Ross Douthat Quotes

#1. However superficially appealing, the idea that a religious tradition could be saved from crisis because a group of intellectuals radically reinterpreted its sacred texts is the kind of conceit that only, well, an intellectual could possibly believe.

Ross Douthat

#2. America's problem isn't too much religion or too little of it. It's bad religion: the slow-motion collapse of traditional Christianity and the rise of a variety of destructive pseudo-Christianities in its place.

Ross Douthat

#3. Every young writer, I imagine, has their first intellectual magazine, whose essays and articles are devoured all the more greedily for being slightly over one's head. Mine was First Things.

Ross Douthat

#4. And the whole mess had been made possible by middle America's relentless appetite - for bigger houses, bigger portfolios, bigger government programs, bigger everything, and damn the long-term cost.

Ross Douthat

#5. In an age of stagnant or declining birthrates, too, these communities' willingness to heed the admonition to be fruitful and multiply has led to speculation about what the demographer Philip Longman calls the survival of the godliest.

Ross Douthat

#6. The Democratic Party's rigidly pro-choice stance is one of the more unyielding positions in contemporary American politics.

Ross Douthat

#7. You start reading C.S. Lewis, then you're reading G.K. Chesterton, then you're a Catholic.

Ross Douthat

#8. The physical vanity of the diet-and-exercise obsessive is recast as the pursuit of a kind of ritual purity, hedged about with taboos and guilt trips and mysticized by yoga.

Ross Douthat

#9. What a society believes and teaches about the link between sex, marriage and procreation has major implications for how, when and whether people couple, marry and raise children, which in turn has implications for every other societal arrangement as well.

Ross Douthat

#10. The thinking person's case for Romney, murmured by many of his backers, amounts to this: Vote for Mitt, you know he doesn't believe a word he says.

Ross Douthat

#11. No one doubts that pure libertarianism is simple, but that's just why it remains on the ideological fringe - because it boils down the most difficult questions in human affairs to a simple equation, a What Would the Market Do bumper sticker.

Ross Douthat