Russell Kirk Quotes

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

~ Russell Kirk

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

~ Russell Kirk

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.

~ Russell Kirk

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 will seek out the imagery of vice.

~ Russell Kirk

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.

~ Russell Kirk

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.

~ Russell Kirk

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 strange than any of Plato's myths that Plato's apprehension of order and justice should be a living influence among the people of that land, twenty-four centuries after the mystical philosopher's soul departed from Athens.

~ Russell Kirk

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

~ Russell Kirk

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

~ Russell Kirk

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.

~ Russell Kirk