Mark Riebling: Likeness

Mark Riebling is American writer. Explore interesting quotes on likeness.

Mark Riebling: 78 quotes0 likes

“Ever since 1953, when Russell Kirk produced its intellectual coat of arms, conservatism has been "what Edmund Burke wrote." This is the equivalent of Arthur Danto’s institutional theory of art—art is whatever the art world says it is. But it’s also a cop-out. Instead of analyzing conservatism in an Aristotelian way, instead of asking how we use the term in real life, we just describe Burke. In the process, don’t we risk fleeing into what Tanenhaus calls an "alternative universe"? If conservatives are "glaringly disconnected from the realities now besetting America," as Tanenhaus says, why is the solution to be more like a man who wore a powdered wig? Liberals have problems of their own, but, to their credit, they don’t sit around debating whether Hillary Clinton or John Edwards is the "real Rousseauian."”

Conservatism Turned Upside Down: Sam Tanenhaus' Critique of Conservative Reason (2009)

“Globalization is a trend with many gurus; not all have been wise. Some, writing during the economic euphoria of the Clinton years, predicted that global trade would translate into global peace. In The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization, Thomas Friedman even dismissed terrorists like Ramzi Youssef, architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, as ineffectual "Yahoos" who were not the wave of the future. We know now that the Ramzi Youssefs of the world are not ineffectual; that they will threaten us for decades to come; and that they will seek to acquire weapons of mass destruction and use them against us.”

The New Paradigm: Merging Law Enforcement and Intelligence Strategies (2006)

“Personal responsibility is a big idea about which little is known. It has received far less study than other key conservative tenets, like economic choice. This lack of attention is striking because personal responsibility is a defining assumption in American thought.”

Personal Responsibility: How the Framers coined a phrase as they created a nation (2010)

“The realities of globalization can be seen in something as simple as the investigation of a car crash. If a patrolman investigated a fatal accident in the 1970s, the victims and the witnesses were both likely from the local community; and if the officer climbed into the wreckage, to look for some malfunction in the vehicle, he would probably see from the serial numbers that the car was made in the U. S. He could put all that together, and make his case. But Consider the death of Princess Diana. This accident involved an English citizen, with an Egyptian boyfriend, crashed in a French tunnel, driving a German car with a Dutch engine, driven by a Belgian, who was drunk on Scotch whiskey, followed closely by Italian paparazzi, on Japanese motorcycles, and finally treated with Brazilian medicines by an American doctor. In this case, even leaving aside the fame of the victims, a mere neighborhood canvass would hardly have completed the forensic picture, as it might have a generation before.”

The New Paradigm: Merging Law Enforcement and Intelligence Strategies (2006)

“A Moral Reckoning is, among its other faults, a 352-page exercise in intellectual bad manners. Reading it is like listening for three days to Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe.”

Jesus, Jews and the Shoah: A Moral Reckoning by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (2003)

“I think that in the emergency situations like we have with potentially weapons of mass destruction, the agent in the field needs as much flexibility as he can and the decision of probable cause as to what’s going to occur needs to be made not in headquarters and not by the attorney general and not by a special court in Washington, but by the agent in the field who needs to respond immediately.”

Interview with Mark Riebling (2002)

“If movement conservatism is less about hating the state than about fighting Godless modernism, this might explain why conservatives have always found actual or cultural wars to fight, but have never got around to shrinking or controlling the growth of government (though centrists like Eisenhower and Clinton did).”

Conservatism Turned Upside Down: Sam Tanenhaus' Critique of Conservative Reason (2009)