Quote

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.

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
Much
Movement
Undone
Never
Turn
Joining
Love
Turns
Rotten
Like
Girl
Falling
Fall
Entirely
Experience
Radical
Young
Valuable
May
Ultimate
Disenchantment

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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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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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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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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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Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions - it only guarantees equality of opportunity.
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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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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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People need religion. It's a vehicle for a moral tradition. A crucial role. Nothing can take its place.
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.. the most intelligent defender of capitalism in the modern period is Friedrich Hayek.
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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 welfare state, properly conceived, can be an integral part of a conservative society.
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What rules the world is idea, because ideas define the way reality is perceived.
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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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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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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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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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