Bret Stephens Quotes
-
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.
-
Everything Republicans once claimed to advocate - entitlement reform, free trade, standing up to dictators, encouraging the march of freedom around the world - turns out to be negotiable and reversible, depending on Donald Trump's whims and the furies of his base.
-
Perhaps the reason Trump voters are so frequently the subject of caricature is that they so frequently conform to type.
-
Please spare us the self-pity about how tough it is to look for a job while living with your parents.
-
Of course ABC and its parent company Disney were right to cancel the sitcom 'Roseanne' after its eponymous star, Roseanne Barr, wrote a racist tweet.
-
Free trade was once a Republican conviction.
-
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.
-
When Trump attacks the news media, he's kicking a wounded animal.
-
We live in a world in which data convey authority. But authority has a way of descending to certitude, and certitude begets hubris.
-
Before the word 'resignation' became a euphemism for being fired, it connoted a sense of public integrity and personal honor.
-
There is something kind of aggressively and inhumanly repetitive about this line that guns are essential to American liberties - hard one to stomach when so many thousands of people are dying every year for this so-called liberty.
-
'Democratic socialism' is awful as a slogan and catastrophic as a policy. And 'social democracy' - a term that better fits the belief of more ordinary liberals who want, say, Medicare for all - is a politically dying force. Democrats who aren't yet sick of all their losing should feel free to embrace them both.
-
I'm simply here to say guns should be owned by responsible people, and there should be high tests and a high bar to prove your responsibility.
-
Down with politics and the art of the possible; up with pronouncements and the allure of the prophetic: It's the way of demagogues everywhere.
-
My father's political heroes were Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
-
The Arab world's problems are a problem of the Arab mind, and the name for that problem is anti-Semitism.
-
Humanitarianism is commendable, but not when you're demanding that others share the burdens and expense.
-
The United States survives so long as at least one of its major parties is politically and intellectually healthy. I don't think the Republican Party, or I should say the Republican Party as the vehicle for modern American conservative ideas, survives with Donald Trump.
-
Many of you have been reared on the cliche that the purpose of education isn't to stuff your head with facts but to teach you how to think. Wrong.
-
If the Republican party essentially becomes the white party, it is going to be the death of it, not only for demographic reasons but for reasons of principle. The party of Lincoln is a party of opportunity for everyone. It's a party about the right to rise, and Mr. Trump unfortunately doesn't represent that view.
-
All societies make necessary moral distinctions between high crimes and misdemeanors, mortal and lesser sins.
-
It's easy to deprecate some of the puffery and jingoism that often go with affirmations of 'American greatness.' It's also easy to confuse greatness with perfection, as if evidence of our shortcomings is proof of our mediocrity.
-
The people we need to hear from most are the ones who make themselves heard least - except, of course, on Election Day.
-
My wife is German, so I know something about German energy policy.