Top 50 Russell Kirk Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “Every right is married to a duty; every freedom owes a corresponding responsibility; and there cannot be genuine freedom unless there exists also genuine order, in the moral realm and in the social realm.”

— Russell Kirk

3. “I am a conservative. Quite possibly I am on the losing side; often I think so. Yet, out of a curious perversity I had rather lose with Socrates, let us say, than win with Lenin.”

— Russell Kirk

4. “Every right is married to a duty, every freedom owes a corresponding responsibility.”

— Russell Kirk

5. “We ought not to endeavor to revise history according to our latter day notions of what things ought to have been, or upon the theory that the past is simply a reflection of the present.”

— Russell Kirk

6. “Individualism is a denial that life has any meaning except the gratification of the ego; in politics it must end in anarchy. It is not possible for one man to be both Christian and Individualist.”

— Russell Kirk

7. “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

8. “Politics moves upward into ethics, and ethics ascends to theology.”

— Russell Kirk

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

— Russell Kirk

10. “The libertarian thinks that this world is chiefly a stage for the swaggering ego; the conservative finds himself instead a pilgrim in a realm of mystery and wonder, where duty, discipline, and sacrifice are required-and where the reward is that love which passeth all understanding.”

— Russell Kirk

11. “Nothing is more conservative than conservation.”

— Russell Kirk

12. “The natural law is an instrument for progress, not a weapon of revolution.”

— Russell Kirk

13. “A society which denies the heart its role becomes, in very short order, a heartless society.”

— Russell Kirk

14. “And Burke, could he see our century, never would concede that a consumption-society, so near to suicide, is the end for which Providence has prepared man.”

— Russell Kirk

15. “We cannot make a heaven on earth, though we may make a hell.”

— Russell Kirk

16. “Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by subtle threads of moral and intellectual principle.”

— Russell Kirk

17. “The aim of any good constitution is to achieve in a society a high degree of political harmony, so that order and justice and freedom may be maintained.”

— Russell Kirk

18. “Sudden and slashing reforms are as perilous as sudden and slashing surgery.”

— Russell Kirk

19. “The Secular City, having legislated and litigated itself out of any entanglement with the City of God, would be a hell upon earth .”

— Russell Kirk

20. “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 lone lines.”

— Russell Kirk

21. “Either order in the cosmos is real, or all is chaos. If we are adrift in chaos, then the fragile egalitarian doctrines and emancipating programs of the revolutionary reformers have no significance; for in a vortex of chaos, only force and appetite signify.”

— Russell Kirk

22. “The ACLU has been able to harass out of existence public expressions of faith.”

— Russell Kirk

23. “The modern spectacle of vanished forests and eroded lands, wasted petroleum and ruthless mining, national debts recklessly increased until they are repudiated, and continual revision of positive law, is evidence of what an age without veneration does to itself and its successors.”

— Russell Kirk

24. “Ordinary human laws are the means – however imperfect – by which we express our understanding of the enduring moral law.”

— Russell Kirk

25. “A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.”

— Russell Kirk

26. “If the state – and within the state, the judiciary particularly – harasses and undermines the Church, in any society the state undoes itself.”

— Russell Kirk

27. “In politics we do well to abide by precedent and precept and even prejudice, for the great mysterious incorporation of the human race has acquired a prescriptive wisdom far greater than any man’s petty private rationality.”

— Russell Kirk

28. “Prejudice is not bigotry or superstition, although prejudice sometimes may degenerate into these. Prejudice is pre-judgment, the answer with which intuition and ancestral consensus of opinion supply a man when he lacks either time or knowledge to arrive at a decision predicated upon pure reason.”

— Russell Kirk

29. “Politics is the preoccupation of the quarter-educated,” George Gissing wrote near the end of the nineteenth century. To that aphorism we may add, near the end of the twentieth century, “Democracy is the preoccupation of the half-aware.” What our age desperately requires is not more mediocrity, but more elevation of spirit, awareness of the eternal source of truth. That failing, order and freedom and justice fall into ruin.”

— Russell Kirk

30. “The good society is marked by a high degree of order, justice, and freedom. Among these, order has primacy: for justice cannot be enforced until a tolerable civil social order is attained, nor can freedom be anything better than violence until order gives us laws.”

— Russell Kirk

31. “Mine was not an Enlightened mind, I now was aware: it was a Gothic mind, medieval in its temper and structure. I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful.”

— Russell Kirk

32. “The resources of nature, like those of spirit, are running out, and all that a conscientious man can aspire to be is a literal conservative, hoarding what remains of culture and of natural wealth against the fierce appetites of modern life.”

— Russell Kirk

33. “Privilege, in any society, is the reward of duties performed.”

— Russell Kirk

34. “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

35. “Common Reader for Everyday Ecologists.”

— Russell Kirk

36. “The word ‘philosopher’ means ‘lover of wisdom.’ Also there is a Greek word to describe the philosopher’s opponent: that word is ‘philodoxer,’ meaning ‘lover of opinion’ – that is, an opinionated man suffering from vain wishes, who passionately pursues illusion. Out of the doxa, the false opinion fanatically held, comes disorder in the soul and disorder in the body politic.”

— Russell Kirk

37. “The issue of environmental quality is one which transcends traditional political boundaries. It is a cause which can attract, and very sincerely, liberals, conservatives, radicals, reactionaries, freaks, and middle-class straights.”

— Russell Kirk

38. “Schooling deprived of religious insights is wretched education.”

— Russell Kirk

39. “There are no lost causes because there are no gained causes.”

— Russell Kirk

40. “The principle of real leadership ignored, the immortal objects of society forgotten, practical conservatism degenerated into mere laudation of private enterprise, economic policy almost wholly surrendered to special interests.”

— Russell Kirk

41. “In the Middle Ages, as in Classical times, the academy possessed freedom unknown to other bodies and persons because the philosopher, the scholar, and the student were looked upon as men consecrated to the service of the Truth; and that Truth was not simply a purposeless groping after miscellaneous information, but a wisdom to be obtained, however imperfectly, from a teleological search.”

— Russell Kirk

42. “Life is for action, and if we desire to know anything, we must make up our minds to be ignorant about much.”

— Russell Kirk

43. “Tradition is a guide to the permanent qualities in society and thought and private life which need to be preserved in one form or another, throughout the process of inevitable change.”

— Russell Kirk

44. “Besides, 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

45. “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

46. “The true natural rights of men, then, are equal justice, security of labor and property, the amenities of civilized institutions, and the benefits of orderly society.”

— Russell Kirk

47. “It is quite possible for man, in ancient or modern times, to be materially prosperous, and freed from the necessity of choice, and yet servile. It is also possible that he may suffer no outrageous oppression. But he must always lack one thing, this servile man, and that is true manhood, the dignity of man. He remains a child; he never comes into man’s birthright, which is the pleasure and the pain of making one’s own choices.”

— Russell Kirk

48. “Locke contended that government originates out of the necessity for protecting property.”

— Russell Kirk

49. “To the modern politician and planner, men are the flies of a summer, oblivious of their past, reckless of their future.”

— Russell Kirk

50. “Some ‘separation’ zealots would expunge any vestige of religious observance in public schools. Many of the same anti-religious fanatics would like to wipe out of existence all church-related schools, by regulation or taxation, so that universal ignorance of the life of spirit should prevail.”

— Russell Kirk