Quotes from Bret Stephens

If a public figure tells a whopping lie once in his life, it'll haunt him into his grave. If he lies morning, noon and night, it will become almost impossible to remember any one particular lie.

Donald Trump is a demagogue. Period. The fervor of his crowds recalls Nasser's Egypt. His convictions are illiberal. His manners are disgusting. His temper is frightening.

It's easy to deprecate some of the puffery and jingoism that often go with affirmations of 'American greatness.' It's also easy to confuse greatness with perfection, as if evidence of our shortcomings is proof of our mediocrity.

Down with politics and the art of the possible; up with pronouncements and the allure of the prophetic: It's the way of demagogues everywhere.

I grew up in Mexico City at a time when the country was a repressive one-party dictatorship almost wholly dependent on oil revenues.

Free trade was once a Republican conviction.

Censoriously asserting one's moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.

I'm simply here to say guns should be owned by responsible people, and there should be high tests and a high bar to prove your responsibility.

Demanding abrupt and expensive changes in public policy raises fair questions about ideological intentions.

My wife is German, so I know something about German energy policy.

Liberals always cry wolf.

When those of us in the words-making world use the term 'overregulation,' we are mostly putting a name to a concept we rarely experience consciously.

There is something kind of aggressively and inhumanly repetitive about this line that guns are essential to American liberties - hard one to stomach when so many thousands of people are dying every year for this so-called liberty.

Nearly everyone I know seems to have a well-developed theory as to why this country is past redemption, or almost, and every theory seems almost right.

My father's political heroes were Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.

I think that for the United States, Hillary Clinton, as awful as I find her, is a survivable event. I'm not so sure about Donald Trump.

No adviser to a president is going to get his way all of the time, but at a minimum, that adviser should be able to defend the tilt of an administration's policy as if it were his own. If not, he should make room for those who can.

The intelligent defense of free speech should not rest on the notion that we must tolerate every form of speech, no matter how offensive. It's that we should lean toward greater tolerance for speech we dislike, and reserve our harshest penalties only for the worst offenders.

I have a very, very hard time voting for Mrs. [Hillary] Clinton.

Movements that hector and punish rather than educate and reform have a way of inviting derision and reaction.

Do I think police chiefs, many of which are African-American or Hispanic, wake up and say, 'Let's systemically oppress African-American communities?' No, I don't. Are there instances in which that happens? I'm sure there are.

We live in a world in which data convey authority. But authority has a way of descending to certitude, and certitude begets hubris.

Since the end of World War II, U.S. presidents of both parties have recognized that foreign and domestic policy do not have to be pursued at the expense of each other.

I am sorry that Mr. Cheney, and every other supporter of enhanced interrogation techniques, has to defend the practices as if they were torture. They are not.