Quotes from Irving Kristol

Nostalgia is one of the legitimate and certainly one of the most enduring of human emotions; but the politics of nostalgia is at best distracting, at worst pernicious.

Even if we can't be happy, we must always be cheerful.

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

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

Being frustrated is disagreeable, but the real disasters of life begin when you get what you want.

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

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

You have to know one big thing and stick with it. The leaders who had one very big idea and one very big commitment. This permitted them to create something. Those are the ones who leave a legacy.

Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions - it only guarantees equality of opportunity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A neoconservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality. A neoliberal is a liberal who's been mugged by reality but has refused to press charges.

If you believe that no one was ever corrupted by a book, you have also to believe that no one was ever improved by a book.

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

Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions - it only guarantees equality of opportunity.

When we lack the will to see things as they really are, there is nothing so mystifying as the obvious.

After 1789, politics ceased to be considered as the prudent management of men and circumstances, in order to become the 'realization of ideas'. Political thinking became irredeemably ideological: an imposition of ideas on political life rather than an emergence of policy from living experience.

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

The three pillars of modern conservatism are religion, nationalism, and economic growth.

International law is a fiction abused callously, or ignored ruthlessly, by those nations that, unlike the Western democracies, never took it seriously in the first place.