Quotes by Russell Kirk

“If you want to have order in the commonwealth, you first have to have order in the individual soul.”

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

“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.”

“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 bo...”

“Because we human beings are imaginative by nature, we cannot choose to live by the routine of the ant-heap. If deprived of the imagery of virtue imaginative depictions of the truly good life we w...”

“Like Solon, Plato intended to write a long fable about legendary Atlantis; like Solon, he never did write it. Yet there existed beyond the Atlantic an unvisited land, after all, and it is more stra...”

“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 et...”

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

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

“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 cont...”

“Because “we human beings are imaginative by nature, we cannot choose to live by the routine of the ant-heap. If deprived of the imagery of virtue” — imaginative depictions of the truly good life — ...”

“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 ...”