Russell Kirk Quotes

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.

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."

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

A thorough survey of Randolph's reading defeats such an effort. The Virginian had, certainly, a lively interest in the writers of his day, but his admiration for the Romantics was strictly qualified, as his correspondence with Francis Walker Gilmer, Brockenbrough, Francis Scott Key, and Josiah Quincy shows.

In medieval times, the learned man, the teacher was a servant of God wholly, and of God only. His freedom was sanctioned by an authority more than human…The academy was regarded almost as a part of the natural and unalterable order of things. … They were Guardians of the Word, fulfilling a sacred function and so secure in their right. Far from repressing free discussion, this "framework of certain key assumptions of Christian doctrine" encouraged disputation of a heat and intensity almost unknown in universities nowadays. …They were free from external interference and free from a stifling internal conformity because the whole purpose of the universities was the search after an enduring truth, besides which worldly aggrandizement was as nothing. They were free because they agreed on this one thing if, on nothing else, fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.

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.

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.

(Plato discerned that the fundamental impulse within democracies was for every man to do as he might arbitrarily choose to do, without regard for others.)

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.

Even the wisest of mankind cannot live by reason alone; pure arrogant reason, denying the claims of prejudice (which commonly are also the claims of conscience), leads to a wasteland of withered hopes and crying loneliness, empty of God and man: the wilderness in which Satan tempted Christ was not more dreadful than the arid expanse of intellectual vanity deprived of tradition and intuition, where modern man is tempted by his own pride.

Second, "Capitalism" is a word popularized by Karl Marx; it implies that the selfish accumulation and enjoyment of capital is the sole purpose of our present society, soon to be overthrown by the proletariat. "Capitalism" is represented as a complete system, moral, intellectual, political, and economic: an ideology has been devised by the greedy capitalists to serve as a false front for this enslaving of the workers of the world. Such is the Marxist argument; and Novak appears to be fulfilling Marx's prophecies by cobbling up just such an ideology.

The twentieth-century conservative is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of the spirit and character – with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest.

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.