Irving Kristol Short Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
[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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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