by Russell Kirk Russell Kirk Power over men is the ability to do as one likes, whether other men like that course of action or not. Intelligent conservatives, from Burke and Adams to our time, have looked upon power as a most dangerous thing; for though unchecked power means complete freedom for the [...]
The beginnings of Western culture are to be found in the new spiritual community which arose from the ruins of the Roman Empire owing to the conversion of the Northern barbarians to the Christian faith. The Christian Church inherited the traditions of the Empire. It came to the barbarians as the bearer of a higher [...]
Conservatism’s most conspicuous difficulty in our time is that conservative leaders confront a people who have come to look upon society, vaguely, as a homogeneous mass of identical individuals whose happiness may be obtained by direction from above, through legislation or some scheme of public instruction. Conservatives endeavor to teach humanity once more that the [...]
Robert Nisbet The family, religious association, and local community—these, the conservatives insisted, cannot be regarded as the external products of man’s thought and behavior; they are essentially prior to the individual and are the indispensable supports of belief and conduct. Release man from the contexts of community and you get not freedom and [...]
It is ridiculous…to talk of “fighting for democracy” in Indo-China when the people we support there are not democrats at all and cannot be, in the light of history and the present condition of Indo-China. We owe ourselves and the world candor. We are not struggling to establish universal “democracy” or “capitalism” or “human [...]
In brief the need is to restore to their predominance in the curriculum those studies that train the imagination, not, be it said, the imagination in its purely aesthetic function, but the imagination in its power of grasping in a single firm vision, so to speak, the long course of human history and of distinguishing [...]
Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again... Consider education not as the painful accumulation of facts and dates and reigns, nor merely the necessary preparation of the individual to [...]
Russell Kirk by Russell Kirk The…conservative is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of 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.—The Conservative [...]
Socrates: "Friend Pan and however many other gods are here, grant me to become beautiful in respect to the things within. And as to whatever things I have outside, grant that they be friendly to the things inside me. May I believe the wise man to be rich. May I have as big a mass [...]
In regard to this principle, that all men are born free and equal, if there is an animal on earth to which it does not apply—that is not born free, it is man—he is born in a state of the most abject want, and in a state of perfect helplessness and ignorance, which is the [...]
Mantel in Russell Kirk’s Library 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 [...]
Aldous Huxley ‘But I like the inconveniences.’ ‘We don’t,’ said the Controller. ‘We prefer to do things comfortably.’ ‘But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.’ ‘In fact,’ said Mustapha Mond, ‘you’re claiming the right to be [...]
Russell Kirk The primary purpose of a liberal education, then, is the cultivation of the person’s own intellect and imagination, for the person’s own sake. It ought not to be forgotten, in this mass-age when the state aspires to be all in all, that genuine education is something higher than an instrument of [...]
Bradley J. Birzer The incarnate angel of Tolkien’s mythology, Gandalf the Grey, said it well in a conversation with Frodo. “I wish it need not have happened in my time,” laments the young Hobbit. “So do I,” Gandalf replies, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not [...]