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#American economic history is a story of booms fading into resentment.
It is not so much a business cycle as a cycle of public
sentiment, alternating between times of optimism and times of
pessimism. Between, if you must, decades of greed and, if you will,
decades of envy.
The Seven Fat Years
#We must develop a fair appreciation for the real strengths and
limitations of government effort on behalf of children. Government,
obviously, cannot fill a child's emotional needs. Nor can it fill
his spiritual and moral needs. Government is not a father or mother.
Government has never raised a child, and it never will.
University of Notre Dame, October, 1990
#[E]ducation is, after all, a serious business. Its lifeblood is
standards. If there are no standards, how do we call something
higher education?
Ibid.
#This is a free country. Within very broad limits, people may live
as they wish. And yet, we believe that some ways of living are
better than others. Better because they bring more meaning to our
lives, to the lives of others, and to our fragile fallible human
condition. Marriage and parenthood should be held up because between
husband and wife and in fatherhood and motherhood come blessings that
cannot be won in any other way.
Speech to the 1992 Republican National Convention
#[A]ll real education is the architecture of the soul.
Ibid.
#I do not suggest that you should not have an open mind, particularly
as you approach college. But, don't keep your mind so
open that your brains fall out.
Gonzaga College High School, 1987
#Discrimination on the basis of race is illegal, immoral, and
unconstitutional, inherently wrong, and destructive of democratic
society.
Counting by Race (with Terry Eastland)
#We don't have to put people out of work to control inflation. The goal
of the next decade should be to fight inflation and unemployment
through supply-side incentives to put more goods on the shelves.
That's the way to cut prices and boost employment.
Statement of Joint Economic Committee of Congress, 1980
#First radio, then television, have assaulted and overturned the
privacy of the home, the real American privacy, which permitted the
development of a higher and more independent life within democratic
society. Parents can no longer control the atmosphere of the home
and have lost even the will to do so. With great subtlety and
energy, television enters not only the room, but also the tastes of
old and young alike, appealing to the immediately pleasant and
subverting whatever does not conform to it.
The Closing of the American Mind
#The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contradictory
simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth.
Ibid.
#There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost
every student entering the university believes, or says he believes,
that truth is relative.
Ibid.
#In a constitutional democracy the moral content of law must be
given by the morality of the framer or legislator, never by the
morality of the judge.
American Enterprise Institute, 1984
#Those who made and endorsed our Constitution knew man's nature, and
it is to their ideas, rather than to the temptations of utopia,
that we must ask that our judges adhere.
The Tempting of America
#The judge's authority derives entirely from the fact that he is
applying the law and not his personal values. That is why the
American public accepts the decisions of its courts, accepts even
decisions that nullify the laws a majority of the electorate or
their representatives voted for.
Opening statement at hearings to become associate justice of
the Supreme Court, 1987
#[W]hen a judge goes beyond [his proper function] and reads entirely
new values into the Constitution, values the framers and ratifiers
did not put there, he deprives the people of their liberty. That
liberty, which the Constitution clearly envisions, is the liberty
of the people to set their own social agenda through the process of
democracy.
Ibid.
#The First Amendment is about how we govern ourselves -- not about how
we titillate ourselves sexually.
Argument for greater restrictions on pornography; an
interview on ABC's "This Week," June 25, 1989
#How can the modern relativist exercise tolerance if he doesn't
believe in anything to begin with? It is not hard to exhibit
toleration toward a point of view if you have no point of view of
your own with which that point of view conflicts.
Up From Liberalism
#I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God,
subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority
of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.
Ibid.
#Socialize the individual's surplus and you socialize his spirit and
creativeness; you cannot paint the Mona Lisa by assigning one dab
of paint to a thousand painters.
Ibid.
#I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand
names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society
governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.
Rumbles
#[T]he government of the United States, under Lyndon Johnson, proposes
to concern itself over the quality of American life. And this is
something very new in the political theory of free nations.
The quality of life has heretofore depended on the quality of the
human beings who gave tone to that life, and they were its priests
and its poets, not its bureaucrats.
