Quotes from Russell Kirk

Either order in the cosmos is real, or all is chaos. If we are adrift in chaos, then the fragile egalitarian doctrines and emancipating programs of the revolutionary reformers have no significance; for in a vortex of chaos, only force and appetite signify.

We ought not to endeavor to revise history according to our latter day notions of what things ought to have been, or upon the theory that the past is simply a reflection of the present

The libertarian thinks that this world is chiefly a stage for the swaggering ego; the conservative finds himself instead a pilgrim in a realm of mystery and wonder, where duty, discipline, and sacrifice are required-and where the reward is that love which passeth all understanding.

Life is for action, and if we desire to know anything, we must make up our minds to be ignorant about much.

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

Besides, the conflict is not really between royalty and democracy. It is between both and plutocracy, which, having destroyed the royal power by frank force under democratic pretexts, has bought and swallowed democracy.

The mass of mankind, Burke implies, reason hardly at all, in the higher sense, nor ever can: deprived of folk-wisdom and folk-law, which are prejudice and prescription, they can do no more than cheer the demagogue, enrich the charlatan, and submit to the despot.

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.

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.

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.

Tradition is a guide to the permanent qualities in society and thought and private life which need to be preserved in one form or another, throughout the process of inevitable change.

freedom can be achieved and retained only by sober men who take humanity as it is, not as humanity should be.

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

Imagination, given time, does rule the world.

The true natural rights of men, then, are equal justice, security of labor and property, the amenities of civilized institutions, and the benefits of orderly society.

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

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.

The word 'philosopher' means 'lover of wisdom.' Also there is a Greek word to describe the philosopher's opponent: that word is 'philodoxer,' meaning 'lover of opinion'--that is, an opinionated man suffering from vain wishes, who passionately pursues illusion. Out of the doxa, the false opinion fanatically held, comes disorder in the soul and disorder in the body politic.

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.

Power can be restrained only by counterbalancing power, Montesquieu reasoned. No man, and no political body or office, ought to possess unchecked power. For the sake of personal liberty and free community, power ought to be divided and hedged. Might this slow the actions of the state? Well, be it so, Montesquieu thought: freedom is better than haste.

The modern mind has fallen into the heresy of democracy—that is, the ruinous error vox populi vox dei, that an abstract People are divine, and that truth issues from the ballot-box.

But wisdom is not got through shouting-matches within one generation.

there are enduring standards superior to our petty private stock of rationality.

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.