Irving Kristol Quotes

34 Sourced Quotes

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
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.

Irving Kristol
It was a new kind of class war — the people as citizens versus the politicians and their clients in the public sector.

Irving Kristol
There is nothing like a parade to elicit the proper respect for the military from the populace.

Irving Kristol
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.

Irving Kristol