National Review, August 7, 1965
#The state is a divine institution. Without it we have anarchy, and
the lawlessness of anarchy is counter to the natural law: so we
abjure all political theories which view the state as inherently
and necessarily evil. But it is the state which has been in history
the principal instrument of abuse of the people, and so it is
central to the conservatives' program to keep the state from
accumulating any but the most necessary powers.
The Catholic
#World War is the second worst activity of mankind, the worst being
acquiescence in slavery.
#Modern liberalism, for most liberals is not a consciously understood
set of rational beliefs, but a bundle of unexamined prejudices and
conjoined sentiments. The basic ideas and beliefs seem more
satisfactory when they are not made fully explicit, when they merely
lurk rather obscurely in the background, coloring the rhetoric and
adding a certain emotive glow.
Suicide of the West
#The economic egalitarianism of the liberal ideology implies ... the
reduction of Westerners to hunger and poverty.
Ibid.
#[A]rmaments do not, generally speaking, cause wars. This notion, the
logical crux of all arguments in favor of disarmament, turns
the causal relationship upside down. Actually, it is wars, or
conflicts threatening war, that cause armaments, not the reverse.
The War We Are In
#I know that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side, but
it is better to die on the losing side than to live under Communism.
Statement before the House Un-American Activities Committee,
August 3, 1948
#The story has spread that in testifying against Mr. Hiss, I am
working out some old grudge, or motives of revenge or hatred. I do
not hate Mr. Hiss. We were close friends, but we are caught in a
tragedy of history. Mr. Hiss represents the concealed enemy against
which we are all fighting, and I am fighting. I have testified
against him with remorse and pity, but in a moment of history in
which this Nation now stands, so help me God, I could not do
otherwise.
Ibid., August 25, 1948
#Political freedom is a political reading of the Bible.
Witness
#[E]very sincere break with Communism is a religious
experience, though the Communists fail to identify its true nature,
though he fail to go to the end of the experience. His break is the
political expression of the perpetual need of the soul whose first
faint stirring he has felt within him, years, months or days before he
breaks. A Communist breaks because he must choose at last between
irreconcilable opposites -- God or Man, Soul or Mind, Freedom or
Communism.
Ibid.
#[W]hen I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit
something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist
revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically,
incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the name of
direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two
decades.
Ibid.
#I see in Communism the focus of the concentrated evil of our time.
Ibid.
#The Communist vision is the vision of man without God. Ibid.
Chiang Kai-shek
#If when I die I am still a dictator I will certainly go down into
the oblivion of all dictators. If, on the other hand, I succeed in
establishing a stable base for a democratic government, I will be
remembered forever in every home in China.
#We refused to assume ... one of the central obligations of parenthood:
to make ourselves the final authority on good and bad,
right and wrong, and to take the consequences of what might turn
out to be a lifetime battle.
Liberal Parents, Radical Children
#You spend a billion here and a billion there. Sooner or later it
adds up to real money.
Attributed
#[T]he Communist revolution, conducted in the name of doing away
with classes, has resulted in the most complete authority of any
single new class. Everything else is a sham and illusion.
The New Class
#[I]deology in the Soviet Union is both dead, and very much alive!
Dead at the level of faith; alive as an indispensable rationale of
policy.
Encounter, December 1979
#In 30 years, everything will be changed in Russia: its economic and
social relations with the west, its government and party structure.
The spirit inside the party will change. I believe democracy will
come to Russia ... it has to come. It cannot be stopped.
Albert Einstein
#Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the
individual who can labor in freedom.
Out Of My Later Years, 1950
#The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.
#Morale is the greatest single factor in successful wars.
New York Post, June 23, 1945
#Americans, indeed all free men, remember that in the final choice
a soldier's pack is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner's chains.
First Inaugural Address, January 20, 1953
#You have broader considerations that might follow what you would
call the "falling domino" principle. You have a row of dominoes set
up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last
one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.
Explanation as to why Indochina would not be allowed
to fall to the communists, April 7, 1954
#We face a hostile ideology [communism]: global in scope, atheistic
in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method.
Farewell address to the nation, January 17,1961
#Our best protection against bigger government in Washington is
better government in the states.
Speech to the NGC, Cleveland, Ohio, June 8, 1964
#[T]he ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution
itself and not what we have said about it.
