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

More quotes by Russell Kirk

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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.
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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...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 .
Russell Kirk
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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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Despite much talk in this land about religious freedom, churches and their schools now confront grave difficulties.
Russell Kirk
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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.
Russell Kirk
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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.
Russell Kirk
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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.
Russell Kirk
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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.
Russell Kirk
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Common Reader for Everyday Ecologists
Russell Kirk
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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.
Russell Kirk
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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.
Russell Kirk
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There are no lost causes because there are no gained causes.
Russell Kirk
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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.
Russell Kirk
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The libertarian thinks that this world is chiefly a stage for the swaggering ego the conservative finds himself instead a pilgrim in a realm of mystery and wonder, where duty, discipline, and sacrifice are required-and where the reward is that love which passeth all understanding.
Russell Kirk
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...only the unscrupulous or shortsighted can defend pollution and degradation of the countryside.
Russell Kirk
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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.
Russell Kirk
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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.
Russell Kirk
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Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by subtle threads of moral and intellectual principle.
Russell Kirk