Mark Steyn Quotations

Mitt has a ton of consultants, and not one of them thought he needed a credible answer on Bain or taxes?

I think at a certain level compared - as was pointed out earlier, compared to what is happening in Europe, the United States still gets the safe-haven money. But underlying that, the United States is not the safe haven but perhaps the most dangerous place of all.

Popular culture as a whole is popular, but in today's fragmented market it's a jostle of competing unpopular popular cultures. As the critic Stanley Crouch likes to say, if you make a movie and 10 million people go see it, you'll gross $100 million - and 96 per cent of the population won't have to be involved. That alone should caution anyone about reading too much into individual examples of popular culture.

The spirit of the age is: Ask not what your country can do for you, demand it.

The Romney candidacy is better than it was four years ago, but it's not clear that it's good. Mitt needs to get good real fast: A real speech, real plan, real responses, and real fire in the belly.

Ron Paul's crazy talk about the Federal Reserve makes more sense these days. Right now, every - all this debt issued by the United States people assume the Chinese are buying, no they don't want any more American debt. Ron Paul has a point there.

I mean, Iceland is Iceland. It can't do damage to anybody unless you're Icelandic. But the United States can drag down the entire western economy. And I think what we are seeing is simply a reflection of reality. This is not, I'm sorry, but this is not a AAA nation.

When is black America going to forgive white America for slavery?

[Charles] Manson wanted to start a race war. Nobody said he was leading some sort of charge about white supremacy.

How ridiculous! You're going to have the first black president apologize for slavery?

When is the Democratic Party going to apologize for being the biggest slave-holding-supporting institution on the planet and sticking with racism for the century after the abolition of slavery?

The Democratic Party is uniquely virulently racist and pro-slavery to a degree unseen anywhere in the English-speaking world!

No family of an American hostage has ever been prosecuted for paying a ransom for the return of their loved ones. The last thing we should ever do is to add to a family's pain.

Alternatively, suppose Qaddafi winds up hanging from a lamppost in his favorite party dress. If you're a Third World dictator, what lessons would you draw? Qaddafi was the thug who came in from the cold, the one who (in the wake of Saddam's fall) renounced his nuclear program and was supposedly rehabilitated in the chancelleries of the West. He was a strong partner in the war on terrorism, according to U.S. diplomats. And what did Washington do? They overthrew him anyway.

A big chunk of Western civilization, consciously or otherwise, has given the impression that it's dying to surrender to somebody, anybody. Reasonably enough, Islam figures: Hey, why not us?

If you're 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you're graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade. There has been no global warming this century. None

When Cromwell instructed his portraitist to paint him 'warts and all', he meant both halves of that equation. To teach the warts alone is morbid and unhealthy.

On the Continent and elsewhere in the West, native populations are aging and fading and being supplanted remorselessly by a young Muslim demographic.

I like Mitch Daniels on the fiscal conservative issues. You disagree with him on this idea that social issues, you takeoff the table. I do that for two reasons. I think the fiscal issues in a sense are a symptom of a lot of the deeper cultural issues in America. I don't think they are as disconnected as he thinks.

Bisexuality is the proportional representation of sexuality in a world where most of us - straight or gay - operate a first-past-the-post system.

Reverend Jesse Jackson, President-for-Life of the People's Republic of Himself.

Appeasement is a vote to live in the present tense, to hold the comforts of the moment.

For states in demographic decline with ever more lavish social programs, the question is a simple one: Can they get real? Can they grow up before they grow old? If not, then they'll end their days in societies dominated by people with a very different worldview.

If gun control bore any relation to homicide rates, Washington, DC would be the safest place in the country.

CNN? Oh, that's that network with Larry King, who, like the Son of Sam, is a native of Brooklyn. Used to be owned by Ted Turner, who, like the Cincinnati Strangler, is a native of Cincinnati. Now part of Time Warner, founded by the Warner Brothers, the oldest of whom, Harry Warner, like many Auschwitz guards, was a native of Poland.

