Quotes from Robert H. Bork

A nations moral life is, of course, the foundation of its culture.

The enemy within is modern liberalism, a corrosive agent carrying a very different mood and agenda than that of classical or traditional liberalism. That the modern variety is intellectually bankrupt diminishes neither its vitality nor the danger it poses.

until recently our artists did better than the cave painters.

A person whose main difficulty is not crop failure but video breakdown has less need of the consolations and promises of religion.

Radical individualism, radical egalitarianism, omnipresent and omni-incompetent government, the politicization of the culture, and the battle for advantages through politics shatter a society into fragments of isolated individuals and angry groups.

Surely a number of such people want to do the right thing, are well-intentioned, but just as surely some do not act from creditable intentions. Some of our elites…professors, journalists, makers of motion pictures and television entertainment, et al.…delight in nihilism and destruction as much as do the random killers in our cities. Their weapons are just different.

If only we could recover mere instruction in an era when SAT scores decline and the solution is not improved instruction but raising all scores so that students seem more accomplished than they actually are.

Burke, unlike the Mill of On Liberty, had a true understanding of the nature of men, and balanced liberty with restraint and order, which are, in truth, essential to the preservation of liberty.

Lyndon Johnson's Great Society carried forward what Roosevelt and Truman had begun and accomplished the most thorough-going redistribution of wealth and status in the name of equality that this country had ever experienced.

President Clinton at one point proposed raising taxes on the rich although it did not appear that it would increase the tax revenues received from them. A substantial proportion of the public said they favored higher taxes on high-income earners even if that did not increase the total taxes such people paid. The effect would not be to help anyone else but merely to pull down the better off.

The defining characteristics of modern liberalism are radical egalitarianism (the equality of outcomes rather than of opportunities) and radical individualism (the drastic reduction of limits to personal gratification).

The Declaration's pronouncement of equality was sweeping but sufficiently ambiguous so that even slave holders, of whom Jefferson was one, subscribed to it. That ambiguity was dangerous because it invited the continual expansion of the concept and its requirements. The Declaration was not, clearly, a document that was understood at the time to promise equality of condition, not even among white male Americans. The

The fact is that antihierarchical, egalitarian sentiments were on the rise in political movements, whose tendencies were, therefore, towards collectivism and centralization, with a concomitant decline in the freedoms of business organizations, private associations, families, and individuals. We

Those who made and endorsed our Constitution knew man's nature, and it is to their ideas, rather than to the temptations of utopia, that we must ask that our judges adhere.

Nobody knew what that sort of blather meant in the Sixties and nobody knows now.

This "filtering down" is not a mechanical process in which ideas of intellectuals just happen to come to the attention of the general public. It is instead a conscious effort on the part of intellectuals to alter Americans' perceptions of the world and of themselves, an effort, among other things, to weaken or destroy Americans' attachment to their country and to Western civilization.

Radical egalitarianism necessarily presses us towards collectivism because a powerful state is required to suppress the differences that freedom produces.

The usual strategy for coping with the discomfort of knowing that others are superior in some way is to try to reduce the inequalities by bringing the more fortunate down or by preventing him from being more fortunate. This is the strategy of envy.

A judge who announces a decision must be able to demonstrate that he began from recognized legal principles and reasoned in an intellectually coherent and politically neutral way to his result. Those who would politicize the law offer the public, and the judiciary, the temptation of results without regard to democratic legitimacy.

The fact that resistance to modern liberalism is weakening suggests that we are on the road to cultural disaster because, in their final stages, radical egalitarianism becomes tyranny and radical individualism descends into hedonism.

Heresy," Hilaire Belloc reminds us, "is the dislocation of some complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of a novel denial of some essential part therein. We

The American design of a constitutional Republic is such a "complete and self-supporting scheme." The heresy that dislocates it is the introduction of the denial that judges are bound by law.