Irving Kristol Quotes

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

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.

Today there is a new class hostile to business in general, and especially to large corporations. As a group, you find them mainly in the very large and growing public sector and in the media. They share a disinterest in personal wealth, a dislike for the free-market economy, and a conviction that society may best be improved through greater governmental participation in the country's economic life. They are the media. They are the educational system. Their dislike for the free-market economy originates in their inability to exercise much influence over it so as to produce change. In its place they would prefer a system in which there is a very large political component. This is because the new class has a great deal of influence in politics. Thus, through politics, they can exercise a direct and immediate influence on the shape of our society and the direction of national affairs.

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

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

Are we in danger of becoming a nation of cry-babies? Are we becoming a people who panic at the least sign at adversity? Are we becoming a people with a faith not in God or in ourselves, but in a paternalistic government to shelter us from all of life's hardships and misfortunes?

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.

There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work.

It requires strength of character to act upon one's ideas; it requires no less strength of character to resist being seduced by them.

Capitalism is the least romantic conception of a public order that the human mind has ever conceived.

What's the point of being the greatest, most powerful nation in the world and not having an imperial role?

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

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

The Supreme Court... was never supposed to be... a democratic institution; it is a republican institution which counterbalances the... democratic institutions.

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