Irving Kristol
Irving Kristol
Irving Kristolwas an American columnist, journalist, and writer who was dubbed the "godfather of neo-conservatism." As the founder, editor, and contributor to various magazines, he played an influential role in the intellectual and political culture of the last half-century; after his death he was described by The Daily Telegraph as being "perhaps the most consequential public intellectual of the latter half of the 20th century."...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth22 January 1920
CountryUnited States of America
If your aims as a donor are modest, you can accomplish an awful lot. When your aims become elevated beyond a reasonable level, you not only don't accomplish much, but you can cause a great deal of damage.
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.
In comparison to the French Revolution, the American Revolution has come to seem a parochial and rather dull event. This, despitethe fact that the American Revolution was successful--realizing the purposes of the revolutionaries and establishing a durable political regime--while the French Revolution was a resounding failure, devouring its own children and leading to an imperial despotism, followed by an eventual restoration of the monarchy.
No modern nation has ever constructed a foreign policy that was acceptable to its intellectuals
Anyone who knows anything about journalism knows that reporters are rarely in a position to investigate anything. They lack the authority to subpoena witnesses, to cross-examine, to scrutinize official records. They are lucky to get their phone calls returned.
Somehow, the fact that more poor people are on welfare, receiving more generous payments, does not seem to have made this country a nice place to live - not even for the poor on welfare, whose condition seems not noticeably better than when they were poor and off welfare. Something appears to have gone wrong; a liberal and compassionate social policy has bred all sorts of unanticipated and perverse consequences.
Being frustrated is disagreeable, but the real disasters of life begin when you get what you want.
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.
The liberal paradigm of regulation and license has led to a society where an 18-year-old girl has the right to public fornication in a pornographic movie -- but only if she is paid the minimum wage.
It was a new kind of class war -- the people as citizens versus the politicians and their clients in the public sector.
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.
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.
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.
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.