Irving Kristol

Irving Kristol was an American columnist, journalist, and writer who was dubbed the "godfather of neoconservatism."

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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.
  • Essay in American Spectator Magazine (1977)

• If you have standards, moral standards, you have to want to make them prevail, and at the very least you have to argue in their favor. Now, show me where libertarians have argued in some comprehensive way for a set of moral standards. ... I don't think morality can be decided on the private level. I think you need public guidance and public support for a moral consensus. The average person has to know instinctively, without thinking too much about it, how he should raise his children.
  • Essay in the Wall Street Journal (1978)

• Doing good isn't [that] hard. It's just doing a lot of good that is very hard. If your aims are modest, you can accomplish an awful lot. When your aims become elevated beyond a reasonable level, you not only don't accomplish much, you can cause a great deal of damage.
  • Interview in the London Times Higher Education Supplement (1987)

• A welfare state, properly conceived, can be an integral part of a conservative society.
  • Reflections of a Neoconservative: Looking Back, Looking Ahead (1983)

• [A neoconservative is] a liberal who has been mugged by reality. A neoliberal is a liberal who got mugged by reality but has not pressed charges.
  • Reflections of a Neoconservative: Looking Back, Looking Ahead

• People need religion. It's a vehicle for a moral tradition. A crucial role. Nothing can take its place.
  • Interview in Reason Magazine (1983)

• The major political event of the twentieth century is the death of socialism.
  • Neo-Conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (1995)

• If you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship.
  • Pornography, Obscenity, and the Case for Censorship (1995)

• There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work.
  • Origin of the Specious, Reason Magazine (July 1997)

• It was a new kind of class war — the people as citizens versus the politicians and their clients in the public sector.
  • The Question of Liberty in America
  • About California's 1978 Proposition 13 which limits tax increases without public approval

Two Cheers for Capitalism (1978)

• Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions — it only guarantees equality of opportunity.

• Today there is a new class hostile to business in general, and especially to large corporations. As a group, you find them mainly in the very large and growing public sector and in the media. They share a disinterest in personal wealth, a dislike for the free-market economy, and a conviction that society may best be improved through greater governmental participation in the country's economic life. They are the media. They are the educational system. Their dislike for the free-market economy originates in their inability to exercise much influence over it so as to produce change. In its place they would prefer a system in which there is a very large political component. This is because the new class has a great deal of influence in politics. Thus, through politics, they can exercise a direct and immediate influence on the shape of our society and the direction of national affairs.

• A liberal is one who says that it's all right for an 18-year-old girl to perform in a pornographic movie as long as she gets paid the minimum wage.

• Neo-conservatives are unlike old conservatives because they are utilitarians, not moralists, and because their aim is the prosperity of post-industrial society, not the recovery of a golden age.

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• Business ethics, in any civilization, is properly defined by moral and religious traditions, and it is a confession of moral bankruptcy to assert that what the law does not explicitly prohibit is therefore morally permissible.

• Corporate philanthropy should not be, and cannot be, disinterested. It must shape or reshape the climate of public opinion.

• Patriotism springs from love of the nation’s past; nationalism arises out of the hope for the nation’s future.

• [The country's founders] understood that republican self-government could not exist if humanity did not possess ... the traditional 'republican virtues' of self-control, self-reliance, and a disinterested concern for the public good.