Russell Kirk Quotes

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

Russell Kirk

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

Russell Kirk

#3. 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 of positive law, is evidence of what an age without veneration does to itself and its successors.

Russell Kirk

#4. 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

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

Russell Kirk

#6. 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.

Russell Kirk

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

Russell Kirk

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

Russell Kirk

#9. 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

#10. 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, church, town, class, guild; yet they wear, instead, the chains of the state, and they expire of ennui or stifling lone lines.

Russell Kirk

#11. 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 instrument for transforming society and even transforming human nature. In his march toward Utopia, the ideologue is merciless.

Russell Kirk

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

Russell Kirk

#13. Schooling deprived of religious insights is wretched education.

Russell Kirk

#14. 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 cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful.

Russell Kirk

#15. Global environmentalists have said and written enough to leave no doubt that their goal is to destroy the prosperous economies of the world's richest nations.

Russell Kirk

#16. 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

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

Russell Kirk

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

Russell Kirk

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

Russell Kirk

#20. 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.

Russell Kirk

#21. In a revolutionary epoch, sometimes men taste every novelty, sicken of them all, and return to ancient principles so long disused that they seem refreshingly hearty when they are rediscovered.

Russell Kirk

#22. Because "we human beings are imaginative by nature, we cannot choose to live by the routine of the ant-heap. If deprived of the imagery of virtue" - imaginative depictions of the truly good life - "we will seek out the imagery of vice.

Russell Kirk

#23. 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

#24. Man's rights are linked with man's duties, and when they are distorted into extravagant claims for a species of freedom and equality and worldly aggrandizement which human character cannot sustain, they degenerate from rights to vices.

Russell Kirk

#25. 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

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

Russell Kirk

#27. 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

#28. The true natural rights of men, then, are equal justice, security of labor and property, the amenities of civilized institutions, and the benefits of orderly society.

Russell Kirk

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

Russell Kirk

#30. Besides, the conflict is not really between royalty and democracy. It is between both and plutocracy, which, having destroyed the royal power by frank force under democratic pretexts, has bought and swallowed democracy.

Russell Kirk

#31. 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.

Russell Kirk

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

Russell Kirk

#35. 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

#36. But instead of this world unification ushering in an age of prosperity and peace, as most globalists believe it will, it will be a time of unimaginable human suffering as recorded in God's Word. The Anti-christ will tightly regulate who may buy and sell.

Russell Kirk

#37. 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

#38. Nothing is more conservative than conservation

Russell Kirk

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

Russell Kirk

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

Russell Kirk

#41. If there were no God the Father, there could be no brotherhood of man.

Russell Kirk

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

Russell Kirk

#43. Common Reader for Everyday Ecologists

Russell Kirk

#44. Burke, could he see our century, never would concede that a consumption-society is the end for which Providence has prepared man.

Russell Kirk

#45. The mass of mankind, Burke implies, reason hardly at all, in the higher sense, nor ever can: deprived of folk-wisdom and folk-law, which are prejudice and prescription, they can do no more than cheer the demagogue, enrich the charlatan, and submit to the despot.

Russell Kirk

#46. 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

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

Russell Kirk

#48. The resources of nature, like those of spirit, are running out, and all that a conscientious man can aspire to be is a literal conservative, hoarding what remains of culture and of natural wealth against the fierce appetites of modern life.

Russell Kirk

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

Russell Kirk

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

Russell Kirk

#51. In America, the Federal Constitution has endured as the most sagacious conservative document in political history

Russell Kirk

#52. Only the unscrupulous or shortsighted can defend pollution and degradation of the countryside.

Russell Kirk

#53. 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

#54. 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

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

Russell Kirk

#56. 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

#57. 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, reactionaries, freaks, and middle-class straights.

Russell Kirk