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.
The true civilization is where every man gives to every other every right that he claims for himself.
Whoever prefers life to death, happiness to suffering, well-being to misery must defend without compromise private ownership in the means of production.
They sensed that what had happened around them and in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable. Never again could it be cleansed; it would prove that man, the human species - we, in short - had the potential to construct an enormity of pain, and that pain is the only force created from nothing, without cost and without effort. It is enough not to see, not to listen, not to act.
We must never allow the voice of humanity within us to be silenced. It is humanity's sympathy with all creatures that first makes us truly human.
All human problems are ultimately symptoms, and our separation from God is the cause.
The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained the vaster the appetite for more.
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