Russell Kirk Quotes

Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it: they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light.

If you want to have order in the commonwealth, you first have to have order in the individual soul.

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 lose with Socrates, let us say, than win with Lenin.

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 that the past is simply a reflection of the present

Every right is married to a duty, every freedom owes a corresponding responsibility.

If the state - and within the state, the judiciary particularly - harasses and undermines the Church , in any society the state undoes itself.

Sudden and slashing reforms are as perilous as sudden and slashing surgery.

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.

A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.

The Secular City, having legislated and litigated itself out of any entanglement with the City of God, would be a hell upon earth .

Privilege, in any society, is the reward of duties performed.

Schooling deprived of religious insights is wretched education.

Nothing is more conservative than conservation

The ACLU has been able to harass out of existence public expressions of faith.

Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by subtle threads of moral and intellectual principle.

...only the unscrupulous or shortsighted can defend pollution and degradation of the countryside.

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.

Locke contended that government originates out of the necessity for protecting property.

Life is for action, and if we desire to know anything, we must make up our minds to be ignorant about much.

Despite much talk in this land about religious freedom, churches and their schools now confront grave difficulties.

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.

There are no lost causes because there are no gained causes.

We cannot make a heaven on earth, though we may make a hell.

The natural law is an instrument for progress, not a weapon of revolution.

Common Reader for Everyday Ecologists

...so mankind is now trapped by the failure of its energies and by the depletion of those natural resources that men have plundered wantonly.

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.

Politics moves upward into ethics, and ethics ascends to theology.

...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.

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 may be maintained.

A society which denies the heart its role becomes, in very short order, a heartless society.

Ordinary human laws are the means - however imperfect - by which we express our understanding of the enduring moral law.

Ordinary human laws are the means -- however imperfect -- by which we express our understanding of the enduring moral law.

To the modern politician and planner, men are the flies of a summer, oblivious of their past, reckless of their future.