"Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it: they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light."
"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."
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Source: Russell Kirk (1963). “Confessions of a bohemian Tory: episodes and reflections of a vagrant career”
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"If you want to have order in the commonwealth, you first have to have order in the individual soul."
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