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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
Social
Unanticipated
Action
Agreeable
Important
Observed
Years
Intended
Always
Consequences
Consequence
Usually
Less

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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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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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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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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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What rules the world is idea, because ideas define the way reality is perceived.
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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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People need religion. It's a vehicle for a moral tradition. A crucial role. Nothing can take its place.
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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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Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions - it only guarantees equality of opportunity.
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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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Even if we can't be happy, we must always be cheerful.
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.. the most intelligent defender of capitalism in the modern period is Friedrich Hayek.
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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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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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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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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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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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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
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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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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