I’m a spiritual person, she said. “I believe in Allah, you know, though I don’t always call It ‘Allah’ and I pray the way I want to pray. Sometimes I just look out at the...

There is room for words on subjects other than last words.

Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed.

A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows that from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas of freedom. A free society fertilizes the soil in which non-conformity and dissent and...

Outrage is easy, cheap, and oversold. The nation needs less anger and more thoughtful reflection, less shouting and more listening, less dissembling and more honesty.

There is a difference between having your own movement and cutting yourself off politically from all other movements. This last form of feminist isolationism is attractive in its simplicity. It appears to offer an option...

Liberalism, contrary to popular belief, is facing backward in considering the injustice of its ancestors. Conservatism, contrary to popular belief, is facing forward in considering the psychology of its descendants. Definitively, it seems in the...

Left-wing zealots have often been prepared to ride roughshod over due process and basic considerations of fairness when they think they can get away with it. For them the ends always seems to justify the...

How many winds of doctrine we have known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking. The small boat of thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these...

The liberal state has no view on whether witchcraft is more valuable than all-in wrestling. Like a tactful publican, it has as few opinions as possible. Many liberals suspect passionate convictions are latently authoritarian. But...

To live in any true sense of the word is to reject others; to accept them, one must be able to renounce, to do oneself violence, to act against one’s own nature, to weaken oneself;...

They were Muslims, man, but not your uncles. They need a deen that’s not your uncle’s deen. Iman, think about it like that, iman! It’s supposed to be all about having no fear of death,...

The state does not oppose the freedom of people to express their particular cultural attachments, but nor does it nurture such expression—rather […] it responds with ‘benign neglect’ [….] The members of ethnic and national...

The neo-cons, or some of them, decided that they would back Clinton when he belatedly decided for Bosnia and Kosovo against Milosevic, and this even though they loathed Clinton, because the battle against religious and...

It was no accident that the beau ideal of his (John Adams’) political philosophy was balance, since he projected onto the world the conflicting passions he felt inside himself and regarded government as the balancing...

If one prevents a man from working for the good of society while at the same time providing for the satisfaction of his own needs, then only one way remains open to him: to make...

I think being a liberal, in the true sense, is being nondoctrinaire, nondogmatic, non-committed to a cause – but examining each case on its merits. Being left of center is another thing; it’s a political...

The left wants, needs, loves, and exacerbates violent conflict. The question is…why?…Conservatives generally want policy discussions because we disagree with liberals. Liberals need gutter politics because they despise conservatives personally.

There was something very American about this ability to dwell constantly in the realm of the improvable superlative.

It is not ‘progressive’ to try to resolve problems by eliminating a human life.

I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty. I believe in democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. That makes me a liberal, and I’m...