11 Quotes & Sayings By Russell Kirk

Russell Kirk was born in Bristol, Pennsylvania, in 1920, and received most of his education at the University of Virginia. He received a B.A. in English with honors in 1942 and an M.A. in English in 1943 Read more

He served as sergeant-major of the University Rifles, a military cadet unit, from 1942 to 1945. After the war he married Margaret Kirk and began teaching at the University of Virginia where he was promoted to full professor in 1953. He has published fifteen books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Conservative Mind (1953), The Roots of American Order (1960), The Two Faces of January (1965), The Liberal Mind (1967), The American Cause (1976); Lords of Discipline (1979), The Last Puritan: Essays on Liberty and Culture (1985), Society's Breakthrough! (1991), Where Faith Begins: A Christian Natural Law for Politics (1999); and What Are You Willing To Lose? (2006).

Kirk is past president of the Association for the Study of Religion and Society; former president of the James Branch Cabell Society, Greenville, South Carolina; member of the board of editors for First Things magazine; a member of the board of governors for the New Criterion magazine; a member of the advisory council for National Review magazine; a trustee emeritus for Princeton University; an honorary fellow for Wolfson College, Oxford University; a foreign member of Italy's Accademia dei Lincei; an honorary citizen of Venice, Italy; honorary citizen of Padua, Italy.

If you want to have order in the commonwealth, you...
1
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...
2
To the modern politician and planner, men are the flies of a summer, oblivious of their past, reckless of their future. Russell Kirk
3
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
4
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
5
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
6
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
7
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
8
The natural law is an instrument for progress, not a weapon of revolution. Russell Kirk
9
Ordinary human laws are the means -- however imperfect -- by which we express our understanding of the enduring moral law. Russell Kirk
10
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