Ross Douthat Quotes

Liberals hate religion because politics is a religion substitute for liberals and they can't stand the competition.

You hear that liberalism lacks an idea of the common good, but I think that's a mistake.

Philosophy wasn't about facts, it was about ideas. My first essay title was something like: 'How can you know what other people are thinking?' I thought, 'Wow, what an amazing thing.' I really thought deeply for the first time.

Your political views really denote your spiritual views.

Even if we don't know it or aren't aware of it, politics and philosophy are really what make our up lives.

Liberalism is Rationalism in politics.

The idea that liberal societies are bound together by philosophical beliefs seems to me to be ludicrous. Philosophy is not that important to politics.

If I can see my own recollections, like many adolescents, I was a Platonic realist. I believed in the reality of ideas, of the big nouns, and believed that one's life was determined by the ideas of the true, the good, and the beautiful which one held.

We want to represent the things we believe.

Liberalism has become a special kind of stupid, and it's on full display now, which I think ultimately has the potential to be a good thing.

I am a conservative. Quite possibly I am on the losing side; often I think so. Yet, out of a curious perversity I had rather lose with Socrates, let us say, than win with Lenin.

Politics is how you think about life itself.

For Conservatives, seeing is believing; for liberals, believing is seeing.

I am also atheist or agnostic (I don't even know the difference). I've never been to church and prefer to think for myself.

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum -- "I think that I think, therefore I think that I am;" as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.

I have always believed the thesis that one's politics and the character of one's intellectual work are inseparable.

The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism.

What I say is it's not that Obama hates America. It's not that he's a traitor, that he's a secret Muslim, that he's a Manchurian Candidate. He simply subscribes to an ideology that thinks it would be good for America to have a diminished economy and a diminished role in the world. In other words, Obama is all about what he perceives as global justice.

I think there's a God and I know it's not me. I don't have a set of tenets, but I live an ethical life.

I'm a fuzzy-headed warm-hearted liberal, and I think fuzzy-headed warm-hearted liberalism is an ideological stance that needs defending-if necessary, with a hob-nailed boot-kick to the bollocks of budding totalitarianism.

Hollywood was set up by a bunch of businessmen. They do not see their job as being philanthropists. I don't think it's a contradiction in terms to attempt to be a good businessman and to also be liberal.

There isn't [in new atheism]. Nothing that wasn't in Bertrand Russell or probably Robert Ingersoll. But I suppose it is more of a political effect, in that all these books happened to come out at the same time. I like to think that we have some influence.

Conservatism is pessimistic, with a negative tendency - which we mostly resist - towards despair. Liberals are optimists, with a negative tendency, rarely resisted, towards utopianism.

Being an atheist makes someone a clearer thinking, fairer person. They [atheists] are not doing things to be rewarded in heaven; they're doing things because they're right, because they live by a moral code.

Socrates is not just expounding noble ideas in a vacuum. He is in the middle of a war between those who think truth is absolute and those who think truth is relative. He is fighting that war with everything he has.