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Roots Of American Order QUOTES

Roots Of American Order QUOTES

1 " Like Solon, Plato intended to write a long fable about legendary Atlantis; like Solon, he never did write it. Yet there existed beyond the Atlantic an unvisited land, after all, and it is more strange than any of Plato's myths that Plato's apprehension of order and justice should be a living influence among the people of that land, twenty-four centuries after the mystical philosopher's soul departed from Athens. "

― Russell Kirk , Roots Of American Order

2 " The natural law is an instrument for progress, not a weapon of revolution. "

― Russell Kirk , Roots Of American Order

3 " Ordinary human laws are the means -- however imperfect -- by which we express our understanding of the enduring moral law. "

― Russell Kirk , Roots Of American Order

4 " Those who neglect the roots of order, one may add, are compelled to water those roots desperately—after wandering in the parched wasteland of disorder. Upon our knowledge of those roots may depend what sort of order America and the world will have by the end of this century. It may be the order of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, rich and dehumanized; it may be the garrison-state controlled by ferocious ideology, as in George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four; or it may be an order renewed and improved, yet recognizably linked with the order that arose in Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and London. "

― Russell Kirk , Roots Of American Order

5 " A pluralistic society even in its beginnings, America could agree on no national establishment of religion; the Greeks would have been astounded that such a nation-state, unconsecrated to the gods, could endure for a decade.

Yet in another sense, repeatedly pointed out by Alexis de Tocqueville, America was held together by a religious bond stronger than any the Greeks or the Romans had known: by a Christian faith that worked upon individual and family, rather than through a state cult. The failure of the Greeks to find an enduring popular religious sanction for the order of their civilization had been a main cause of the collapse of the world of the polis. The power of Christian teaching over private conscience made possible the American democratic society, vastly greater in extent and population than Old Greece. "

― Russell Kirk , Roots Of American Order

6 " 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 , Roots Of American Order

7 " Power can be restrained only by counterbalancing power, Montesquieu reasoned. No man, and no political body or office, ought to possess unchecked power. For the sake of personal liberty and free community, power ought to be divided and hedged. Might this slow the actions of the state? Well, be it so, Montesquieu thought: freedom is better than haste. "

― Russell Kirk , Roots Of American Order

8 " The American Constitution is a practical secular covenant, drawn up by men who (with few exceptions) believed in a sacred Covenant, designed to restrain the human tendencies toward violence and fraud; the American Constitution is a fundamental law deliberately meant to place checks upon will and appetite. "

― Russell Kirk , Roots Of American Order