Irving Kristol Quotes

We are living in a Golden Age, the most gilded Golden Age of human history—not only of past history, but of future history.

Neoconservatism is a blend of realism and idealism. We have the idealism of the liberals but we look at the reality of the world.

People all over the world are today questioning matters that only a few generations ago were generally seen as "just the way things are.”

Those interested in perpetuating present conditions are always in tears about the marvelous past that is about to disappear.

Conservative: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

America is a conservative country with a small “c” - they want change, but they don’t want too much change too fast.

A conservative is someone who does not think he is morally superior to his grandfather.

Social conservatives [are] nostalgic for a time when the government dictated whom you could live with or sleep with. But the rejection of moral codes is no more a rejection of morality than the rejection of speech codes is a rejection of free speech. Our morality laws are falling, and we are a better nation for it.

Man is by nature a conservative animal and government is his instrument for preventing rapid change.

A conservative is a man who will not look at the new moon out of respect for that ancient institution, the old one.

A young man under twenty-five who is not a Socialist has no heart, one above twenty-five who remains a Socialist has no head.

Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from birth what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government to do good.

Neoconservatives habitually overstate America’s ability to export democracy.

The word conservative has become so loaded by people who are radical and don’t want to admit that they are radical.

Ours is the only government under heaven where liberty can, in truth, be said to dwell; and the numberless advantages of such a government, for moral, religious, and intellectual improvement, may be learnt from the prosperous state of our country since the time she assumed her just and proper station among the nations of the earth.

The left and right have been as bad as each other. The left has allowed its distrust of markets and endless faith in government to obscure the importance of civil society. The right has been so focused on replacing the state with markets that it has forgotten how to cultivate a trusting society

The Republican party should have learned its lesson -- that it must be a conservative party.

The key to economic development is less in government aid, but in having a climate that will attract private capital….Free market development is the key to economic prosperity in the world.

Liberalism is the philosophy for our time, because it does not try to conserve every tradition of the past, because it does not apply to new problems the old doctrinaire solutions, because it is prepared to experiment and innovate and because it knows that the past is less important than the future.

All political action aims at either preservation or change.

We must not continue to dwell in the past and we must resolve to do the right and march along with the rest of the world.

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

Ideas appropriate to a past social order have a strange power of influencing thought and action within a later institutional framework.

A man cannot be in the seventeenth century and the nineteenth at one and the same moment.

For income growth to occur in a society, a large fraction of people must experience changes in the possible lives they imagine for themselves and their children, and these new visions of possible futures must have enough force to lead them to change the way they behave.