Sound judgment

Irving Kristol, from a 1984 essay reprinted in a new collection of his essays, via Bill McGurn at Ricochet.com:

[F]or myself, I have reached certain conclusions: that Jane Austen is a greater novelist than Proust or Joyce; that Raphael is a greater painter than Picasso; that T.S. Eliot's later, Christian poetry is much superior to his earlier; that C.S. Lewis is a finer literary and cultural critic than Edmund Wilson; that Aristotle is more worthy of careful study than Marx; that we have more to learn from Tocqueville than from Max Weber; that Adam Smith makes a lot more economic sense than any economist since; that the founders had a better understanding of democracy than any political scientists since; that ... well enough. As I said at the outset, I have become conservative, and whatever ambiguities attach to that term, it should be obvious what it does not mean.

Missing Irving - Ricochet.com