Welfare culture is bad not just because, as in Europe, it's bankrupting the state, but because it enfeebles the citizenry, it erodes self-reliance and resourcefulness.

There is no conceivable amount of money worth telling the world that you were beaten up by Liza Minnelli.

One lesson of Sept. 11 is that a government that tries to do everything is likely to do most of it badly.

When nuclear weapons were an elite club of five relatively sane world powers, the Left was convinced the planet was about to go ka-boom any minute, and the handful of us who survived would be walking in a nuclear winter wonderland. Now anyone with a few thousand bucks and an unlisted number in Islamabad in his Rolodex can get a nuke, and the Left couldn't care less.

Contemporary politics is all about phony energy, about running around slamming doors for the sake of it-or, more to the point, opening them and tossing through a huge sack of taxpayer dollars.

When a man doesn't know the meaning of the word 'fear', that might just be a deficiency in his education.

Hollywood gave us far more Muslim terrorists in the Eighties and Nineties than it has since 9/11.

If you look at the range of Hollywood movies playing in most cities in the developing world, you'd hate the America they portray, too.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. How do you get away from it? Improvise.

We immigrants can sometimes sound a little hysterical about this because we come from places that have tried this and we know where it leads. Anybody who's lived in countries with socialized health care knows that it becomes the dominant political issue.

The essence of a government health care system - for people who have never lived under it and don't know - is waiting, waiting, waiting. You wait for everything. You wait for years for operations that are routine in America.

The minute health care becomes a huge, unwieldy, expensive government bureaucracy it's a permanent feature of life and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

The progressive Left can be in favor of Big Government or population control but not both. The mutual incompatibility is about to plunge Europe into societal collapse. There is no precedent in human history for economic growth on declining human capital - and that's before anyone invented unsustainable welfare systems.

Kafka would surely have been impressed by the twin ambitions of the modern empathetic state: the need to set up hyper-regulatory bodies preventing you from doing anything yourself, while simultaneously endowing lavish pseudo-agencies to hand out leaflets listing a 1-800 number you can dial to order more leaflets.

It's not that I place less value on Palestinian lives, but that Chairman Arafat and his chums in Hamas do.

Freedom is messy. In free societies, people will fall through the cracks - drink too much, eat too much, buy unaffordable homes, fail to make prudent provision for health care, and much else. But the price of being relieved of all those tiresome choices by a benign paternal government is far too high. Big Government is the small option: it's the guarantee of smaller freedom, smaller homes, smaller cars, smaller opportunities, smaller lives.

The president has borrowed more money to spend to less effect than anybody on the planet.

Those who can do. Those who can't form a supercommittee.

If the IMF is correct (a big if), China will be the planet's No.1 economy by 2016. That means whoever's elected in November next year will be the last president of the United States to preside over the world's dominant economic power.

Her Majesty's government is engaging not merely in Orwellian Newspeak but in self-defeating Orwellian Newspeak. The broader message it sends is that ours is a weak culture so unconfident and insecure that if you bomb us and kill us our first urge is to find a way to flatter and apologize to you.

The state of our civilization manifests itself both in the non-problems that terrify us beyond all reason - rising sea levels - and in the real problems we pay no heed to [population decline]...In reality, much of the planet will be uninhabited long before it's uninhabitable

I believe Western culture -- rule of law, universal suffrage, etc. -- is preferable to Arab culture: that's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I support immigration, but with assimilation.

For all the casual slurs about 'cultural imperialism', British imperialists were more interested in other cultures than anybody before or since, and, if they hadn't dug it up and taken care of it, we'd know hardly anything about the ancient world. What's important about a nation's past is not what it keeps walled up in the museum but what it keeps outside, living and breathing as every citizen's inheritance.

