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There's a sort of romanticizing of the past. When you actually think about the past, you know it's a little different.

William Kristol

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More quotes by William Kristol

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I'm happy to have interns at The Weekly Standard and happy to have readers of The Weekly Standard, but if you all tell me that you were busy reading Plato and [Lev] Tolstoy and playing violin in the orchestra, I'd say that was great. I wouldn't tell you to take time out from that to get involved in political journalism.
William Kristol
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Conservatives shouldn't count on the Supreme Court to do our work for us on Obamacare. The Court may rule as it should, and strike down the mandate. But it may not. And even if it does, the future of health care in America - and for that matter, the future of limited government - depends ultimately on the verdict of the American people.
William Kristol
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Iraq's always been very secular.
William Kristol
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For all the talk about the bitterness and the partisanship in American politics, is it really that bitter and partisan? Think of American history. Think of Joseph McCarthy. Think of the New Left. Think of [George] McGovern. Think of [Ronald] Reagan. Think of George Wallace. We've had an awful lot of real extremism on both wings.
William Kristol
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[Among conservatives] there's been too much pseudo-populism, almost too much concern and attention for, quote, 'the people'.... After all, we conservatives are on the side of the lords and barons.... We...are pulling up the drawbridge against the peasants.
William Kristol
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The average GOP presidential vote in these last five elections was 44.5 percent. In the last three, it was 48.1 percent. Give Romney an extra point for voter disillusionment with Obama, and a half-point for being better financed than his predecessors. It still strikes me as a path to narrow defeat.
William Kristol
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I still would say generally that more people have access [to] and take advantage of more diversity of opinion than was once .
William Kristol
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I don't really believe that people read just the stuff they agree with.
William Kristol
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People read the Tribune or the Sun-Times, you know, way back when the Tribune was a right-wing paper.It's always been somewhat that way. We take 10, 20 years in the 50s and 60s as kind of the norm, when there was this sort of bi-partisan parent consensus.
William Kristol
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Of course there are different forms of conservatism. I would say just analytically that the Republican Party is more thoroughly conservative and the Democratic Party is more thoroughly liberal today than has been the case for most of modern history.
William Kristol
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I don't think you want political parties that are entirely driven by some extremely doctrinal ideology.
William Kristol
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If we free the people of Iraq, we will be respected in the Arab world... and I think we will be respected around the world.
William Kristol
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Leo Strauss's discoveries in the history of political philosophy had the effect of liberating his students from the yoke of contemporary thought.
William Kristol
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If the American people really come to a settled belief that Bush lied us into war, his presidency will be over.
William Kristol
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Republicans can also point to an alternate path. They can draw upon genuine experts to explain what should be done.
William Kristol
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We can remove Saddam because that could start a chain reaction in the Arab world that would be very healthy.
William Kristol
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It will be an unusual dynamic [in Congress]. It won't be like the rallying behind President [Barack] Obama in 2009 or behind President [George W.] Bush, even at the beginning of his presidency, or even [Bill] Clinton in '93, when he got his budget through on a partisan vote.
William Kristol
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You all would be really shocked, if you were dropped back down into when I went to college, by the narrowness of the opinions you could get just by reading newspapers and magazines and watching TV.
William Kristol
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If terror groups are to be defeated, it is national governments that will have to do so. In nations like India, governments will have to call on the patriotism of citizens to fight the terrorists. In a nation like Pakistan, the government will have to be persuaded to deal with those in their midst who are complicit.
William Kristol
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People used to complain in the 50s and 60s and even in the 70s when I was in school, studying political science, that if only we could have two political parties that presented a choice, but there were all these liberal Republicans and there were all these southern Democrats who are conservative so people just don't have a clear choice.
William Kristol