Top 27 Irving Kristol Quotes
#1. 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
#2. The most intelligent defender of capitalism in the modern period is Friedrich Hayek.
Irving Kristol
#3. If you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship.
Irving Kristol
#4. 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
#5. Being frustrated is disagreeable, but the real disasters of life begin when you get what you want.
Irving Kristol
#7. The major political event of the twentieth century is the death of socialism.
Irving Kristol
#8. 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.
Irving Kristol
#9. Only liberal organizations are clearly designated [in the press] as "nonpatisan, nonprofit." Non-liberal research organizations are always identified as "right-wing" or "conservative."
Irving Kristol
#10. A neoconservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality. A neoliberal is a liberal who's been mugged by reality but has refused to press charges.
Irving Kristol
#11. 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
#12. Even if we can't be happy, we must always be cheerful.
Irving Kristol
#13. There is nothing like a parade to elicit the proper respect for the military from the populace.
Irving Kristol
#14. 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
#15. The really difficult moral issues arise, not from a confrontation of good and evil, but from a collision between two goods
Irving Kristol
#16. The danger facing American Jews today is not that Christians want to persecute them but that Christians want to marry them.
Irving Kristol
#17. One can be unhappy before eating caviar, even after, but at least not during.
Irving Kristol
#18. People need religion. It's a vehicle for a moral tradition. A crucial role. Nothing can take its place.
Irving Kristol
#19. A welfare state, properly conceived, can be an integral part of a conservative society.
Irving Kristol
#20. Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions - it only guarantees equality of opportunity.
Irving Kristol
#21. If you believe that no one was ever corrupted by a book, you have also to believe that no one was ever improved by a book.
Irving Kristol
#22. It was a new kind of class war
the people as citizens versus the politicians and their clients in the public sector.
Irving Kristol
#23. No modern nation has ever constructed a foreign policy that was acceptable to its intellectuals
Irving Kristol
#24. Anyone who knows anything about journalism knows that reporters are rarely in a position to investigate anything. They lack the authority to subpoena witnesses, to cross-examine, to scrutinize official records. They are lucky to get their phone calls returned.
Irving Kristol
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. The enemy of liberal capitalism today is not so much socialism as nihilism.
Irving Kristol
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