Rights have become what the political sovereign or ephemeral master decides to dispense and whatever gratifies the undisciplined cravings and desires… - Russell Kirk

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

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.

Liberty, prescriptive freedom as we Americans know it, cannot endure without order. Our constitutions were established that order might make true freedom possible. For all our American talk of private judgment, dissent, and individualism, still our national character has the stamp of a respectful order almost superstitious in its power: respect for the moral traditions inculcated by our religion, and for the prescriptive political forms which we, more than any other people in the world, have maintained little altered in this time when Whirl is King of most of the universe. I think that we would do a most terrible mischief to our freedoms if we ceased to respect our established order and began, instead, to run after an abstract Jacobin liberté — in this age of the triumph of technology, of all times.