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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
Order
Exists
Cannot
Married
Also
Unless
Right
Duty
Corresponding
Every
Responsibility
Owes
Moral
Realm
Freedom
Realms
Social
Genuine
More quotes by 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
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
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
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
...so mankind is now trapped by the failure of its energies and by the depletion of those natural resources that men have plundered wantonly.
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
We cannot make a heaven on earth, though we may make a hell.
Russell Kirk
Privilege, in any society, is the reward of duties performed.
Russell Kirk
There are no lost causes because there are no gained causes.
Russell Kirk
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
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
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
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
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
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
Common Reader for Everyday Ecologists
Russell Kirk
Ordinary human laws are the means - however imperfect - by which we express our understanding of the enduring moral law.
Russell Kirk
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
Despite much talk in this land about religious freedom, churches and their schools now confront grave difficulties.
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
