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.

A liberal is a person who sees a fourteen-year-old girl performing sex acts onstage and wonders if she's being paid minimum wage.

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

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

If God does not exist, and if religion is an illusion that the majority of men cannot live without ... let men believe in the lies of religion since they cannot do without them, and let then a handful of sages, who know the truth and can live with it, keep it among themselves. Men are then divided into the wise and the foolish, the philosophers and the common men, and atheism becomes a guarded, esoteric doctrine - for if the illusions of religion were to be discredited, there is no telling with what madness men would be seized, with what uncontrollable anguish.

.. the most intelligent defender of capitalism in the modern period is Friedrich Hayek.

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.