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.

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

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.

Even if we can't be happy, we must always be cheerful.

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.

...What is at stake is civilization and humanity, nothing less. The idea that everything is permitted, as Nietzsche put it, rests on the premise of nihilism and has nihilistic implications. I will not pretend that the case against nihilism and for civilization is an easy one to make. We are here confronting the most fundamental of philosophical questions, on the deepest levels. In short, the matter of pornography and obscenity is not a trivial one, and only superficial minds can take a bland and untroubled view of it.

No modern nation has ever constructed a foreign policy that was acceptable to its intellectuals