Carolina QuotesThere are six canons of conservative thought:
Russell Kirk Connected to the Carolinas
Source
No citation is recorded for this quotation.
- work
- The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (1953)
- year
- 1953
no citation recorded
Cite this record
“There are six canons of conservative thought:” Russell Kirk. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-7731BB8069. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/7731bb8069
More from Russell Kirk
Conservatives respect the wisdom of their ancestors; they are dubious of wholesale alteration. They think society is a spiritual reality, possessing an eternal life but a delicate constitution: it cannot be scrapped and recast as if it were a machine.
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.
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.