Bret Stephens Quotes
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Censoriously asserting one's moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.
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Perhaps if there were less certitude about our climate future, more Americans would be interested in having a reasoned conversation about it.
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Listen carefully to the global warming alarmists, and the main theme that emerges is that what the developed world needs is a large dose of penance. What's remarkable is the extent to which penance sells among a mostly secular audience. What is there to be penitent about?
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When it comes to trade, when it comes to standing up to countries like North Korea, when it comes to standing up to guys like Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump is not a conservative.
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In place of presidential addresses, stump speeches, or town halls, we have Trump's demagogic mass rallies. In place of the usual jousting between the administration and the press, we have a president who fantasizes on Twitter about physically assaulting CNN.
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Anyone who has been the victim of the social-media furies knows just how distorting and dishonest those furies can be.
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Food insecurity is not remotely the same as hunger.
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The hater always suffers more than the object of his hatred.
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This is the standard line of the Trump side of the party, that us who oppose him are just a bunch of elites who live in the Acela corridor in this bubble of unimaginable wealth. I wish I had been born into an extremely wealthy New York real estate family and been given multimillion dollar loans to get my start in life.
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Yes, Obama took over two wars from Bush - just as President Richard Nixon inherited Vietnam from President Lyndon Johnson and President Dwight Eisenhower inherited Korea from President Harry Truman. But at least the war in Iraq was all but won by 2009, thanks largely to the very surge Obama had opposed as a senator.
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Nearly everyone I know seems to have a well-developed theory as to why this country is past redemption, or almost, and every theory seems almost right.
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In every generation, there's a strong tendency for everyone to think like everyone else.
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The more Mr. Trump traduces the old established lines of decency, the more he affirms his supporters' most shameless ideological instincts.
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Do I think police chiefs, many of which are African-American or Hispanic, wake up and say, 'Let's systemically oppress African-American communities?' No, I don't. Are there instances in which that happens? I'm sure there are.
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I write my columns pretty carefully.
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The American birthright belongs, potentially, to everyone. This is unprecedented. Other countries accept migrants on the basis of economic necessity or as a humanitarian gesture. Only in America is it the direct consequence of our foundational ideals.
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Among the events of John McCain's five-and-a-half years of imprisonment and torture in North Vietnam, probably the most heroic, and surely the most celebrated, was his refusal to accept an early release from his captors.
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Democrats should have learned in 2016 that what counts in American politics is location, not turnout.
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Movements that hector and punish rather than educate and reform have a way of inviting derision and reaction.
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People want leaders. Not ideologues. Not people whose life experiences have been so narrow that they've been able to maintain the purity of their youthful ideals. Not people whose principal contact with political life comes in the form of speeches and sound bites rather than decisions and responsibilities.
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The criterion for racism is either objective or it's meaningless: If liberals get to decide for themselves who is or isn't a racist according to their political lights, conservatives will be within their rights to ignore them.
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If a public figure tells a whopping lie once in his life, it'll haunt him into his grave. If he lies morning, noon and night, it will become almost impossible to remember any one particular lie.
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We live in a world in which data convey authority. But authority has a way of descending to certitude, and certitude begets hubris.
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My office-hour reading is fairly ad hoc: I generally read whatever seems relevant to what I'm editing, writing, or thinking about writing.