What was wrong with communism wasn't aberrant leadership, it was communism.

Reagan is both too fatalistic and too modest to be a crudaser. He doesn't have that darkness around the eyes of a George McGovern.

Industry is the enemy of melancholy

Enthusiasm for conservation can be fashioned into a nasty weapon for those who dislike business on general principles.

We have got to accept Big Government for the duration-for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged, given our present government skills, except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores. … And if they deem Soviet power a menace to our freedom (as I happen to), they will have to support large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards, and the attendant centralization of power in Washington-even with Truman at the reins of it all.

The largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques which, in education as well as the arts, are out to impose upon the nation their modish fads and fallacies, and have nearly succeeded in doing so. In this cultural issue, we are, without reservations, on the side of excellence (rather than "newness") and of honest intellectual combat (rather than conformity).

Knee-jerk liberals and all the certified saints of sanctified humanism are quick to condemn this great and much-maligned Transylvanian statesman.