Sadly, a U.S. invasion of Iraq 'would threaten the whole stability of the Middle East' - or so Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, told the BBC on Tuesday. Amr's talking points are so Sept. 10: It's supposed to destabilize the Middle East. The stability of the Middle East is unique in the non-democratic world and it's the lack of change in Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt that's turned them into a fetid swamp of terrorist bottom-feeders.

Our leadership class's real accomplishment is résumé padding.

In 1897, troops from the greatest empire the world had ever seen marched down London’s mall for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee. Seventy years later, Britain had government health care, a government-owned car industry, massive government housing, and it was a shriveled high-unemployment socialist basket-case living off the dwindling cultural capital of its glorious past. In 1945, America emerged from the Second World War as the preeminent power on earth. Seventy years later . . . Let’s not go there.

We are the source of our problems not mysterious sinister foreigners overseas.

Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb. The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone.

Government health care changes the relationship between the citizen and the state, and, in fact, I think it's an assault on citizenship.

Even if you don't mind Romneycare, or the abortion flip-flop, or any of the rest, there's a more basic problem: He's not a natural campaigner, and on the stump he instinctively recoils from any personal connection with the voters.

In a way, both the U.S. media and those wacky rioters in the Afghan-Pakistani hinterlands are very similar, two highly parochial and monumentally self-absorbed tribes living in isolation from the rest of the world and prone to fanatical irrational indestructible beliefs — not least the notion that you can flush a 950-page book down one of Al Gore's eco-crazed federally mandated low-flush toilets, a claim no editorial bigfoot thought to test for himself in Newsweek's executive washroom.

We're told the old-school imperialists were racists, that they thought of the wogs as inferior. But, if so, they at least considered them capable of improvement. The multiculturalists are just as racist. The only difference is that they think the wogs can never reform: Good heavens, you can't expect a Muslim in Norway not to go about raping the womenfolk! Much better just to get used to it.

What happened to those men and women at Fort Hood had a horrible symbolism: Members of the best trained, best equipped fighting force on the planet gunned down by a guy who said a few goofy things no one took seriously. And that's the problem: America has the best troops and fiercest firepower, but no strategy for throttling the ideology that drives the enemy — in Afghanistan and in Texas.

But in reality the point of free speech is for the stuff that’s over the line, and strikingly unbalanced. If free speech is only for polite persons of mild temperament within government-policed parameters, it isn’t free at all. So screw that.

...discussing cultural relativism with cultural relativists is like playing tennis with some guy who says, "Your ace is just a social construct.

To expect the government to save you is to be a bystander in your own fate.

When you're taxing bovine flatulence emissions, there's nothing left to tax.

But a society that has nothing to die for has nothing to live for . . .

"Moderate" Republicans such as Arnold Schwarzenegger like to boast that they're fiscal conservatives and social liberals. But the social liberalism always ends up burying the fiscal conservatism.

For Al Gore and Paul Ehrlich and Co., whatever the problem, the solution is always the same. Whether it's global cooling, global warming, or overpopulation, we need bigger government, more regulation, higher taxes, and a massive transfer of power from the citizens to some unelected self-perpetuating crisis lobby.

What can Americans learn from the Olympics spectacle? According to the IMF, China will succeed America as the dominant economic power in the course of the next presidential term, so Howard Fineman, editorial director of the Huffington Post and MSNBC mainstay, was anxious to pick up tips. 'Brits long ago lost their empire,' he tweeted, 'but overall show us how to lose global power gracefully.' So there's that.

Last month, 80,000 Americans signed on to new jobs, but 85,000 Americas signed on for Social Security disability checks. Most of these people are not 'disabled' as that term is generally understood. Rather, it's the U.S. economy that's disabled, and thus Obama incentivizes dependency.

[We] assume that social progress is like technological progress: one cannot uninvent the internal combustion engine, so how could one uninvent liberty?

The law functions as formal embodiment of a moral code, not as free-standing substitute for it.

Big government makes small citizens.

Only in America does 'health' 'care' 'reform' begin with the hiring of 16,500 new IRS agents tasked with determining whether your insurance policy merits a fine.

