71 Quotes by Russell Kirk

But instead of this world unification ushering in an age of prosperity and peace, as most globalists believe it will, it will be a time of unimaginable human suffering as recorded in God's Word. The Anti-christ will tightly regulate who may buy and sell.

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.

I am a conservative. Quite possibly I am on the losing side; often I think so. Yet, out of a curious perversity I had rather lose with Socrates, let us say, than win with Lenin.

Politics is the preoccupation of the quarter-educated,” George Gissing wrote near the end of the nineteenth century. To that aphorism we may add, near the end of the twentieth century, “Democracy is the preoccupation of the half-aware.” What our age desperately requires is not more mediocrity, but more elevation of spirit, awareness of the eternal source of truth. That failing, order and freedom and justice fall into ruin.

It is quite possible for man, in ancient or modern times, to be materially prosperous, and freed from the necessity of choice, and yet servile. It is also possible that he may suffer no outrageous oppression. But he must always lack one thing, this servile man, and that is true manhood, the dignity of man. He remains a child; he never comes into man’s birthright, which is the pleasure and the pain of making one’s own choices.

Every right is married to a duty; every freedom owes a corresponding responsibility; and there cannot be genuine freedom unless there exists also genuine order, in the moral realm and in the social realm.

Every right is married to a duty, every freedom owes a corresponding responsibility.

Despite much talk in this land about religious freedom, churches and their schools now confront grave difficulties.

Individualism is a denial that life has any meaning except the gratification of the ego; in politics it must end in anarchy. It is not possible for one man to be both Christian and Individualist.