Graves v. New York, 306 US 466, 1939
#[P]ersonal freedom is best maintained ... when it is ingrained in
a people's habits and not enforced against popular policy by the
coercion of adjudicated law.
Ibid.
#If the function of this Court is to be essentially no different
from that of a legislature, if the considerations governing
constitutional construction are to be substantially those that
underlie legislation, then indeed judges should not have life
tenure and they should be made directly responsible to the electorate.
Ibid.
#The [Supreme] Court's authority -- possessed neither of the purse nor
the sword -- ultimately rests on sustained public confidence in its
moral sanction. Such feeling must be nourished by the Court's
complete detachment, in fact and appearance, from political
entanglements and by abstention from injecting itself into the
clash of political forces and political settlements.
Earl Warren: A Political Biography by Earl Katcher, 1967
#Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
#Governments never learn. Only people learn.
#History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for
political freedom.
#The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment,
was produced by government mismanagement rather than
by any inherent instability of the private economy.
#Inflation is taxation without legislation.
Comment on President Carter's plan to raise taxes to
reduce inflation, 1979
#Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the
effects of mismanagement of government.
PBS, "Firing Line," October 9, 1988
#What kind of a society isn't structured on greed? The problem of
social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which
greed will do the least harm.
The Macmillan Book of Business and Economic Quotations
#Most economic fallacies derive ... from the tendency to assume that
there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense
of another.
Free to Choose (with Rose Friedman)
#Self-interest is not myopic selfishness. It is whatever it is that
interests the participants, whatever they value, whatever goals
they pursue. The scientist seeking to advance the frontiers of his
discipline, the missionary seeking to convert infidels to the true
faith, the philanthropist seeking to bring comfort to the needy -- all
are pursuing their interests, as they see them, as they judge them
by their own values.
Ibid.
#The man has the gradually sinking feeling that his role as provider,
the definitive male activity from the primal days of the
hunt through the industrial revolution and on into modern life, has
been largely seized from him; he has been cuckolded by the
compassionate state.
Wealth and Poverty
#Real poverty is less a state of income than a state of mind. Ibid.
A successful economy depends on the proliferation of the rich, on
creating a large class of risk-taking men who are willing to shun
the easy channels of a comfortable life in order to create new
enterprise, win huge profits, and invest them again.
Ibid.
#The first priority of any serious program against poverty is to
strengthen the male role in poor families.
Ibid.
#The welfare culture tells the man he is not a necessary part of the
family; he feels dispensable, his wife knows he is dispensable, his
children sense it.
Ibid.
#Capitalism begins with giving. Not from greed, avarice, or even
self love can one expect the rewards of commerce, but from a spirit
closely akin to altruism, a regard for the needs of others, a
benevolent, outgoing, and courageous temper of mind.
Ibid.
#The differences between the sexes are the single most important
fact of human society.
Men and Marriage
#I will offer a choice, not an echo.
January 3, 1964
#We cannot allow the American flag to be shot at anywhere on earth
if we are to retain our respect and prestige.
Remarks on the Gulf of Tonkin incident, August 1964
#We Americans understand freedom; we have earned it, we have lived
for it, and we have died for it. This nation and its people are
freedom's models in a searching world. We can be freedom's
missionaries in a doubting world.
Speech to the Republican National Convention, June 16, 1964
#Those who seek to live your lives for you, to take your liberty in
return for relieving you of yours, those who elevate the state and
downgrade the citizen, must see ultimately a world in which earthly
power can be substituted for divine will. And this nation was
founded upon the rejection of that notion and upon the acceptance
of God as the author of freedom.
Ibid.
#Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it,
leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences;
wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it
leads first to conformity and then to despotism.
Ibid.
#A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big
enough to take it all away.
October 1964
#[T]he genius of the American system is that through freedom we have
created extraordinary results from plain old ordinary people.
Interview in Policy Review, Fall 1989
#Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no
constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no
law, no court can even do much to help it.
Speech at "I Am An American Day," Central Park, May 20, 1945
#Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify
everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it
falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to
possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends
to respect human rights. It pretends to prosecute no one.
It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.
