Russell Kirk Quotes

Agriculture's principles are not identical with those of trade, and the rights of the proprietor are balanced by his duties. The final causes of agriculture are identical with the final causes of the state. Two negative ends of the state exist: its own safety, and the protection of person and property. Three positive ends stand beside these: to make the means of subsistence more easy to each individual; to secure to each of its members the hope of bettering his condition or that of his children; and the development of those faculties which are essential to his humanity, that is, to the rational and moral being. Knowing these ends, we must reform our courses, recast our measures, and make ourselves a better people.

But wisdom is not got through shouting-matches within one generation.

Embracing his knees, she babbled of the Holy Blood, and thanked all her saints. "Lei, lei, a miracle! A miracle!"
"if so, one quite arbitrary," the Knight observed. "How very odd of God! Yet conceivably, Melchiora, there exist greater sinners whom the world mistakes for the elect. Were it not for that chance, and were I indeed particularly blessed, one would be tempted to embrace the error of Origen — though not, my darling, Origen's peculiar mode of renouncing the world."

To narrow natural rights to such neat slogans as "liberty, equality, fraternity" or "life, liberty, property," . . . was to ignore the complexity of public affairs and to leave out of consideration most moral relationships. . . .

Burke appealed back beyond Locke to an idea of community far warmer and richer than Locke's or Hobbes's aggregation of individuals. The true compact of society, Burke told his countrymen, is eternal: it joins the dead, the living, and the unborn. We all participate in this spiritual and social partnership, because it is ordained of God. In defense of social harmony, Burke appealed to what Locke had ignored: the love of neighbor and the sense of duty. By the time of the French Revolution, Locke's argument in the Second Treatise already had become insufficient to sustain a social order. . . .

The Constitution is not a theoretical document at all, and the influence of Locke upon it is negligible, although Locke's phrases, at least, crept into the Declaration of Independence, despite Jefferson's awkwardness about confessing the source of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

If we turn to the books read and quoted by American leaders near the end of the eighteenth century, we discover that Locke was but one philosopher and political advocate among the many writers whose influence they acknowledged. . . .

Even Jefferson, though he had read Locke, cites in his Commonplace Book such juridical authorities as Coke and Kames much more frequently. As Gilbert Chinard puts it, "The Jeffersonian philosophy was born under the sign of Hengist and Horsa, not of the Goddess Reason" — that is, Jefferson was more strongly influenced by his understanding of British history, the Anglo-Saxon age particularly, than by the eighteenth-century rationalism of which Locke was a principal forerunner. . . .

Adams treats Locke merely as one of several commendable English friends to liberty. . . .

At bottom, the thinking Americans of the last quarter of the

We all have real obligations toward our fellow-men, for it was ordained by Omniscience that men should live together in charity and brotherhood. A just society, guided by these lights, will endeavor to provide that every man be free to do the work for which he is best suited, and that he receive the rewards which that work deserves, and that no one meddle with him. Thus cooperation, not strife, will be the governing influence in the state; class will not turn against class, but all men will realize, instead, that a variety of occupations, duties, and rewards is necessary to civilization and the rule of law.

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

By “the Permanent Things” [T. S. Eliot] meant those elements in the human condition that give us our nature, without which we are as the beasts that perish. They work upon us all in the sense that both they and we are bound up in that continuity of belief and institution called the great mysterious incorporation of the human race.

To the immense majority of men, even in civilized countries, speculative philosophy has ever been, and must ever remain, a terra incognita. Yet it is not the less true, that all the epoch-forming Revolutions of the Christian world, the revolutions of religion and with them the civil, social, and domestic habits of the nations concerned, have coincided with the rise and fall of metaphysical systems. So few are the minds that really govern the machine of society, and so incomparably more numerous and more important are the indirect consequences of things than their foreseen and direct effects.

Those who neglect the roots of order, one may add, are compelled to water those roots desperately — after wandering in the parched wasteland of disorder. Upon our knowledge of those roots may depend what sort of order America and the world will have by the end of this century. It may be the order of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, rich and dehumanized; it may be the garrison-state controlled by ferocious ideology, as in George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four; or it may be an order renewed and improved, yet recognizably linked with the order that arose in Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and London.

freedom can be achieved and retained only by sober men who take humanity as it is, not as humanity should be.

Human nature being irremediably flawed, so that all of us in some degree rebel against the people and the institutions to which we owe most, there is in every man a certain impulse to make himself God: that is, to cast off all authority but his own lust and whim. From this vice comes the corrupting influence of total power upon even the best of natures. The rebellion of Lucifer is the symbol of this ancient anarchic impulse—the passion for overthrowing the just authority of God, that upon the vacant throne of authority the rebel may make himself absolute.

The American Constitution is a practical secular covenant, drawn up by men who (with few exceptions) believed in a sacred Covenant, designed to restrain the human tendencies toward violence and fraud; the American Constitution is a fundamental law deliberately meant to place checks upon will and appetite.

Most men and women are good only from habit, or out of deference to the opinions of their neighbors, the friend to tradition argues; and to deprive them of their habits, customs, and precepts, in order to benefit them in some novel way, may leave them morally and socially adrift, more harmed by their loss of ethical sanctions than helped by the fancied new benefit.

It is quite possible for man, in ancient or modern times, to be materially prosperous, and freed from the necessity of choice, and yet servile. It is also possible that he may suffer no outrageous oppression. But he must always lack one thing, this servile man, and that is true manhood, the dignity of man. He remains a child; he never comes into man's birthright, which is the pleasure and the pain of making one's own choices.

When an orthodoxy decays, the old dark gods, the savage gods, win back their burnt offerings