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
...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
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
Politics moves upward into ethics, and ethics ascends to theology.
Russell Kirk
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
We cannot make a heaven on earth, though we may make a hell.
Russell Kirk
Schooling deprived of religious insights is wretched education.
Russell Kirk
The ACLU has been able to harass out of existence public expressions of faith.
Russell Kirk
...only the unscrupulous or shortsighted can defend pollution and degradation of the countryside.
Russell Kirk
The natural law is an instrument for progress, not a weapon of revolution.
Russell Kirk
Common Reader for Everyday Ecologists
Russell Kirk
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
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
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
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
Ordinary human laws are the means - however imperfect - by which we express our understanding of the enduring moral law.
Russell Kirk
Privilege, in any society, is the reward of duties performed.
Russell Kirk
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
There are no lost causes because there are no gained causes.
Russell Kirk
