Irving Kristol Quotes

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

— Irving Kristol

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.

— Irving Kristol

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

— Irving Kristol

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

— Irving Kristol

“It is ironic to watch the churches, including large sections of my own religion, surrendering to the spirit of modernity at the very moment when modernity itself is undergoing a kind of spiritual collapse ...”

— Irving Kristol

“One can be unhappy before eating caviar, even after, but at least not during.”

— Irving Kristol

“A conservative is a liberal mugged by reality.”

— Irving Kristol

“A welfare state, properly conceived, can be an integral part of a conservative society.”

— Irving Kristol

“What is at stake is civilization and humanity, nothing less. The idea that everything is permitted, as Nietzsche put it, rests on the premise of nihilism and has nihilistic implications. I will not pretend that the case against nihilism and for civilization is an easy one to make. We are here confronting the most fundamental of philosophical questions, on the deepest levels. In short, the matter of pornography and obscenity is not a trivial one, and only superficial minds can take a bland and untroubled view of it.”

— Irving Kristol

“The most intelligent defender of capitalism in the modern period is Friedrich Hayek.”

— Irving Kristol

“If God does not exist, and if religion is an illusion that the majority of men cannot live without ... let men believe in the lies of religion since they cannot do without them, and let then a handful of sages, who know the truth and can live with it, keep it among themselves. Men are then divided into the wise and the foolish, the philosophers and the common men, and atheism becomes a guarded, esoteric doctrine - for if the illusions of religion were to be discredited, there is no telling with what madness men would be seized, with what uncontrollable anguish.”

— Irving Kristol

“Senator McGovern is very sincere when he says that he will try to cut the military budget by 30%. And this is to drive a knife in the heart of Israel ... Jews don't like big military budgets. But it is now an interest of the Jews to have a large and powerful military establishment in the United States ... American Jews who care about the survival of the state of Israel have to say, no, we don't want to cut the military budget, it is important to keep that military budget big, so that we can defend Israel.”

— 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.”

— Irving Kristol

“After all, if you believe that no one was ever corrupted by a book, you also have to believe that no one was ever improved by a book (or a play or a movie). You have to believe, in other words, that all art is morally trivial and that, consequently, all education is morally irrelevant. No one, not even a university professor, really believes that.”

— Irving Kristol

“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.”

— Irving Kristol

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

— Irving Kristol

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

— Irving Kristol

“The liberal paradigm of regulation and license has led to a society where an 18-year-old girl has the right to public fornication in a pornographic movie
but only if she is paid the minimum wage.”

— Irving Kristol

“Somehow, the fact that more poor people are on welfare, receiving more generous payments, does not seem to have made this country a nice place to live - not even for the poor on welfare, whose condition seems not noticeably better than when they were poor and off welfare. Something appears to have gone wrong; a liberal and compassionate social policy has bred all sorts of unanticipated and perverse consequences.”

— Irving Kristol

“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.”

— Irving Kristol

There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work.

— Irving Kristol

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.

— Irving Kristol

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

— Irving Kristol

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

— Irving Kristol

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

— Irving Kristol

“Only liberal organizations are clearly designated [in the press] as "nonpatisan, nonprofit." Non-liberal research organizations are always identified as "right-wing" or "conservative."”

— Irving Kristol

“Anyone who knows anything about journalism knows that reporters are rarely in a position to investigate anything. They lack the authority to subpoena witnesses, to cross-examine, to scrutinize official records. They are lucky to get their phone calls returned.”

— Irving Kristol

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

— Irving Kristol

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.

— Irving Kristol

“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.”

— Irving Kristol

The really difficult moral issues arise, not from a confrontation of good and evil, but from a collision between two goods

— Irving Kristol

“No modern nation has ever constructed a foreign policy that was acceptable to its intellectuals”

— Irving Kristol

There is nothing like a parade to elicit the proper respect for the military from the populace.

— Irving Kristol