Top 35 Irving Kristol Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A conservative is a liberal mugged by reality.”

— Irving Kristol

2. “Being frustrated is disagreeable, but the real disasters of life begin when you get what you want.”

— Irving Kristol

3. “The three pillars of modern conservatism are religion, nationalism, and economic growth.”

— Irving Kristol

4. “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.”

— Irving Kristol

5. “Even if we can’t be happy, we must always be cheerful.”

— Irving Kristol

6. “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.”

— Irving Kristol

7. “One can be unhappy before eating caviar, even after, but at least not during.”

— Irving Kristol

8. “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.”

— Irving Kristol

9. “What rules the world is idea, because ideas define the way reality is perceived.”

— Irving Kristol

10. “The really difficult moral issues arise, not from a confrontation of good and evil, but from a collision between two goods.”

— Irving Kristol

11. “Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions – it only guarantees equality of opportunity.”

— Irving Kristol

12. “No modern nation has ever constructed a foreign policy that was acceptable to its intellectuals.”

— Irving Kristol

13. “The enemy of liberal capitalism today is not so much socialism as nihilism.”

— Irving Kristol

14. “People need religion. It’s a vehicle for a moral tradition. A crucial role. Nothing can take its place.”

— Irving Kristol

15. “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.”

— Irving Kristol

16. “International law is a fiction abused callously, or ignored ruthlessly, by those nations that, unlike the Western democracies, never took it seriously in the first place.”

— Irving Kristol

17. “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

18. “The danger facing American Jews today is not that Christians want to persecute them but that Christians want to marry them.”

— Irving Kristol

19. “There is nothing like a parade to elicit the proper respect for the military from the populace.”

— Irving Kristol

20. “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.”

— Irving Kristol

21. “Young people, especially, are looking for religion so desperately that they are inventing new ones. They should not have to invent new ones; the old religions are pretty good.”

— Irving Kristol

22. “If you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship.”

— Irving Kristol

23. “I regard myself to have been a young Trostkyite and I have not a single bitter memory.”

— Irving Kristol

24. “An intellectual may be defined as a man who speaks with general authority about a subject on which he has no particular competence.”

— Irving Kristol

25. “A welfare state, properly conceived, can be an integral part of a conservative society.”

— Irving Kristol

26. “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.”

— Irving Kristol

27. “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.”

— Irving Kristol

28. “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.”

— Irving Kristol

29. “The trouble with traditional American conservatism is that it lacks a naturally cheerful, optimistic disposition. Not only does it lack one, it regards signs of one as evidence of unsoundness, irresponsibility.”

— Irving Kristol

30. “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.”

— Irving Kristol

31. “It is ironic to watch the churches, including large sections of my own religion, surrendering to the spirit of modernity at the very moment when modernity itself is undergoing a kind of spiritual collapse...”

— Irving Kristol

32. “It was a new kind of class war – the people as citizens versus the politicians and their clients in the public sector.”

— Irving Kristol

33. “The major political event of the twentieth century is the death of socialism.”

— Irving Kristol

34. “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.”

— Irving Kristol

35. “When we lack the will to see things as they really are, there is nothing so mystifying as the obvious.”

— Irving Kristol