Bret Stephens Quotes
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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.
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Free trade was once a Republican conviction.
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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.
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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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Perhaps the reason Trump voters are so frequently the subject of caricature is that they so frequently conform to type.
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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.
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My father's political heroes were Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
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Demanding abrupt and expensive changes in public policy raises fair questions about ideological intentions.
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Please spare us the self-pity about how tough it is to look for a job while living with your parents.
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'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.
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All societies make necessary moral distinctions between high crimes and misdemeanors, mortal and lesser sins.
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Before the word 'resignation' became a euphemism for being fired, it connoted a sense of public integrity and personal honor.
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The Arab world's problems are a problem of the Arab mind, and the name for that problem is anti-Semitism.
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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.
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The candidacy of Donald Trump is the open sewer of American conservatism.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It may be a truism that the country cannot be strong abroad unless it is strong at home, but it's also a fact that the country's economic prosperity depends on its security abroad - not only in the core of the liberal democratic world but often well beyond it, too.
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When Trump attacks the news media, he's kicking a wounded animal.
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Ms. Rice was a bad national security adviser and a bad secretary of state. She was on the wrong side of some of the administration's biggest internal policy fights. She had a tendency to flip-flop when it came to the president's core priorities, and her political misjudgment more than once cost Mr. Bush dearly.
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Social movements rarely succeed if they violate our gut sense of decency and moral proportion.
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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.
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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.