“ If you want to have order in the commonwealth, you first have to have order in the individual soul. 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
“ 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 contemp… Russell Kirk
“ Two centuries ago, the United States settled into a permanent political order, after fourteen years of violence and heated debate. Two centuries ago, France fell into ruinous disorder that ran its cou… Russell Kirk
“ True law necessarily is rooted in ethical assumptions or norms; and those ethical principles are derived, in the beginning at least, from religious convictions. When the religious understanding, from… Russell Kirk
“ Ordinary human laws are the means -- however imperfect -- by which we express our understanding of the enduring moral law. 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… 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 ethi… 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 bot… 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… 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
