Irving Kristol Quotes
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People need religion. It's a vehicle for a moral tradition. A crucial role. Nothing can take its place.
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Power breeds responsibilities, in international affairs as in domestic - or even private. To dodge or disclaim these responsibilities is one form of the abuse of power.
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You have to know one big thing and stick with it. The leaders who had one very big idea and one very big commitment. This permitted them to create something. Those are the ones who leave a legacy.
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Neo-conservatives are unlike old conservatives because they are utilitarians, not moralists, and because their aim is the prosperity of post-industrial society, not the recovery of a golden age.
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Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions - it only guarantees equality of opportunity.
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Capitalism is the least romantic conception of a public order that the human mind has ever conceived.
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After all, if you believe that no one was ever corrupted by a book, you also have to believe that no one was ever improved by a book (or a play or a movie). You have to believe, in other words, that all art is morally trivial and that, consequently, all education is morally irrelevant. No one, not even a university professor, really believes that.
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Joining a radical movement when one is young is very much like falling in love when one is young. The girl may turn out to be rotten, but the the experience of love is so valuable it can never be entirely undone by the ultimate disenchantment.
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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....
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An intellectual may be defined as a man who speaks with general authority about a subject on which he has no particular competence.
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Nostalgia is one of the legitimate and certainly one of the most enduring of human emotions; but the politics of nostalgia is at best distracting, at worst pernicious.
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The trouble with traditional American conservatism is that it lacks a naturally cheerful, optimistic disposition. Not only does it lack one, it regards signs of one as evidence of unsoundness, irresponsibility.
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Young people, especially, are looking for religion so desperately that they are inventing new ones. They should not have to invent new ones; the old religions are pretty good.
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Conservatism: Our revolutionary message … is that a self-disciplined people can create a political community in which an ordered liberty will promote both economic prosperity and political participation.
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The enemy of liberal capitalism today is not so much socialism as nihilism.
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A neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. A neoliberal is a liberal who got mugged by reality but has not pressed charges.
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Doing good isn't that hard. It's just doing a lot of good that is very hard. If your aims are modest, you can accomplish an awful lot. When your aims become elevated beyond a reasonable level, you not only don't accomplish much, you can cause a great deal of damage.
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It was a new kind of class war - the people as citizens versus the politicians and their clients in the public sector.
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What rules the world is idea, because ideas define the way reality is perceived.
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A liberal is one who says that it's all right for an 18-year-old girl to perform in a pornographic movie as long as she gets paid the minimum wage.
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The danger facing American Jews today is not that Christians want to persecute them but that Christians want to marry them.
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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.
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If you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship.
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There is nothing like a parade to elicit the proper respect for the military from the populace.