"Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it: they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light."
"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."
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Source: Russell Kirk (2001). “The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot”, p.41, Regnery Publishing
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