Irving Kristol > Quotes

“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, Neo-conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea

“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

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

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

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

“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.”
― Irving Kristol

“What rules the world is ideas, because ideas define the way reality is perceived.”
― Irving Kristol

“The three pillars of modern conservatism are religion, nationalism, and economic growth.”
― Irving Kristol

“That this modern, adversary culture—spanning the century, 1865-1965—was hostile to bourgeois society was obvious enough. That it was also, in a deeper sense, hostile to secular humanism was not so obvious, even to many of those involved in the adversary culture itself. Yet in retrospect it is clear that, with hardly an exception, the leading novelists, poets, and painters—those whom we now call the “moderns” (Eliot, Yeats, Kafka, Proust, Picasso)—could not be enlisted in a secular-humanist canon.”
― Irving Kristol, Neo-conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea

“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.”
― Irving Kristol

“I myself have accepted the term [neoconservative], perhaps, because, having been named Irving, I am relatively indifferent to baptismal caprice.”
― Irving Kristol

“Power breeds responsibilities […] To dodge or disclaim these responsibilities is one form of the abuse of power.”
― Irving Kristol

“For well over a hundred and fifty years now, social critics have been warning us that bourgeois society was living off the accumulated moral capital of traditional religion and traditional moral philosophy, and that once this capital was depleted, bourgeois society would find its legitimacy ever more questionable. These critics were never, in their lifetime, either popular or persuasive. The educated classes of liberal- bourgeois society simply could not bring themselves to believe that religion was that important to a polity. They could live with religion or morality as a purely private affair, and they could not see why everyone else—after a proper secular education, of course—could not do likewise.”
― Irving Kristol, Neo-conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea

“We in our secular, rationalist world are utterly unprepared for such existential-spiritual spasms. For one thing, we do not study the history of religion in any serious way, even for explanations of religious phenomena. Instead, we look for sociological explanations, or economic explanations, or even political explanations, and we do so precisely because we find it almost impossible to posit spiritual appetites and spiritual passions as independent, primary forces in human history.”
― Irving Kristol, Neo-conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea

“The delicate task that faces our civilization today is not to reform the secular, rationalist orthodoxy, which has passed beyond the point of redemption. Rather, it is to breathe new life into the older, now largely comatose, religious orthodoxies—while resisting the counterculture as best we can, adapting to it and reshaping it where we cannot simply resist.”
― Irving Kristol, Neo-conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea

“Patriotism springs from love of the nation’s past; nationalism arises out of hope for the nation’s future, distinctive greatness. Nationalism in our time is probably the most powerful of political emotions.”
― Irving Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative: Looking Back Looking Ahead

“[Liberalism] is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other”
― Irving Kristol

“The granddaddy of all countercultures, of course, was early Christianity itself. And in a polemic written in the 2nd century by the Greek philosopher Celsus, we have a marvelous document of the bewilderment and incomprehension with which Greco-Roman rationalists of the early Christian era viewed this counterculture.”
― Irving Kristol, Neo-conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea

“Both the counterculture and its younger twin, postmodernism, then, are a rebellion against culture and art seen as autonomous, secular human activities. It is now felt, quite correctly, that these activities have been emptied of all spiritual substance even while continuing to claim a quasi-sacred mission.”
― Irving Kristol, Neo-conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea

“The counterculture was not “caused,” it was born. What happened was internal to our culture and society, not external to it.”
― Irving Kristol, Neo-conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea