Russell Kirk quotes

Russell Kirk was an American political theorist, historian, and writer, celebrated as a principal architect of modern American conservatism. His influential book "The Conservative Mind" revived interest in traditionalist thought in the United States. He championed principles such as order, tradition, and moral values throughout his prolific career. Here are 13 of his quotes:

If you want to have order in the commonwealth, you first have to have order in the individual soul.

Russell Kirk

Conservatives have no intention of compromising with socialists, but even such an alliance, ridiculous though it would be, is more conceivable than the coalition of conservatives and libertarians.

Russell Kirk

Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it: they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light.

Russell Kirk

When heaven and earth have passed away, perhaps the conservative mind and the libertarian mind may be joined in synthesis, but not until then.

Russell Kirk

What else do conservatives and libertarians profess in common? The answer to that question is simple: nothing. Nor will they ever. To talk of forming a league or coalition between these two is like advocating a union of ice and fire.

Russell Kirk

Rousseau and his disciples were resolved to force men to be free; in most of the world, they triumphed; men are set free from family, church, town, class, guild; yet they wear, instead, the chains of the state, and they expire of ennui or stifling lonelines.

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 ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest.

Russell Kirk

Even the wisest of mankind cannot live by reason alone; pure arrogant reason, denying the claims of prejudice (which commonly are also the claims of conscience), leads to a wasteland of withered hopes and crying loneliness, empty of God and man: the wilderness in which Satan tempted Christ was not more dreadful than the arid expanse of intellectual vanity deprived of tradition and intuition, where modern man is tempted by his own pride.

Russell Kirk

Burke, could he see our century, never would concede that a consumption-society is the end for which Providence has prepared man.

Russell Kirk

The mass of mankind, Burke implies, reason hardly at all, in the higher sense, nor ever can: deprived of folk-wisdom and folk-law, which are prejudice and prescription, they can do no more than cheer the demagogue, enrich the charlatan, and submit to the despot.

Russell Kirk

The conflict is not really between royalty and democracy. It is between both and plutocracy, which, having destroyed the royal power by frank force under democratic pretexts, has bought and swallowed democracy.

Russell Kirk