In claiming that prohibition, not the drugs themselves, is the problem, Nadelmann and many others - even policemen - have said that "the war on drugs is lost." But to demand a yes or no answer to the question "Is the war against drugs being won?" is like demanding a yes or no answer to the question "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" Never can an unimaginative and fundamentally stupid metaphor have exerted a more baleful effect upon proper thought.

If the history of the 20th Century proved anything, it proved that however bad things were, human ingenuity could usually find a way to make them worse.

To regret religion is to regret Western civilization.

How many people does each of us know who claim to seek happiness but freely choose paths inevitably leading to misery?

The loss of the religious understanding of the human condition—that Man is a fallen creature for whom virtue is necessary but never fully attainable—is a loss, not a gain, in true sophistication. The secular substitute—the belief in the perfection of life on earth by the endless extension of a choice of pleasures—is not merely callow by comparison but much less realistic in its understanding of human nature.

There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy.

Where a reputation for intolerance is more feared than a reputation for vice itself, all manner of evil may be expected to flourish.