Irving Kristol Quotes

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.

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?

Joining a radical movement when one is young is very much like falling in love when one is young. The girl may turn out to be rotten, but the experience of love is so valuable it can never be entirely undone by the ultimate disenchantment.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Democratic socialism turns out to be an inherently unstable compound, a contradiction in terms. Every social-democratic party, once in power, soon finds itself choosing, at one point after another, between the socialist society it aspires to and the liberal society that lathered [sic] it... [S]ocialist movements end up [in] a society where liberty is the property of the state, and is (or is not) doled out to its citizens along with other contingent "benefits".

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.

[T]hough affluence is a good thing, and the spirit of compassionate reform is a good thing, in the end a nation survives only to the extent that the spirit of self-discipline and self-sacrifice is strong and vital.

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

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