It was a new kind of class war – the people as citizens versus the politicians and their clients in the public sector.

International law is a fiction abused callously, or ignored ruthlessly, by those nations that, unlike the Western democracies, never took it seriously in the first place.

People need religion. It’s a vehicle for a moral tradition. A crucial role. Nothing can take its place.

It is ironic to watch the churches, including large sections of my own religion, surrendering to the spirit of modernity at the very moment when modernity itself is undergoing a kind of spiritual collapse...

If your aims as a donor are modest, you can accomplish an awful lot. When your aims become elevated beyond a reasonable level, you not only don’t accomplish much, but you can cause a great deal of damage.

The liberal paradigm of regulation and license has led to a society where an 18-year-old girl has the right to public fornication in a pornographic movie – but only if she is paid the minimum wage.

The really difficult moral issues arise, not from a confrontation of good and evil, but from a collision between two goods.

Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions – it only guarantees equality of opportunity.

No modern nation has ever constructed a foreign policy that was acceptable to its intellectuals.

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.