What I say is I am somebody who cares about conservative ideas. I want to see them implemented in governance.

One of the things you can learn from a figure like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is that if you take all the resources of the state for yourself, you don't build much of a constituency and you have to rely on repression, and repression is difficult in the modern world.

The Soviet Union was brought down by a strange global coalition of Western European conservatives, Eastern European nationalists, Russian liberals, Chinese communists, and Afghan Islamic reactionaries, to name only a few. Many of these discordant groups disliked the United States intensely. But Americans were able to mobilize them to direct their ire at the Soviet Union first.

We're not free because other people are nice, maybe other people aren't nice that day. We're free because we expect the institutions of government to work impersonally. That we expect people in government to understand they don't work for the president or the prime minister, they work for the government. And the government is always there.

People who watch a lot of Fox come away knowing a lot less about important world events.

Life, as the signs in the liquor stores say, is too short to drink bad wine. And summer is too short to read bad books.

Partly because of the desperate economic situation in the country, what were once the leading institutions of conservatism are constrained.