The Power of the Powerless, 1978
#My dear fellow citizens: For forty years you have heard from my
predecessors on this day different variations of the same theme:
how our country flourished, how many millions of tons of steel we
produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and
what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us. I assume
you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to
you.
New Year's address to the Czech and Slovak people, 1990
#[W]e live in a contaminated moral environment. We have fallen
morally ill because we became used to saying one thing and thinking
another. We have learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each
other, to care only about ourselves. Notions such as love, friendship,
compassion, humility, or forgiveness have lost their
depth and dimensions.
Ibid.
nature to a tool of production. Thus it attacked both their very
essence and their mutual relationship. It reduced gifted and
autonomous people to nuts and bolts in some monstrously huge,
noisy, and stinking machine.
Ibid.
#It is of the essence of the demand for equality before the law that
people should be treated alike in spite of the fact that they are
different.
The Constitution of Liberty, 1960
#The greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are
most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the
efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what
they regard as the public good.
Ibid.
#The great aim of the struggle for liberty has been equality before
the law.
Ibid.
#Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity
and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the
consequences of his actions.... Liberty and responsibility are
inseparable.
Ibid.
#[W]here the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by
slow starvation.
The Road to Serfdom
#We shall all be the gainers if we can create a world fit for small
states to live in.
Ibid.
#The more the state "plans" the more difficult planning becomes for
the individual.
Ibid.
#Scratch an intellectual and you find a would-be aristocrat who
loathes the sight, the sound, and the smell of common folk.
First Things, Last Things, 1970
#I was guilty of judging capitalism by its operations and socialism
by its hopes and aspirations; capitalism by its works and socialism
by its literature.
Out of Step
#Those who say life is worth living at any cost have already written
for themselves an epitaph of infamy, for there is no cause and no
person they will not betray to stay alive.
Attributed
#To silence criticism is to silence freedom.
New York Times Magazine, September 30, 1951
#The family is the cornerstone of our society. More than any other
force it shapes the attitude, the hopes, the ambitions, and the
values of the child. And when the family collapses it is the
children that are usually damaged. When it happens on a massive
scale the community itself is crippled.
So, unless we work to strengthen the family, to create conditions
under which most parents will stay together, all the rest -- schools,
playgrounds, and public assistance, and private concern -- will never
be enough.
June 4, 1965
#The argument that the West was somehow to blame for world poverty
was itself a Western invention. Like decolonization, it was a
product of guilt, the prime dissolvent of order and justice.
Modern Times
#By early 1933, therefore, the two largest and strongest of Europe
were firmly in the grip of totalitarian regimes which preached and
practiced, and indeed embodied, moral relativism, with all its
horrifying potentialities.
Ibid.
#Throughout these years, the power of the State to do evil expanded
with awesome speed. Its power to do good grew slowly and ambiguously.
Ibid.
# Jack Kemp
There are no limits on our future if we don't put limits on our
people.
April 6, 1987
#America's mission to the world did not end when communism ended.
Our mission is ongoing.... Our mission is to continue to tell the
world that we are for the freedom and human rights of all men and
women, for all time -- and to do everything we can to transform the
ancient dream and hope of freedom into a democratic reality
everywhere! And with God's help we will.
November 30, 1990
# John F. Kennedy
An economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce
enough revenue to balance our budget, just as it will never
produce enough jobs or enough profits.
New York, December 14, 1962
#The twentieth-century conservative is concerned, first of all, for
the regeneration of spirit and character -- with the perennial problem
of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical
understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth
living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest.
The Conservative Mind
#[The conservative believes] in a transcendent order, or body of
natural law, which rules society as well as conscience.
Ibid.
#[Conservatives have an] affection for the proliferating variety and
mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity,
egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems.
Ibid.
#[C]ivilized society requires orders and classes.... If natural
distinctions are effaced among men, oligarchs fill the vacuum.
Ultimate equality in the judgment of God, and equality before
courts of law, are recognized by conservatives; but equality of
condition, they think, means equality in servitude and boredom.
Ibid.
#Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by subtle
threads of moral and intellectual principle.
Enlivening the Conservative Mind
#Privilege, in any society, is the reward of duties performed.
Ibid.
