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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.

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
Cannot
Married
Also
Unless
Right
Duty
Corresponding
Every
Responsibility
Owes
Moral
Realm
Freedom
Realms
Social
Genuine
Order
Exists

More quotes by Russell Kirk

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We cannot make a heaven on earth, though we may make a hell.
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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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Politics moves upward into ethics, and ethics ascends to theology.
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The ACLU has been able to harass out of existence public expressions of faith.
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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 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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...so mankind is now trapped by the failure of its energies and by the depletion of those natural resources that men have plundered wantonly.
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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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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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There are no lost causes because there are no gained causes.
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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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Common Reader for Everyday Ecologists
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Schooling deprived of religious insights is wretched education.
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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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...only the unscrupulous or shortsighted can defend pollution and degradation of the countryside.
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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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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
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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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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.
Russell Kirk