Quotes from Bret Stephens

My office-hour reading is fairly ad hoc: I generally read whatever seems relevant to what I'm editing, writing, or thinking about writing.

When Trump attacks the news media, he's kicking a wounded animal.

Before the word 'resignation' became a euphemism for being fired, it connoted a sense of public integrity and personal honor.

Countries we love will inevitably do things we don't like or fail to understand. The same goes for people.

Ms. Rice was a bad national security adviser and a bad secretary of state. She was on the wrong side of some of the administration's biggest internal policy fights. She had a tendency to flip-flop when it came to the president's core priorities, and her political misjudgment more than once cost Mr. Bush dearly.

The American tradition rests on pillars of self-questioning, self-actualization, and disagreement.

What too many of Mr. Trump's supporters want is an American strongman, a president who will make the proverbial trains run on time.

A Trump presidency - neutral between dictatorships and democracies, opposed to free trade, skeptical of traditional U.S. defense alliances, hostile to immigration - would mark the collapse of the entire architecture of the U.S.-led post-World War II global order.

There was a time when the conservative movement was led by the likes of Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol and Bob Bartley, men of ideas who invested the Republican Party with intellectual seriousness.

For the anti-Semite, the problems of the world can invariably be ascribed to the Jews; for the Communist, to the capitalists.

This is the standard line of the Trump side of the party, that us who oppose him are just a bunch of elites who live in the Acela corridor in this bubble of unimaginable wealth. I wish I had been born into an extremely wealthy New York real estate family and been given multimillion dollar loans to get my start in life.

The best scientific evidence suggests temperatures are rising, and the best scientific evidence suggests man-made anthropogenic carbon emissions have some substantial thing to do with that. However, does that mean the trend will continue forever? We don't know.

I don't see the point of belonging to a party on the increasingly dubious assumption that it's slightly less bad than the opposition.

People want leaders. Not ideologues. Not people whose life experiences have been so narrow that they've been able to maintain the purity of their youthful ideals. Not people whose principal contact with political life comes in the form of speeches and sound bites rather than decisions and responsibilities.

When it comes to trade, when it comes to standing up to countries like North Korea, when it comes to standing up to guys like Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump is not a conservative.

Social movements rarely succeed if they violate our gut sense of decency and moral proportion.

'Democratic socialism' is awful as a slogan and catastrophic as a policy. And 'social democracy' - a term that better fits the belief of more ordinary liberals who want, say, Medicare for all - is a politically dying force. Democrats who aren't yet sick of all their losing should feel free to embrace them both.

All societies make necessary moral distinctions between high crimes and misdemeanors, mortal and lesser sins.

Democrats should have learned in 2016 that what counts in American politics is location, not turnout.

Of course ABC and its parent company Disney were right to cancel the sitcom 'Roseanne' after its eponymous star, Roseanne Barr, wrote a racist tweet.

Donald Trump's more sophisticated defenders have long since mastered the art of pretending that the only thing that matters with his presidency is what it does, not what he says.

Every president inherits a mixed bag when he comes to office, and Obama's was hardly the worst.

The most interesting conversation is not about why Donald Trump lies. Many public figures lie, and he's only a severe example of a common type. The interesting conversation concerns how we come to accept those lies.

Please spare us the self-pity about how tough it is to look for a job while living with your parents.