Conrad Black Quotations

Guerrilla wars, and even more so terrorist assaults, are conducted only by forces with insufficient strength to carry out a real war.

All emphasis in American prisons is on punishment, retribution, and disparagement, and almost none is on rehabilitation.

At least 80 percent of American prisoners are grossly over-sentenced. The Supreme Court knows this, but shows scant concern for this human side of criminal justice.

There is a legitimate concern about wealth distribution in the United States, but the answer is not to scapegoat any individual who makes over $200,000 per year and to try to sell the fraud that the government can equitably take the money of those who have earned it and give it to those who haven't.

The Arabs could have peace tomorrow if sufficient numbers of Palestinians were not content to be used as cannon fodder in fruitless assaults on Israel, even as the surrounding Arab powers distract the Arab masses with the red herring of Israel while retarding their countries with their repression and corruption.

A quest for knowledge is not a war with faith; spirituality is not usually an infelicitous amalgam of superstition and philistinism; and moral relativism, taken outside midfield, leads inexorably both to heresy and to secular wickedness, which are often identical.

From the early Seventies to the mid-Eighties, I approached Rome at a snail's pace. Having concluded that God existed, I could not seriously entertain the thought of not trying to be in contact with Him.

I do not at all have the mind of a bully... in my mind bullies are intolerant of contrary opinion, domineering and rather cowardly. I would hope that none of those terms could be fairly used in describing me.

Perhaps the gravest under-publicized atrocity in the world is the persecution of Christians.

No one could seriously dispute that almost all of sub-Saharan Africa, all of North Africa except Morocco, all of the Middle East except Israel and Jordan and most of the oil-rich states, and the entire former British Indian Empire were better governed by Europeans.

The argument of socialists, that people really want to share, beyond a reasonable level of charity, is rubbish, though it is espoused by a lot of rich, pious hypocrites who want to share only enough to avoid widespread starvation, mob violence, and government seizure of more of their incomes.

I always keep a firewall between my own travails and my perception of public-policy issues; otherwise I would retain no credibility as a commentator.

The vicar of Christ is an individual, not an electorate.

Eastern Muslim countries, such as Indonesia and Malaysia, are relative success stories, as they are not afflicted by the Arab heritage of retreat and humiliation at the hands of the French, Spanish, British, Turks, and Persians.

I may have made a mistake in renouncing my Canadian citizenship, which I have never ceased to promise to try to regain.

The greenhouse effect of carbon-dioxide emissions does produce gentle warming if it is not counteracted by unpredictable natural phenomena, but it cannot be measured directly against the volume of such emissions.

Walter Cronkite was a personally decent and convivial man, who literally couldn't kill a fly, was kind to his children, generally helpful to juniors, authentically curious about the news, and, in his time, an energetic reporter.

The United States is a proud, determined, hard-working, talented, patriotic nation and people, and it is not over-extended in the manner of empires of the past that took over the lands of others and eventually collapsed under the weight of the over-ambitious hegemon.

I never ask for mercy and seek no one's sympathy.

Although his personality is generally quite agreeable, Mr Murdoch has no loyalty to anyone or anything except his company.

Terrorists cannot threaten the survival of a great nation.

Watergate enabled the Democrats to cut off all aid to South Vietnam and ensure American defeat in a war their party entered and had effectively lost, before Nixon salvaged a non-Communist South Vietnam while effecting a complete American withdrawal.

Given the genocidal belligerence of Iranian threats against Israel, it is hard to take issue with Israel's right to preemptive self-defense.

There are some people whose opinion I value and respect and it would be very bothersome if I forfeited their respect. But the general public? I'm not preoccupied with the opinions of others.

There is no doubt that the second President Bush inherited a very serious terrorist threat, though not such a threat as had been represented by the totalitarian Great Powers, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

Nixon's full term was one of the most successful in U.S. history, which is why he was re-elected by the largest plurality in the country's history.

I am a passport-carrying citizen of the E.U.

he may be asked to testify in future actions. . . for that, we will have to stay tuned.

Look, I understand it's a good news story, but this has been one massive smear job from A to Z and it will have a surprise ending, a complete vindication of the defendants and an exposure of their persecutors.

Unionized teachers have destroyed much of the state school system.

We'll leave out whether he got a fair verdict or not,

The criminal aspect, from a shareholder's perspective, is important because it helps Hollinger International prove its civil case. Shareholders are not recovering meaningful money as a result of the criminal actions. $250,000 is great, but when you're looking for $500 million it doesn't go a long way.

An overgenerous reinsurance policy for an underachieving people.

I don't have any shame.

Maximising my wealth was never my chief thing.

The facts of Watergate have been wildly exaggerated.

The U.S. prosecution service is eating at the soul of the American republic. It is an absolute danger to everyone.

There can be no return to prosperity while the government (of Ontario) believes that taking money from the people who have earned it and giving it away to the people who haven't, in exchange for their votes and regardless of merit, is the essence of fairness.

