Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Irving Kristol
Irving Kristol Quotes
34 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions — it only guarantees equality of opportunity.
Irving Kristol
Source
Report...
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.
Irving Kristol
Source
Report...
The enemy of liberal capitalism today is not so much socialism as nihilism.
Irving Kristol
Source
Report...
What rules the world is idea, because ideas define the way reality is perceived.
Irving Kristol
Source
Report...
People need religion. It's a vehicle for a moral tradition. A crucial role. Nothing can take its place.
Irving Kristol
Source
Report...
The danger facing American Jews today is not that Christians want to persecute them but that Christians want to marry them.
Irving Kristol
Source
Report...
If you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship.
Irving Kristol
Source
Report...
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....
Irving Kristol
Source
Report...
[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.
Irving Kristol
Source
Report...
If you have standards, moral standards, you have to want to make them prevail, and at the very least you have to argue in their favor. Now, show me where libertarians have argued in some comprehensive way for a set of moral standards. … I don't think morality can be decided on the private level. I think you need public guidance and public support for a moral consensus. The average person has to know instinctively, without thinking too much about it, how he should raise his children.
Irving Kristol
Source
Report...
The major political event of the twentieth century is the death of socialism.
Irving Kristol
Source
Report...
Being frustrated is disagreeable, but the real disasters in life begin when you get what you want.
Irving Kristol
Source
Report...
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.
Irving Kristol
Source
Report...
I have observed over the years that the unanticipated consequences of social action are always more important, and usually less agreeable, than the intended consequences.
Irving Kristol
Source
Report...
A welfare state, properly conceived, can be an integral part of a conservative society.
Irving Kristol
Source
Report...
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.
Irving Kristol
Source
Report...
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.
Irving Kristol
Source
Report...
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.
Irving Kristol
Source
Report...
Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century, seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable... People have always preferred strong government to weak government, although they certainly have no liking for anything that smacks of overly intrusive government.
Irving Kristol
Source
Report...
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.
Irving Kristol
Source
Report...
There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work.
Irving Kristol
Source
Report...
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.
Irving Kristol
Source
Report...
No modern nation has ever constructed a foreign policy that was acceptable to its intellectuals
Irving Kristol
Source
Report...
Senator McGovern is very sincere when he says that he will try to cut the military budget by 30%. And this is to drive a knife in the heart of Israel... Jews don't like big military budgets. But it is now an interest of the Jews to have a large and powerful military establishment in the United States... American Jews who care about the survival of the state of Israel have to say, no, we don't want to cut the military budget, it is important to keep that military budget big, so that we can defend Israel.
Irving Kristol
Source
Report...
Somehow, the fact that more poor people are on welfare, receiving more generous payments, does not seem to have made this country a nice place to live - not even for the poor on welfare, whose condition seems not noticeably better than when they were poor and off welfare. Something appears to have gone wrong; a liberal and compassionate social policy has bred all sorts of unanticipated and perverse consequences.
Irving Kristol
Source
Report...
The really difficult moral issues arise, not from a confrontation of good and evil, but from a collision between two goods
Irving Kristol
Source
Report...
It requires strength of character to act upon one's ideas; it requires no less strength of character to resist being seduced by them.
Irving Kristol
Source
Report...
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.
Irving Kristol
Source
Report...
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.
Irving Kristol
Source
Report...
An intellectual may be defined as a man who speaks with general authority about a subject on which he has no particular competence.
Irving Kristol
1
2
Quote of the day
Men were only made into "men" with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally "a man" any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse.
Wyndham Lewis
Irving Kristol
Wikipedia
Born:
January 22, 1920
Died:
September 18, 2009
(aged 89)
Bio:
Irving Kristol was an American columnist, journalist, and writer who was dubbed the "godfather of neo-conservatism.
Known for:
Two cheers for capitalism (1978)
On the democratic idea in America (1972)
On Jews and Judaism
Most used words:
people
liberal
military
truths
moral
appropriate
american
welfare
jews
public
poor
standards
reality
religion
budget
Irving Kristol on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
American Journalist Quotes
Journalist Quotes
20th-century Journalist Quotes
Related Authors
Leo Strauss
American Politician
Daniel Bell
American Sociologist
Norman Podhoretz
American Journalist
Family
Gertrude Himmelfarb
Spouse
Bill Kristol
Son
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes