Neo-conservatism Quotes

“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, Neo-conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea

“That this modern, adversary culture—spanning the century, 1865-1965—was hostile to bourgeois society was obvious enough. That it was also, in a deeper sense, hostile to secular humanism was not so obvious, even to many of those involved in the adversary culture itself. Yet in retrospect it is clear that, with hardly an exception, the leading novelists, poets, and painters—those whom we now call the “moderns” (Eliot, Yeats, Kafka, Proust, Picasso)—could not be enlisted in a secular-humanist canon.”
― Irving Kristol, Neo-conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea

“The granddaddy of all countercultures, of course, was early Christianity itself. And in a polemic written in the 2nd century by the Greek philosopher Celsus, we have a marvelous document of the bewilderment and incomprehension with which Greco-Roman rationalists of the early Christian era viewed this counterculture.”
― Irving Kristol, Neo-conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea

“We in our secular, rationalist world are utterly unprepared for such existential-spiritual spasms. For one thing, we do not study the history of religion in any serious way, even for explanations of religious phenomena. Instead, we look for sociological explanations, or economic explanations, or even political explanations, and we do so precisely because we find it almost impossible to posit spiritual appetites and spiritual passions as independent, primary forces in human history.”
― Irving Kristol, Neo-conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea

“Both the counterculture and its younger twin, postmodernism, then, are a rebellion against culture and art seen as autonomous, secular human activities. It is now felt, quite correctly, that these activities have been emptied of all spiritual substance even while continuing to claim a quasi-sacred mission.”
― Irving Kristol, Neo-conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea

“The counterculture was not “caused,” it was born. What happened was internal to our culture and society, not external to it.”
― Irving Kristol, Neo-conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea

“The delicate task that faces our civilization today is not to reform the secular, rationalist orthodoxy, which has passed beyond the point of redemption. Rather, it is to breathe new life into the older, now largely comatose, religious orthodoxies—while resisting the counterculture as best we can, adapting to it and reshaping it where we cannot simply resist.”
― Irving Kristol, Neo-conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea

“For well over a hundred and fifty years now, social critics have been warning us that bourgeois society was living off the accumulated moral capital of traditional religion and traditional moral philosophy, and that once this capital was depleted, bourgeois society would find its legitimacy ever more questionable. These critics were never, in their lifetime, either popular or persuasive. The educated classes of liberal- bourgeois society simply could not bring themselves to believe that religion was that important to a polity. They could live with religion or morality as a purely private affair, and they could not see why everyone else—after a proper secular education, of course—could not do likewise.”
― Irving Kristol, Neo-conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea