Russell Kirk was an American political theorist credited with giving rise to conservatism's intellectual respectability in post-World War II America. His seminal work, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (1953), is widely regarded as the most influential text in twentieth-century conservative thought. President Reagan noted, "As the prophet of American conservatism, Russell Kirk has taught, nurtured, and inspired a generation."

Quotes:

"Nothing is more conservative than conservation"

Conservation Activism is a Healthy Sign, Baltimore Sun, May 4, 1970

"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."

The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (1953), pages 44-45

"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."

The Conservative Mind, page 362

"...only the unscrupulous or shortsighted can defend pollution and degradation of the countryside."

"Conservation Activism is a Healthy Sign," Baltimore Sun, May 4, 1970

"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."

"Common Reader for Everyday Ecologists," New Orleans Times-Picayune, Sept. 20, 1971

"Every right is married to a duty, every freedom owes a corresponding responsibility."

Redeeming the Time (1996), page 33

"True conformity to the dictates of nature requires reverence for the past and solicitude for the future. 'Nature' is not simply the sensation of the passing moment; it is eternal, though we evanescent men experience only a fragment of it. We have no right to imperil the happiness of posterity by impudently tinkering with the heritage of humanity."

The Conservative Mind, page 57

"...so mankind is now trapped by the failure of its energies and by the depletion of those natural resources that men have plundered wantonly."

The Conservative Mind, page 364

"If men are discharged of reverence for ancient usage, they will treat this world, almost certainly, as if it were their private property, to be consumed for their sensual gratification; and thus they will destroy in their lust for enjoyment the property of future generations, of their own contemporaries, and indeed their very own capital."

The Conservative Mind, page 44

"The decay of old aristocratic prejudices against greedy speculation, the undermining of orthodox Christian faith (which forbids avarice)... the debauching of agriculture to a gross money-getting concern: these particular aspects of a vast and voracious concentration upon profits are so many illustrations of our sinning confusion of values."

The Conservative Mind, page 140

"This network of personal relationships and local decencies was brushed aside by steam, coal, the spinning jenny, the cotton gin, speedy transportation, and the other items in that catalogue of progress which schoolchildren memorize. The Industrial Revolution seems to have been a response of mankind to the challenge of a swelling population...But it turned the world inside out. Personal loyalties gave way to financial relationships. The wealthy man ceased to be magistrate and patron; he ceased to be a neighbor to the poor man; he became a mass man, very often, with no purpose in life but aggrandizement. He ceased to be conservative because he did not understand conservative terms."

The Conservative Mind, page 228

"To complete the rout of traditionalists, in America an impression began to arise that the new industrial and acquisitive interests are the conservative interest, that conservatism is simply a political argument in defense of large accumulations of private property, that expansion, centralization, and accumulation are the tenets of conservatives. From this confusion, from the popular belief that Hamilton was the founder of American conservatism, the forces of tradition in the United States never have fully escaped."

The Conservative Mind, page 229

"Rather than ennobling the public mind and cementing the social fabric, applied science speedily became the chief weapon of a gross individualism, which was anathema to the frugal and righteous (John Quincy) Adams, the source of enormous fortunes divorced from duty, the instrument of unscrupulous ambition and rapacious materialism. Presently, it came to scar the very of the country which Adams loved, a disfiguring process uninterrupted since his day."

The Conservative Mind, page 237

"The automobile, practical since 1906, was proceeding to disintegrate and stamp anew the pattern of communication, manners, and city life in the United States, by 1918; before long, men would begin to see that the automobile, and the mass production techniques which made its possible, could alter the national character and morality more thoroughly than could the most absolute of tyrants. As a mechanical Jacobin, it rivaled the dynamo. The productive process which made these vehicles cheap was still more subversive of the old ways than was the gasoline engine itself."

The Conservative Mind, pages 373-374

"Humility, which Burke ranked high among the virtues, is the only effectual restraint upon this congenital vanity; yet our world has nearly forgotten the nature of humility. Submission to the dictates of humility formerly was made palatable to man by the doctrine of grace; that elaborate doctrine has been overwhelmed by modern presumption."

The Conservative Mind, page 426

"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."

The Conservative Mind, page 455

"To check centralization and usurping of power ... we require a new laissez-faire. The old laissez-faire was founded upon a misapprehension of human nature, an exultation of individuality (in private character often a virtue) to the condition of a political dogma, which destroyed the spirit of community and reduced men to so many equipollent atoms of humanity, without sense of brotherhood or purpose."

The Conservative Mind, page 489

"Why do we not exhaust the heritage of the ages, spiritual and material for our immediate pleasure, and let posterity go hang? So far as simple rationality is concerned, self-interest can advance no argument against the appetite of present possessors. Yet within some of us, a voice that is not the demand of self-interest or pure rationality says that we have no right to give ourselves enjoyment at the expense of our ancestors' memory and our descendants' prospects. We hold our present advantages only in trust."

The Problem of Tradition As appeared in A Program for Conservatives (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1956).

"...ambition without pious restraint must end in failure, often involving in its ruin that beautiful reverence which solaces common men for the obscurity and poverty of their lot."

The Conservative Mind, page 35

"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."

The Conservative Mind, page 11

Russell Kirk (1919 - 1994)