Irving Kristol Quotes

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

Even if we can't be happy, we must always be cheerful.

One can be unhappy before eating caviar, even after, but at least not during.

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

A conservative is a liberal mugged by reality.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

An intellectual may be defined as a man who speaks with general authority about a subject on which he has no particular competence.

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.

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.

...only liberal organizations are clearly designated [in the press] as "nonpatisan, nonprofit." Non-liberal research organizations are always identified as "right-wing" or "conservative."

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

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.

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

.. the most intelligent defender of capitalism in the modern period is Friedrich Hayek.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

I regard myself to have been a young Trostkyite and I have not a single bitter memory.

The problem is efforts by liberals to establish a wall between religion and society, in the guise of maintaining the wall between church and state.

Being frustrated is disagreeable but the real disasters of life begin when you get what you want.

Even if we can't be happy we must always be cheerful.

Even if we can't be happy we must always be cheerful.