Russell Kirk Quotes

46 quotes in 1026 categories

• The aim of any good constitution is to achieve in a society a high degree of political harmony, so that order and justice and freedom…
• I am a conservative. Quite possibly I am on the losing side; often I think so. Yet, out of a curious perversity I had rather…
• 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…
• Rousseau and his disciples were resolved to force men to be free; in most of the world, they triumphed; men are set free from family,…
• We ought not to endeavor to revise history according to our latter day notions of what things ought to have been, or upon the theory…
• Mine was not an Enlightened mind, I now was aware: it was a Gothic mind, medieval in its temper and structure. I did not love…
• 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…
• 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…
• We cannot make a heaven on earth, though we may make a hell.
• Sudden and slashing reforms are as perilous as sudden and slashing surgery.
• A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.
• The issue of environmental quality is one which transcends traditional political boundaries. It is a cause which can attract, and very sincerely, liberals, conservatives, radicals,…
• Nothing is more conservative than conservation
• Every right is married to a duty, every freedom owes a corresponding responsibility.
• 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…
• Politics moves upward into ethics, and ethics ascends to theology.
• A society which denies the heart its role becomes, in very short order, a heartless society.
• The conservative "thinks of political policies as intended to preserve order, justice, and freedom. The ideologue, on the contrary, thinks of politics as a revolutionary…
• 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;…
• The modern spectacle of vanished forests and eroded lands, wasted petroleum and ruthless mining, national debts recklessly increased until they are repudiated, and continual revision…

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