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.

After all, if you believe that no one was ever corrupted by a book, you also have to believe that no one was ever improved by a book (or a play or a movie). You have to believe, in other words, that all art is morally trivial and that, consequently, all education is morally irrelevant. No one, not even a university professor, really believes that.

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

In comparison to the French Revolution, the American Revolution has come to seem a parochial and rather dull event. This, despitethe fact that the American Revolution was successful--realizing the purposes of the revolutionaries and establishing a durable political regime--while the French Revolution was a resounding failure, devouring its own children and leading to an imperial despotism, followed by an eventual restoration of the monarchy.

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

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

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.