All below taken from Russell Kirk, “English Letters in the Age of Boredom,” Shenandoah 7 (Spring, 1956): 3-15. “It is quite within the realm of possibility that the Age of Eliot will be succeeded by a long gulf of vacancy in the history of literature.…Universal war and social dissolution might bring this calamity upon us, [...]
Conservatism, I repeat, is not an ideology. It does not breed fanatics. It does not try to excite the enthusiasm of a secular religion. If you want men who will sacrifice their past and present and future to a set of abstract ideas, you must go to Communism, or Fascism, or Benthamism. But if you [...]
Russell Kirk We Americans were from the first a people endowed with strong conservative prejudices, immeasurably influenced by the spirit of religious veneration, firm in a traditional morality, hostile to arbitrary power whether possessed by a monarch or a mob, zealous to guard against centralization, attached to prescriptive rights, convinced of the necessity [...]
The thinking conservative, in truth, must take on some of the outward characteristic of the radical, today: he must poke about the roots of society, in the hope of restoring vigor to an old tree half strangled in the rank undergrowth of modern passions. The conservative does not much enjoy this unaccustomed function, for, with [...]
Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past by John Lukacs, Transaction Publishers (Library of Conservative Thought), 1994. Applying a philosophical intellect to the study of history, Dr. Lukacs believes that historical studies may become the principal literary form and way to wisdom in the dawning age. This does not mean that he endeavors to present a “philosophy [...]
Sobering voices tell us nowadays that the civilization in which we participate is not long for this world. Many countries have fallen under the domination of squalid oligarchs; other lands are reduced to anarchy. “Cultural revolution,” rejecting our patrimony of learning and manners, has done nearly as much mischief in the West as in the [...]
Russell Kirk at Piety Hill 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 [...]
by Russell Kirk Seeking for the roots of order, we are led to four cities: Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and London. In Washington or New York or Chicago or Los Angeles today, the order which Americans experience is derived from the experience of those four old cities. If our souls are disordered, we fall into abnormality, [...]
The following quotes, excerpted from the article “The Conservative Purpose of a Liberal Education” by Russell Kirk, emphasize the importance of liberal education–in the sense of an education that liberates the person from ignorance in vice–for the preservation of conservative ideals. “The Conservative Purpose of a Liberal Education,” Redeeming the Time by Russell Kirk(Wilmington: ISI Books, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
For the object of American foreign-policy, Robert Taft argued repeatedly, is to protect and advance American national interests. Neutrality or intervention, alliances and restrictions upon armaments, international commercial agreements and assistance to other governments, peace or war, all must be determined by reference to the effects of such policies upon the security and the welfare [...]
Russell Kirk From America’s British Culture, pp. 1–3 This slim book is a summary account of the culture that the people of the United States have inherited from Britain. Sometimes this is called the Anglo-Saxon culture—although it is not simply English, for much in British culture has had its origins in Scotland, Ireland, [...]
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 [...]