Russell Kirk Quotes

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

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

The careful study of history is of hight value - among other reasons because it may instruct us, sometimes, concerning ways to deal with our present cisontentk. I do not mean simply that history repeats itself, or repeats itself with variation - although there is something in that, and particularly in the history of revolutions on the French model, which devour their own children. I am suggesting, rather, that deficiency in historical perspective leads to the ruinous blunders of ideologues, whom Burckhardt calls "the terrible simplifiers," while sound historical knowledge may diminish the force of Hegel's aphorism that "we learn from history that we learn nothing from history."

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.

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

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.

Roepke was no apologist for an abstraction called “capitalism” — a Marxist term, incidentally, foolishly pinned to themselves by numerous vainglorious champions of economic competition. He knew that the worship of Mammon is damnable.

Richard Weaver in his book, "Ethics of Rhetoric" calls a "god-term": a charismatic expression drained dry of any objective significance, but remaining an empty symbol intended to win unthinking applause

Počnite osvjetljavanjem kutka u kojem se nalazite - poboljšavanjem jedne ljudske jedinke, sebe, i pomaganjem svojem bližnjemu. Ne morate biti bogati ili slavni kako biste sudjelovali u iskupljenju vremena: za taj zadatak potrebni su vam samo moralna mašta i pravi razum. Vjerojatno nećete biti nagrađeni bogatstvom ili slavom, nego vječnim trenucima: onim pojavama u vlastitom postojanju kada se, kako T. S. Eliot kaže, vrijeme i bezvremenost presijecaju... Sve ovo stvaranje oko nas je vrt je namijenjen nama pogrešivim ljudima da se o njemu brinemo. Ako možete, posadite cvijeće ili stabla u njemu i iščupajte korov.

In politics we do well to abide by precedent and precept and even prejudice, for the great mysterious incorporation of the human race has acquired a prescriptive wisdom far greater than any man’s petty private rationality.

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.

When heaven and earth have passed away, perhaps the conservative mind and the libertarian mind may be joined in synthesis, but not until then.

Conservatives have no intention of compromising with socialists, but even such an alliance, ridiculous though it would be, is more conceivable than the coalition of conservatives and libertarians.

What else do conservatives and libertarians profess in common? The answer to that question is simple: nothing. Nor will they ever. To talk of forming a league or coalition between these two is like advocating a union of ice and fire.

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