#The intelligent conservative combines a disposition to preserve
with an ability to reform.
The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Conservatism
#When Marxist dictators shoot their way into power in Central America,
the San Francisco Democrats don't blame the guerrillas and
their Soviet allies, they blame United States policies of one
hundred years ago, but then they always blame America first.
Speech at the 1984 Republican Convention
#Traditional authoritarian governments are less repressive than
revolutionary autocracies.... They are more susceptible of
liberalization, and ... they are more compatible with U.S. interests.
Dictatorships and Double Standards
#People need religion. It's a vehicle for a moral tradition. A
crucial role. Nothing can take its place.
Two Cheers for Capitalism
#[A neoconservative is] a liberal who has been mugged by reality.
Ibid.
#A liberal is one who says that it's all right for an 18-year-old
girl to perform in a pornographic movie as long as she gets paid
the minimum wage.
Ibid.
#[To believe that] no one was ever corrupted by a book, you almost
have to believe that no one was ever improved by a book (or play,
or a movie).... No one, not even a university professor, really
believes that.
Reflections of a Neo-Conservative
#[The Founding Fathers] understood that republican self-government
could not exist if humanity did not possess ... the traditional
"republican virtues" of self-control, self-reliance, and a
disinterested concern for the public good.
Ibid.
#His [Reagan's] posture was forward-looking, his accent was on
economic growth rather than sobriety. All those Republicans with
the hearts and souls of accountants -- the traditional ideological
curse of the party -- were nervous, even dismayed.
Ibid.
#A welfare state, properly conceived, can be an integral part of a
conservative society.
American Spectator, 1977
#It was a new kind of class war -- the people as citizens versus the
politicians and their clients in the public sector.
"Comments on Prop 13," Wall Street Journal, 1978
#The Culture of Narcissism.
Book title
#The Japanese inevitably will again play a major role in the world,
and not just economically. They are a great people. They cannot and
should not be satisfied with a world role that limits them to
making better transistor radios and sewing machines, and teaching
other Asians to grow rice.
Quoted in Richard M. Nixon's Leaders
#We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.
We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We
castrate and then bid the geldings to be fruitful.
The Abolition of Man
#We will put no impediment in your way, and we will be down at the
dock bidding you a fond farewell as you sail off into the sunset.
Reply to a proposal to move the United Nations from
New York City, September 19, 1983
#Poverty and suffering are not due to the unequal distribution of
goods and resources, but to the unequal distribution of capitalism.
Policy Review, Summer 1992
#I have come up with a new national symbol for the United States. I
think we need to junk the eagle and come up with a symbol that is
more appropriate for the kind of government we have today. We need
to replace the eagle with a huge sow that has a lot of nipples and
a bunch of fat little piglets hanging on them, all trying to suckle
as much nourishment from them as possible.
The Way Things Ought to Be
#I prefer to call the most obnoxious feminists what they really are:
feminazis.
Ibid.
#I am for lifting everyone off the social bottom. In fact, I am for
doing away with the social bottom altogether.
Time, February 14, 1964
#Whenever a Republican leaves one side of the aisle and goes to the
other, it raises the intelligence quotient of both parties.
1956
#Much of what [Henry] Wallace calls his global thinking is, no matter
how you slice it, still globaloney.
Speech to Congress, February 9, 1943
#It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.
Speech to the Republican National Convention, 1952
#By profession I am a soldier and take great pride in that fact, but
I am prouder, infinitely prouder, to be a father. A soldier destroys
in order to build; the father only builds, never destroys. The one has
the potentialities of death; the other embodies creation and life. And
while the hordes of death are mighty, the battalions of life are
mightier still.
#Unless men are free to be vicious they cannot be virtuous.
In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Manifesto
#There is simply no other choice than this: either abstain from
interference in the free play of the market, or to delegate the
entire management of production and distribution to the government.
Either capitalism or socialism: there exists no middle way.
The Macmillan Book of Business and Economic Quotations, Michael
Jackman, 1962
#There is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community
that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families,
dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male
authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the
future -- that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence,
unrest, disorder -- most particularly the furious, unrestrained
lashing out at the whole social structure -- that is not only to be
expected; it is very near to inevitable. And it is richly deserved.