Since biblical times, and probably before, the wealthy have been envied and condemned.

Greed has been severely underestimated and denigrated - unfairly so, in my opinion.

Like all fads, corporate governance has its zealots

The bedraggled warhorse of American blowhardism.

Rupert Murdoch is probably the most successful media proprietor and operator in history.

While few judges or prosecutors would be afraid to exercise their perfectly legitimate discretion in favour of an ordinary man, not to mention a minority group member, most would be terrified to exercise the same discretion for someone politically, financially or socially powerful.

We're going to try and recruit the very best people we can and produce the best papers we can, and publish them to the highest standards we can .

For all history up to the end of the Cold War, summit meetings were historic and dramatic occasions, when leaders who controlled the destiny of much of the world met to change the world.

Nixon's full term was one of the most successful in U.S. history, which is why he was re-elected by the largest plurality in the country's history.

Most American media outlets that are controlled by Jews seem to be reflexively, or at least habitually, anti-Israel.

I made 50 million bucks yesterday. That's a flameout I could get used to.

The American legal industry is a medieval guild in which the prosecutors, bar, and bench join hands to ensure that legal invoices are paid, no matter how excessive.

We must express the view, based on our empirical observations, that a substantial number of journalists are ignorant, lazy, opinionated, and intellectually dishonest. The profession is heavily cluttered with aged hacks toiling through a miasma of mounting decrepitude and often alcoholism, and even more so with arrogant and abrasive youngsters who substitute 'commitment' for insight. The product of their impassioned intervention in public affairs is more often confusion than lucidity.

I am proud of being in a U.S. federal prison and surviving it.

I am a passport-carrying citizen of the E.U.

For decades, I have been a militant anti-declinist in terms of America's place in the world.

Economics is half psychology and half Grade Three arithmetic, and the U.S. does not now have either half right.

I have long thought that his [Rupert Murdoch's] social philosophy was contained in his cartoon show, The Simpsons: all politicians and public officials are crooks, and the masses are a vast lumpen proletariat of deluded and exploitable blowhards.

The balance between faith and reason is for the determination of each individual, and of the people as a whole, not of unauthorized government officials uttering impious humbug as they arbitrarily try to define that balance.

I don't go around trying to stir up foreign wars.

The destructive fixation of the envious English-Canadian mind requires that the highest, happiest most agile flyers be laid low. [It is] a sadistic desire corroded by soul-destroying envy, to intimidate all those who might aspire to anything the slightest exceptional.

It is galling to see such mendacious hypocrites as Kennedy and Biden at the Senate Judiciary Committee sitting in judgment on distinguished jurists.

[The] swarming, grunting masses of jackals...

This was a magnificent company that the people who have seized it and used it as a platform from which to persecute and defame the people who built it have torn apart and destroyed, to the expense of the shareholder.

There was a colossal bankruptcy, 50,000 people lost their jobs, tens of billions of dollars were lost and there was a $4 billion accounting fraud. Keep a little perspective, guys,

Israel expanded beyond its original boundaries only because the Arab powers attacked Israel and the U.N. demarcation unsuccessfully in 1948. The endless caterwauling about the 1967 borders is rubbish.

The whole nuclear-arms-control and non-proliferation policy of the nuclear powers is a fraud: The Americans could not prevent the Soviets from replicating their weaponry, and then could not object when the British did the same.

Private-sector firms are increasingly active in the prison industry and they and the militantly unionized correctional officers, almost all unskilled labor, constantly lead public demands for more criminal statutes and more draconian penalties.

The U.S. prosecution service is eating at the soul of the American republic. It is an absolute danger to everyone.

There's a lot of nonsense going on here. This has absolutely no relevance to this case. It's irritating. Come on, it would be irritating to you, wouldn't it? If you had pictures of your family, a picture of the guy you wrote a book about that his secretary gave you, that had been a present from his own parliamentary caucus?

All my life, Americans have been accustomed to thinking of theirs as 'the richest, freest' country in the world. By most measurements, it was long a contender for that honor, and - among the larger countries, if equal weight were given to wealth and indices of freedom - probably did deserve to be so described.

Absolute nonsense. There's no truth or substance whatsoever to these charges,

a complete vindication of the defendants, and exposure of their persecutors.

Economics is half psychology and half Grade Three arithmetic, and the U.S. does not now have either half right.

I want to get on with it. . . . I want to expose this case for the complete fraud that it is.

I'm not a xenophobe - I think immigration is a good thing for most countries - but they transmute the foibles of their native tongues into English in a way that's difficult to figure out.

I don't know him, ... I accept that he's a competent prosecutor, but he doesn't know anything about this case. He just swoops in for the press conference and fluffs his lines.

I am proud of being in a U.S. federal prison and surviving it.

All the other members of the U.N. were admitted, at the outset or subsequently, but Israel was created by the U.N. as a Jewish state, on the motion of Stalin's ambassador, seconded by President Truman's.