111 Quotes by Ross Douthat

For all its deranging effects, I am always grateful to Twitter for the interesting ideas it surfaces.

To visit the West Coast, now and always, is to be overwhelmed by its beauty - the blue water and blue skies, the temperate air and the beaches and the looming mountains not so far away.

The days of noblesse oblige are long behind us, so our elite's entire claim to legitimacy rests on theories of equal opportunity and upward mobility, and the promise that 'merit' correlates with talents and deserts.

As a generalization, fantasy writing has leaned more on political storytelling the more it's tried to escape the inevitable influence of Middle-earth, and revise the Eurocentric and Christian tropes that Tolkien's particular worldview bequeathed.

In the end the recrudescence of racism on the right is conservatism's problem to solve, and it has to be solved independently of whatever liberals and leftists happen to be saying. But the task of solving it still gets a little harder with every nonsense charge or bad-faith accusation.

When immigration proceeds at a steady but modest clip, deep change comes slowly, and there's time for assimilation to do its work.

It is not white nationalism to believe that growing ideological uniformity in the commanding heights of culture makes American politics more polarized.

It is not white nationalism to recognize limiting principles on liberal universalism, and a justifiable role for particularity - ethnic, cultural, religious - in many political arrangements.

When a newspaper columnist wants to write about a novel, the rule is that you're supposed to have a 'hook,' an excuse, a timely reason to bring up the book in question.