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.
Irving KristolRead
There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work.
Interpretation
Truth varies based on the audience's understanding and maturity level.
Irving Kristol's quote highlights the idea that truth is subjective and should be tailored to the audience's level of comprehension. It critiques the belief that a universal set of truths can be applied equally to all individuals, emphasizing the importance of context and individual experience in shaping one’s understanding of truth.
In practice
In a classroom setting to discuss how educational content should vary with student maturity.
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.
If you believe that no one was ever corrupted by a book, you have also to believe that no one was ever improved by a book.
No modern nation has ever constructed a foreign policy that was acceptable to its intellectuals
The really difficult moral issues arise, not from a confrontation of good and evil, but from a collision between two goods
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.
You have to know one big thing and stick with it. The leaders who had one very big idea and one very big commitment. This permitted them to create something. Those are the ones who leave a legacy.
There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life’s meaning - that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself - is not earned by work.
Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.
Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.
There is no good or bad without us, there is only perception. There is the event itself and the story we tell ourselves about what it means.
...it is simplicity that is difficult to make.
What comes into the world to disturb nothing merits neither attention nor patience
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