Irving Kristol Famous Quotes
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International law is a fiction abused callously, or ignored ruthlessly, by those nations that, unlike the Western democracies, never took it seriously in the first place.
The danger facing American Jews today is not that Christians want to persecute them but that Christians want to marry them.
The liberal paradigm of regulation and license has led to a society where an 18-year-old girl has the right to public fornication in a pornographic movie
but only if she is paid the minimum wage.
The three pillars of modern conservatism are religion, nationalism, and economic growth.
What is at stake is civilization and humanity, nothing less. The idea that everything is permitted, as Nietzsche put it, rests on the premise of nihilism and has nihilistic implications. I will not pretend that the case against nihilism and for civilization is an easy one to make. We are here confronting the most fundamental of philosophical questions, on the deepest levels. In short, the matter of pornography and obscenity is not a trivial one, and only superficial minds can take a bland and untroubled view of it.
A welfare state, properly conceived, can be an integral part of a conservative society.
Anyone who knows anything about journalism knows that reporters are rarely in a position to investigate anything. They lack the authority to subpoena witnesses, to cross-examine, to scrutinize official records. They are lucky to get their phone calls returned.
The major political event of the twentieth century is the death of socialism.
The really difficult moral issues arise, not from a confrontation of good and evil, but from a collision between two goods
People need religion. It's a vehicle for a moral tradition. A crucial role. Nothing can take its place.
If you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship.
I have observed over the years that the unanticipated consequences of social action are always more important, and usually less agreeable, than the intended consequences.
It is ironic to watch the churches, including large sections of my own religion, surrendering to the spirit of modernity at the very moment when modernity itself is undergoing a kind of spiritual collapse ...
Even if we can't be happy, we must always be cheerful.
The most intelligent defender of capitalism in the modern period is Friedrich Hayek.
A neoconservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality. A neoliberal is a liberal who's been mugged by reality but has refused to press charges.
It was a new kind of class war
the people as citizens versus the politicians and their clients in the public sector.
Only liberal organizations are clearly designated [in the press] as "nonpatisan, nonprofit." Non-liberal research organizations are always identified as "right-wing" or "conservative."
Senator McGovern is very sincere when he says that he will try to cut the military budget by 30%. And this is to drive a knife in the heart of Israel ... Jews don't like big military budgets. But it is now an interest of the Jews to have a large and powerful military establishment in the United States ... American Jews who care about the survival of the state of Israel have to say, no, we don't want to cut the military budget, it is important to keep that military budget big, so that we can defend Israel.
That this modern, adversary culture - spanning the century, 1865-1965 - was hostile to bourgeois society was obvious enough. That it was also, in a deeper sense, hostile to secular humanism was not so obvious, even to many of those involved in the adversary culture itself. Yet in retrospect it is clear that, with hardly an exception, the leading novelists, poets, and painters - those whom we now call the "moderns" (Eliot, Yeats, Kafka, Proust, Picasso) - could not be enlisted in a secular-humanist canon.
One can be unhappy before eating caviar, even after, but at least not during.
An intellectual may be defined as a man who speaks with general authority about a subject on which he has no particular competence.
There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work.
