Russell Kirk Quotes

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

Imagination, given time, does rule the world.

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

When, during and after the Reformation, the universities lost their status as so many autonomous parts of the universal church, they lost their independence correspondingly. In Protestant Europe, they came under the jurisdiction of the national churches and of the rapacious national monarchies; in Catholic Europe — although to a lesser extent — they came under the jurisdiction of the reinvigorated and consolidated Papacy, and of the sovereigns who, as in Spain and France, made royal influence over the church establishment within their realms a condition of their support for the Roman cause. The dissolution of medieval universalism meant that learning, like nearly everything else, was forced to submit to new or more rigid denominations. With the complete or partial secularization of society which followed upon the French Revolutionary era, in nearly every country except Britain, the universities were stripped of what remained of their old rights and became little better than state corporations.

And, substantially they hope to supplant the "disciplining of the higher faculty of the imagination" by what they call "education for democracy." ...

The very banality of the expression helps to ensure its triumph. Who could be against education? Who could be against democracy? Yet the phrase begs two questions: What do you mean by "education"? And what do you mean by "democracy"? The school of Dewey has long been fond of capturing words and turning them to their own purposes: they tried hard to capture "humanism", and even laid siege to "religion" Now I am convinced that if, by

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.

Politics is the preoccupation of the quarter-educated,

In the Middle Ages, as in Classical times, the academy possessed freedom unknown to other bodies and persons because the philosopher, the scholar, and the student were looked upon as men consecrated to the service of the Truth; and that Truth was not simply a purposeless groping after miscellaneous information , but a wisdom to be obtained, however imperfectly, from a teleological search.

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.

Conservatives respect the wisdom of their ancestors...they are dubious of wholesale alteration. They think society is a spiritual reality, possessing an eternal life but a delicate constitution: it cannot be scrapped and recast as if it were a
machine

"It is ordained," said Burke, "in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions form their fetters."

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.

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

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.

All policy is very suspicious, says an eminent statesman, that sacrifices the interest of any part of a community to the ideal good of the whole; and those governments only are tolerable, where, by the necessary contraction of the political machine, the interests of all the parts are obliged to be protected by it....