Russell Kirk Quotes

The trouble with purging the school curriculum of religious knowledge is that ultimate questions cannot be answered without reference to religious beliefs or at least to philosophy. With religion expelled from the schools, a clear field was left for the entrance of the mode of belief called humanitarianism, or secular humanism — the latter a term employed by the cultural historian Christopher Dawson. During the past four decades and more, the place that religion used to hold in American schooling, always a rather modest and non-dogmatic place, has been filled by secular humanism. Its root principle is that human nature and society may be perfected without the operation of divine grace. . . .

In his book A Common Faith (1934), [John] Dewey advocated his brand of humanism as a religion. "Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race," he wrote. "Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind. It remains to make it explicit and militant."

Much more evidence exists to suggest that humanitarianism, or secular humanism, should be regarded in law as a religion, with respect to both establishment and free exercise in the First Amendment. It is this non-theistic religion, hostile to much of the established morality and many existing American institutions, that has come close to being established as a "civil religion" in American public schools.

Only portions of the globe still enslaved by the enemies of the people refrained from congratulating President Zingu and Premier Villiers-Kolama upon the astounding successes of their masterly general and his incomparable popular forces. The tyrants may live to rue the day when they ignored the might of revolutionary Hamnegri. These reactionary elements include, of course, the oligarchs of the United States, Perfidious Albion and her sattelites, decadent France, the Latin-American serfs of the United States, corrupt Formosa, brutal Zanzibar, absurd Malaysia, unspeakable Liberia, middle-ages Morocco, bloody-handed South Africa, hypocritical China, barbarous Albania, and the treacherous Limkono Confderation.

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:

Every right is married to a duty; every freedom owns a corresponding responsibility; and there cannot be genuine freedom unless there is also genuine order in the moral realm and the social realm. Order, in the moral realm, is the realization of a body of transcendent values — indeed a hierarchy of values — which give purpose to existence and motive to conduct. Order, in society, is the harmonious arrangement of classes and functions which guards justice and gives willing consent to law and insurers that we all shall be safe together. Although there cannot be freedom without order, in some sense there is always a conflict between the claims of order and the claims of freedom. We often express this conflict is the competition between the desire for liberty and the desire for security. Although modern technological revolution and modern mass–democracy have made this struggle more intense, there is nothing new about it in essence. President Washington remarked that 'individuals entering into a society must give up a share of their liberty to preserve the rest.' But doctrinaires of one ideology or another, in our time, continue to cry out for absolute security, absolute order, or for absolute freedom, power to assert the ego in defiance of all convention. At the moment, this fanatic debate may be particularly well discerned in the intemperate argument over academic freedom. I feel that in asserting freedom as an absolute, somehow divorced from order, we are repudiating our historical legacy of freedom and exposing ourselves to the danger of absolutism, whether that absolutism be what Tocqueville called 'democratic despotism' or what recently existed in Germany and now exists in Russia. 'To begin with unlimited freedom,' Dostoevski rights in The Devils, 'is to end without on limited despotism.

There are six canons of conservative thought:

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

Most of us are not really so arrogant as to think we have a right to remold the world in our image. The best we can do, toward redeeming the states of Europe and Asia from the menace of revolution and the distresses of our time, is to realize our own conservative character, suspicious of doctrinaire alteration, respectful toward history, preferring variety over uniformity, acknowledging a moral order composed of human persons, not of mere political and economic atoms subservient to the state. We have not been appointed the correctors of mankind; but, under God, we may be an example to mankind.

If a man acknowledges no authority, he sets himself up as Cain, and before long he is struck down by nemesis, which follows upon hubris.

Two centuries ago, the United States settled into a permanent political order, after fourteen years of violence and heated debate. Two centuries ago, France fell into ruinous disorder that ran its course for twenty-four years. In both countries there resounded much ardent talk of rights — rights natural, rights prescriptive. . . .

[F]anatic ideology had begun to rage within France, so that not one of the liberties guaranteed by the Declaration of the Rights of Man could be enjoyed by France's citizens. One thinks of the words of Dostoievski: "To begin with unlimited liberty is to end with unlimited despotism." . . .

In striking contrast, the twenty-two senators and fifty-nine representatives who during the summer of 1789 debated the proposed seventeen amendments to the Constitution were men of much experience in representative government, experience acquired within the governments of their several states or, before 1776, in colonial assembles and in the practice of the law. Many had served in the army during the Revolution. They decidedly were political realists, aware of how difficult it is to govern men's passions and self-interest. . . . Among most of them, the term democracy was suspect. The War of Independence had sufficed them by way of revolution. . . .

The purpose of law, they knew, is to keep the peace. To that end, compromises must be made among interests and among states. Both Federalists and Anti-Federalists ranked historical experience higher than novel theory. They suffered from no itch to alter American society radically; they went for sound security. The amendments constituting what is called the Bill of Rights were not innovations, but rather restatements of principles at law long observed in Britain and in the thirteen colonies. . . .

The Americans who approved the first ten amendments to their Constitution were no ideologues. Neither Voltaire nor Rousseau had any substantial following among them. Their political ideas, with few exceptions, wer

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 you turn toward O'Connell Street, an easy stroll takes you to the noble façade of Trinity College and the statues of Burke and Goldsmith; northward, near Parnell Square, you may hear living Irish orators proclaiming through amplifiers that they have succeeded in increasing sevenfold the pensions of widows, a mere earnest of their intent. And you may reflect, with Burke, "What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!"

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.

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.

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.

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.