Bret Stephens Quotes
-
Humanitarianism is commendable, but not when you're demanding that others share the burdens and expense.
-
Free trade was once a Republican conviction.
-
The most interesting conversation is not about why Donald Trump lies. Many public figures lie, and he's only a severe example of a common type. The interesting conversation concerns how we come to accept those lies.
-
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.
-
My father's political heroes were Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
-
The best scientific evidence suggests temperatures are rising, and the best scientific evidence suggests man-made anthropogenic carbon emissions have some substantial thing to do with that. However, does that mean the trend will continue forever? We don't know.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Perhaps the reason Trump voters are so frequently the subject of caricature is that they so frequently conform to type.
-
All societies make necessary moral distinctions between high crimes and misdemeanors, mortal and lesser sins.
-
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.
-
Before the word 'resignation' became a euphemism for being fired, it connoted a sense of public integrity and personal honor.
-
Please spare us the self-pity about how tough it is to look for a job while living with your parents.
-
Demanding abrupt and expensive changes in public policy raises fair questions about ideological intentions.
-
Liberals always cry wolf.
-
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.
-
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 candidacy of Donald Trump is the open sewer of American conservatism.
-
The Arab world's problems are a problem of the Arab mind, and the name for that problem is anti-Semitism.
-
The people we need to hear from most are the ones who make themselves heard least - except, of course, on Election Day.
-
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.
-
I wear two hats at the 'Wall Street Journal': one as a columnist, the other as the editor responsible for our editorial pages in Asia and Europe.
-
Social movements rarely succeed if they violate our gut sense of decency and moral proportion.