Irving Kristol Quotes

34 Sourced Quotes

Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions — it only guarantees equality of opportunity.

Irving Kristol
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
The enemy of liberal capitalism today is not so much socialism as nihilism.

Irving Kristol
What rules the world is idea, because ideas define the way reality is perceived.

Irving Kristol
People need religion. It's a vehicle for a moral tradition. A crucial role. Nothing can take its place.

Irving Kristol
The danger facing American Jews today is not that Christians want to persecute them but that Christians want to marry them.

Irving Kristol
If you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship.

Irving Kristol
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
[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
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
The major political event of the twentieth century is the death of socialism.

Irving Kristol
Being frustrated is disagreeable, but the real disasters in life begin when you get what you want.

Irving Kristol
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
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
A welfare state, properly conceived, can be an integral part of a conservative society.

Irving Kristol
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
No modern nation has ever constructed a foreign policy that was acceptable to its intellectuals

Irving Kristol
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
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
The really difficult moral issues arise, not from a confrontation of good and evil, but from a collision between two goods

Irving Kristol
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
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
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
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