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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

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Irving Kristol
Age: 89 †
Born: 1920
Born: January 22
Died: 2009
Died: September 18
Columnist
Historian
Journalist
Philosopher
Politician
Publisher
Sociologist
Brooklyn
New York
Years
Intended
Always
Consequences
Consequence
Usually
Less
Social
Unanticipated
Action
Agreeable
Important
Observed

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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.
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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.
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A liberal is a person who sees a fourteen-year-old girl performing sex acts onstage and wonders if she's being paid minimum wage.
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Joining a radical movement when one is young is very much like falling in love when one is young. The girl may turn out to be rotten, but the the experience of love is so valuable it can never be entirely undone by the ultimate disenchantment.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Even if we can't be happy, we must always be cheerful.
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An intellectual may be defined as a man who speaks with general authority about a subject on which he has no particular competence.
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Young people, especially, are looking for religion so desperately that they are inventing new ones. They should not have to invent new ones the old religions are pretty good.
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The danger facing American Jews today is not that Christians want to persecute them but that Christians want to marry them.
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The problem is efforts by liberals to establish a wall between religion and society, in the guise of maintaining the wall between church and state.
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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.
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Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century, seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable ... People have always preferred strong government to weak government, although they certainly have no liking for anything that smacks of overly intrusive government.
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The really difficult moral issues arise, not from a confrontation of good and evil, but from a collision between two goods
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What rules the world is idea, because ideas define the way reality is perceived.
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.. the most intelligent defender of capitalism in the modern period is Friedrich Hayek.
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[Conservatism:] Our revolutionary message... is that a self-disciplined people can create a political community in which an ordered liberty will promote both economic prosperity and political participation.
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As a result of the efforts of Hayek .. and the many others who share his general outlook, the idea of a centrally planned and centrally administered economy, so popular in the 1930s and early 1940s, has been discredited.
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