Family and Nation, 1965
#It [government] cannot provide values to persons who have none, or
who have lost those they had. It cannot provide inner peace. It can
provide outlets for moral energies, but it cannot create those
energies.
Los Angeles Times, February 15, 1969
#Somehow Liberals have been unable to acquire from birth what
Conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy
skepticism of the powers of government to do good.
New York Post, May 14, 1969
#The issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect.
Memo to President Nixon, 1971
#The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is
competence, because it's so rare.
New York Times, March 2, 1976
#Incentives to fail.
Description of what the welfare system provides
#We tried to provide more for the poor and produced more poor instead.
We tried to remove the barriers to escape poverty, and inadvertently
built a trap.
Losing Ground
#There is no principle in the conservative philosophy than that of
the inherent and absolute incompatibility between liberty and
equality.
Twilight of Authority
#The quest for community will not be denied, for it springs from
some of the powerful needs of human nature -- needs for clear sense of
cultural purpose, membership, status, and continuity.
The Quest for Community
#The successful leader does not talk down to people. He lifts them up.
Leaders
#In assembling a staff, the conservative leader faces a greater
problem than does the liberal. In general, liberals want more
government and hunger to be the ones running it. Conservatives want
less government and want no part of it. Liberals want to run other
people's lives. Conservatives want to be left alone to run their
own lives.... Liberals flock to government; conservatives have to
be enticed and persuaded. With a smaller field to choose from, the
conservative leader often has to choose between those who are loyal
and not bright and those who are bright but not loyal.
Ibid.
#Only slowly did I come to the precise capitalist insight: creativity
is more productive than rote labor; therefore, the primary form of
capital is mind. "Errand Into the Wilderness" Capitalism is ... a
social order favorable to alertness, inventiveness, discovery, and
creativity. This means a social order based upon education, research,
the freedom to create, and the right to enjoy the fruit's of one's own
creativity.
Ibid.
#Where self-government is not possible in personal life, it remains
to be seen whether it is possible in the republic. Every prognosis
based on history would suggest that lack of self-government in the
individual citizenry will lead to lack of restraint in the government
of the republic.... Personal prodigality will be paralleled by public
prodigality. As individuals live beyond their means, so will the
state. As individuals liberate themselves from costs,
responsibilities, and a prudent concern for the future, so will their
political leaders. When self-government is no longer an ideal for
individuals, it cannot be credible for the republic.
The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
#To be a conservative ... is to prefer the familiar to the unknown,
to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to
the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant,
the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the
perfect, present laughter to utopia's bliss.
Rationalism in Politics
#Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car
keys to teenage boys.
Parliament of Whores
#What is this oozing behemoth, this fibrous tumor, this monster of
power and expense hatched from the simple human desire for civic
order? How did an allegedly free people spawn a vast, rampant
cuttlefish of dominion with its tentacles in every orifice of the
body politic?
Ibid.
#Wealth is, for most people, the only honest and likely path to
liberty. With money comes power over the world. Men are freed from
drudgery, women from exploitation. Businesses can be started, homes
built, communities formed, religions practiced, educations pursued.
But liberals aren't very interested in such real and material
freedoms. They have a more innocent -- not to say toddlerlike -- idea
of freedom. Liberals want the freedom to put anything into their
mouths, to say bad words and to expose their private parts in art
museums.
Give War a Chance
#At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child -- miserable, as all
spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined,
despotic, and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling
brats.
Ibid.
#There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn
well please.
Speech to the Cato Institute, 1993
#There are just two rules of governance in a free society: Mind your
own business. Keep your hands to yourself.
Ibid.
#If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what
it costs when it's free.
Ibid.
#If there is one profoundly reactionary sector in Latin America, it
is the leftist intellectuals. They are a people without memory. I
have never heard one of them admit he made a mistake. Marxism has
become an intellectual vice. It is the superstition of the entire
century
Quoted by Alan Riding, New York Times, May 3, 1979
#The fundamental error of socialism is anthropological in nature.
Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a
molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the
individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the
socio-economic mechanism. Socialism likewise maintains that the
good of the individual can be realized without reference to his
free choice, to the unique and exclusive responsibility which he
exercises in the face of good or evil. Man is reduced to a series
of social relationships, and the concept of the person as the
autonomous subject of moral decisions disappears.
Centesimus Annus
#The modern business economy has positive aspects. Its basis is
human freedom exercised in the economic field.
Ibid.
#There exists another form of ownership which is becoming no less
important than land: the possession of know-how, technology and
skill. The wealth of the industrialized nations is based much more
on this kind of ownership than on natural resources.
Ibid.
#Besides the earth, man's principal resource is man himself.
Ibid.
#Where self-interest is suppressed, it is replaced by a burdensome
system of bureaucratic control that dries up the wellsprings of
initiative and creativity.
Ibid.
#The first and fundamental structure for "human ecology" is the
family, in which man receives his first ideas about truth and
goodness and learns what it means to love and be loved, and thus
what it means to be a person.
Ibid.
#I certainly agree that we should not go around saying we are the
world's policemen. But guess who gets called when someone needs a
cop?
New York Times, August 17, 1990
#The guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied
to one individual and something else when applied to a person of
another color. If both are not accorded the same protection, then it
is not equal.
University of California v. Bakke, 1978
#But what is freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take
man's freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must
be free of his brothers.
Anthem
#If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I
would choose -- because it contains all the others -- the fact that
they were the people who created the phrase "to make money." No other
language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always
thought of wealth as a static quantity -- to be seized, begged,
inherited, shared, looted, or obtained as a favor. Americans were
the first to understand that wealth has to be created.
Atlas Shrugged
#We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms, only
to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious
possession: our spiritual life.
A World Split Apart
#Patriotism means unqualified and unwavering love for the nation,
which implies not uncritical eagerness to serve, not support for
unjust claims, but frank assessment of its vices and sins, and
penitence for them.
From Under the Rubble
#European democracy was originally imbued with a sense of Christian
responsibility and self-discipline, but these spiritual principles
have been gradually losing their force. Spiritual independence is
being pressured on all sides by the dictatorship of self-satisfied
vulgarity, of the latest fads, and of group interests.
Ibid.
#To coexist with communism on the same planet is impossible. Either
it will spread, cancer-like, to destroy mankind, or else mankind
will have to rid itself of communism (and even then face lengthy
treatment for secondary tumors).
The Mortal Danger
#Communism will never be halted by negotiations or through the
machinations of dΘtente. It can only be halted by force from without
or by disintegration from within.
Ibid.
#Many Americans who supported the initial thrust of civil rights, as
represented by the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the
Civil Rights Act of 1964, later felt betrayed as the original
concept of equal individual opportunity evolved toward the concept
of equal group results.
Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?
#[T]here are many reasons, besides genes and discrimination, why
groups differ in their economic performances and rewards. Groups
differ by large amounts demographically, culturally, and
geographically -- and all these differences have profound effects on
incomes and occupations.
Ibid.
#Live people are being sacrificed because of what dead people did.
New York Times, July 1, 1990, regarding affirmative
action and reverse discrimination
#Poverty doesn't cause crime. Crime causes poverty -- or more
precisely, crime makes it harder to break out of poverty. The vast
majority of poor people are honest, law-abiding citizens whose
opportunities for advancement are stunted by the drug dealers,
muggers, thieves, rapists, and murderers who terrorize their
neighborhoods.
Policy Review, Summer 1986
#Crime is the ultimate tax on enterprise. It must be reduced or
eliminated before poor people can fully share in the American
dream.
Ibid.
#The Labour Party believes in turning workers against owners; we
believe in turning workers into owners.
Sunday Election Rally Speech, 1987
#Hope is no basis for a defense policy.
Speech to a Conservative Party Conference, October 14, 1988
#[C]ommunist regimes were not some unfortunate aberration, some
historical deviation from a socialist ideal. They were the ultimate
expression, unconstrained by democratic and electoral pressures, of
what socialism is all about.... In short, the state [is] everything
and the individual nothing.
March 8, 1991
#Ronald Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot.
The Heritage Foundation, 1991
#With free trade you can have both large-scale economic efficiency
and small-scale political decentralization.
Ibid.