Top 66 Max Boot Quotes

I saw America as a land of opportunity, not a bastion of racism or sexism.

Stupidity is not an accusation that could be hurled against such prominent early Republicans as Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root and Charles Evans Hughes.

At Mom’s funeral, mourner after mourner spoke about what a wonderful teacher she was. She was certainly devoted to her students.

Analogies, in particular, can illuminate, but they can also obscure and confuse. They need to be handled carefully, like rhetorical high explosives.

Soliciting anything of value from a foreign national to help a U.S. campaign is not just illegal; it is the Founding Fathers’ nightmare.

There has been an unspoken assumption among establishment Republicans that all they have to do is wait out Hurricane Trump and then return to ‘normal’ conservatism.

Upon closer examination, it’s obvious that the history of modern conservative is permeated with racism, extremism, conspiracy-mongering, isolationism and know-nothingism.

Diplomatic eminences often natter on about preventive action, making the obvious point that it’s better to cure festering ills before they metastasize into something much worse.

The spread of communications technologies – social media, TV news channels – aggravates societal divisions and discord. All that online snarling is making us jittery.

But while I am proud to be an American, I am ashamed of what the Trump administration is doing in our name. It is literally rewriting the meaning of America.

There is no evidence that Republican leaders have been demonstrably dumber than their Democratic counterparts.

All acts of terrorism – all killings of the innocent – are an abomination, and one that is made all the worse when the victims are chosen for their skin color, ethnicity, sexuality or religious beliefs.

Unfortunately, history suggests that dictatorial regimes can withstand years, even decades, of economic sanctions.

I have been a Republican as long as I can remember.

Having emigrated to the United States as a small boy from the Soviet Union, I am instinctively suspicious of socialism and inveterately opposed to communism.

Catering to populist anger with extremist proposals that are certain to fail is not a viable strategy for political success.

There are two kinds of people: Those who like active vacations and those who like sedentary vacations. I’m one of the weird hybrids who likes both. That makes me, I suppose, the Jekyll and Hyde of holidayers.

Logic, fact, morality, legality, ideology: All of it is irrelevant in understanding the Party of Trump. Republicans have made crystal clear that nothing matters to them other than partisanship.

Neoconservatism’ once had a real meaning – back in the 1970s. But the label has now become meaningless. With many of those who are described as neocons, including me, fleeing the Trumpified right, the term’s sell-by date has passed.

Even getting a college degree does not guarantee a minimal knowledge of U.S. history.

Political paralysis and partisanship are sabotaging American power.

You can debate when the conservative movement became a racket – I nominate 1996, the year Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes created Fox News Channel to monetize right-wing outrage – but there is no doubt it has long since passed that point.

Well, a general danger of punditry is that there’s very little incentive to change your position or admit error. If you reverse your position, the people who backed you before will be unhappy, but a lot of the people who now agree with you will still pillory you.

What would I do now, at age 48, if I were deported to a country that I have not seen in more than 40 years and whose language I no longer speak? How would I work? How would I survive?

In the 16th and 17th centuries, as many as 60,000 people were executed in Europe as suspected witches. But it would be nice to think that centuries of advances in science and education have made people less prey to phantasms and falsehoods.

The Immigration Act of 1924 closed our doors to virtually all non-European immigrants – a great wrong that was not rectified for decades.

As someone who has spent much of my life identifying as a conservative, I can’t stand what American conservatism has become.

I yearn for intellectual sustenance on vacation but want, of course, to avoid tedium or boredom. I want to read something that will entertain me but also help me appreciate what I am seeing.

Air superiority, which the United States has taken for granted since World War II, is no longer assured. And, without control of the skies, U.S. ships and soldiers would be vulnerable in ways that are difficult to imagine.

Americans are in vital need of the instruction that historians can provide.

Joe Biden stands out from other Democratic candidates not just by taking on President Trump directly but also by seeking to separate Trump from the rest of the Republican Party.

Whether I realize it or not, I have benefitted from my skin color and my gender – and those of a different gender or sexuality or skin color have suffered because of it.

I find contentment in the craft of writing and fulfillment in self-expression.

As a Jewish refugee from the Soviet Union, I felt it was ridiculous to expect me to atone for the sins of slavery and segregation, to say nothing of the household drudgery and workplace discrimination suffered by women.

My mother and I were alike in one crucial respect: We may have been Russian by birth, but we were English in spirit. She was intensely reserved and private, and seldom showed what she was feeling.

Only 36 percent of Americans could pass a multiple-choice civics test of the kind that is administered to immigrants seeking to become citizens.

Freedom will not prevail because of historical forces; it will only win, if it does, because of historical actors. In other words, us. Those like me who came of age around 1989 used to take democracy for granted.

For years, as a seller of real estate and star of reality TV, Donald Trump made a living wooing customers and viewers. His selling skills were good enough that he even convinced voters to elect him as president in spite of his near-total lack of qualifications.

What’s true for New York is true for most of the country: We are a long way removed from the double-digit interest rates and unemployment rates, and the soaring crime rates, of the early 1980s.

I am white. I am Jewish. I am an immigrant. I am a Russian American. But until recently I haven’t focused so much on those parts of my identity. I’ve always thought of myself simply as a normal, unhyphenated American.

Olga E. Kagan was the strongest woman I knew – and probably the reason I’ve spent my life with other strong women.

France has had socialist presidents on and off since the 1920s, and it remains a free country. Socialists have ruled in many South American countries without ushering in disaster.

The scandal isn’t that refugees want to come to the United States. It’s that Trump is abusing these aspiring Americans and closing our doors to them.

Mexico attacked United States troops in 1846 because they had moved into disputed border territory; President James Polk used this as a convenient casus belli, but he was preparing a war message for Congress even before the attack.

When Democrats aren’t being fiscally reckless, they are economically irresponsible. Democrats bemoan corporate greed and have not a positive word to say about the entrepreneurs that have made our economy the envy of the world.

Hillary Clinton is a centrist Democrat who is more hawkish than President Obama and far more principled and knowledgeable about foreign affairs than Trump, who is too unstable and erratic to be entrusted with the nuclear triad he has never heard of.

Often the process of writing can feel like spitting into the ocean.

I find myself increasingly forced to think of my ethnic identity instead of the national identity I adopted as a boy in 1976. That is discomfiting for me, and a tragedy for America.

Protests are the very essence of America! It is a country founded in protest.

No President can achieve everything or please everyone.

Thirty years on, I am no longer as certain about anything as I was at age 20. I now regret my support for the war in Iraq and kick myself for the naive expectation that freedom was destined to prevail.

I love what I do and realize I am supremely lucky to be able to make my living by writing and speaking about the news of the day.

My allegiance to the GOP was cemented during the 1980s, when I was in high school and college and Ronald Reagan was in the White House. For me, Reagan was what John F. Kennedy had been to an earlier generation: an inspirational figure who shaped my worldview.

I am by no means suggesting that everyone who uses the neocon label is doing so as an anti-Semitic smear, but the word has been used often enough in that ugly context that it should make any person of goodwill think twice before employing it.

Trump doesn’t need his own agenda if he can terrify independent voters in swing states about what would happen if the Democratic agenda is implemented.

Growing up in the 1980s, I remember when the GOP was the party of ideas. Now it’s brain dead.

Everyone from Silesians to Sicilians to Scots seems to want autonomy or independence. The British voted to leave the European Union, and hostility to the superstate is rising across the continent.

I remain troubled by the deliberate killing of civilians, whether by the United States or by its enemies.