Russell Kirk The moral imagination is the principal possession that man does not share with the beasts. It is man’s power to perceive ethical truth, abiding law, in the seeming chaos of many events. Without the moral imagination, man would live merely day to day, or rather moment to moment, as dogs do. [...]
To protest against the existence of order is to protest against well-being, justice, freedom, and prosperity. Happiness is found in imaginative affirmation, not in sullen negation. Gratitude is one form of happiness; and anyone who appreciates the legacy of moral and social order which he has inherited in America will feel gratitude. The pursuit of [...]
Russell Kirk In honor of Russell Kirk’s birthday (October 19, 1918) we offer this very fine quote in which Dr. Kirk lays out the essentials for those of us seeking to preserve and restore Western civilization. He makes clear that true conservatives do not limit themselves to questions of politics and economics. “Cant [...]
Mere unthinking negative opposition to the current of events, clutching in despair at what we still retain, will not suffice in this age. A conservatism of instinct must be reinforced by a conservatism of thought and imagination.–Russell Kirk […]
I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws, and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no [...]
The conservative…knows the peril of power, and the practical means for restraining power. To John Adams and James Madison in the United States, to Burke and Disraeli in England, we can turn for guidance. The thinking conservative has consistently sought to keep power from the appetite of any man or any class, through respect for [...]
Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure—but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little [...]
In the affairs of nations, the American conservative feels that his country ought to set an example to the world, but ought not to try to remake the world in its image. It is a law of politics, as well as of biology, that every living thing loves above all else—even above its own life—its [...]
Drinking my morning Mocha from my new Thomas Jefferson coffee mug: “I cannot live without books.” If you also cannot live without books, visit The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore to find books on the American Founding and Conservatism. We hope you will join us in The Imaginative Conservative community. The Imaginative Conservative is an on-line journal for those who seek the True, the Good [...]
On every question of construction carry ourselves back to the time when the constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed. -Thomas Jefferson to William Johnson [...]
I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its Constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing. — Jefferson to John [...]
Monticello Library Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital. Pick up literary ‘capital’ for [...]
”We are ruined, Sir, if we do not over rule the principles that ‘the more we owe, the more prosperous we shall be,’ ‘that a public debt furnishes the means of enterprise,” that if ours should be once paid off, we should incur another by any means however extravagant.”– to James Monroe, 1791 For more [...]
James Madison “If we were to look, therefore, for the meaning of the instrument beyond the face of the instrument, we must look for it, not in the general Convention, which proposed, but in the State Conventions, which accepted and ratified the Constitution.” —James Madison Books on James Madison may be found in The [...]