Public interest criteria does not mean criteria that the public decides are in its interest. It means that the elite - via various appointed bodies - decide what the public's interest is for them.

Sometimes societies become too stupid to survive. A nation that takes Barack Obama's current rhetorical flourishes seriously is certainly well advanced along that dismal path.

The trouble with the social-democratic state is that, when government does too much, nobody else does much of anything.

Once a fellow's enjoying the fruits of government health care and all the rest, he couldn't give a hoot about the general societal interest; he's got his, and if it's going to bankrupt the state of a generation hence, well, as long as they can keep the checks coming till he's dead, it's fine by him.

America is the brokest country in history. We owe more money than anyone has ever owed anyone. And Obama and Reid say relax, that's no reason not to spend more - because the world hasn't yet concluded we have no intention of paying it back. When they do, the dollar will collapse.

Absolute welfare corrupts absolutely.

Anything that shifts power from the individual judgment of free citizens to government is a bad thing.

At first glance, an alliance of anarchists and government might appear to be somewhat paradoxical. But the formal convergence in Oakland makes explicit the movement's aims: They're anarchists for statism, wild free-spirited youth demanding more and more total government control of every aspect of life - just so long as it respects the fundamental human right to sloth.

The 'Occupy' movement has no real solutions, except more government, more spending, more regulation, more bureaucracy, more unsustainable lethargic pseudo-university with no return on investment, more more more of what got us into this hole.

Every power grab is the new base camp for the next power grab.

The first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death.

After all, [female genital mutilation is] a key pillar of institutional misogyny in Islam: its entire purpose is to deny women sexual pleasure. True, a lot of us hapless western men find we deny women sexual pleasure without even trying, but we don't demand genital mutilation to guarantee it. On such slender distinctions does civilization rest.

The most basic of conservative principles is that if you reward bad behavior you get more of it.

The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government 'security,' large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time - the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and a ton of other stuff.

Once you accept you're a child in the government nursery, why shouldn't Nanny tell you what to do?

The long-term cost of a welfare society is the infantilization of the population.

The senator's actions in the hours and days after emerging from that pond tell us something ugly about Kennedy the man. That he got away with it tell us something ugly about American public life.

Obama's Nobel Peace Prize is an exquisite act of condescension from Norwegians, a dog biscuit and a pat on the head to the American hyperpower for agreeing to spay itself into a hyperpoodle.

This is a perfect snapshot of the West at twilight. On the one hand, governments of developed nations microregulate every aspect of your life in the interests of 'keeping you safe.' ... On the other hand, when it comes to 'keeping you safe' from real threats, such as a millenarian theocracy that claims universal jurisdiction, America and its allies do nothing. ... It is now certain that Tehran will get its nukes, and very soon. This is the biggest abdication of responsibility by the Western powers since the 1930s.

Secretary of State Clinton dared Iran on Monday to let her hold a town hall meeting in Tehran. That's telling 'em. If the ayatollahs had a sense of humor, they'd call her bluff.

America's belated embrace of government health care is going to be far more expensive and disastrous than the Euro-Canadian models. Whatever one's philosophical objection to the Canadian health system, it is, broadly, fair: Unless you're a cabinet minister or a big time hockey player, you'll enjoy the same equality of crappiness and universal lack of access that everybody else does. But, even before it's up-and-running, Pelosi-Reid-Obamacare is an impenetrable thicket of contradictory boondoggles, shameless payoffs and arbitrary shakedowns.

When the family dies, the nation follows...

The rules in this new 'post-partisan' era are pretty simple: If the Democratic Party wants it, it's 'stimulus.' If the Republican Party opposes it, it's 'politics' - as in headlines like this: 'Obama Urges GOP To Keep Politics To A Minimum On Stimulus.' These are serious times: As the president says, it's the worst economic crisis since the Thirties. So politicians need to put politics behind them and immediately lavish $4.19 billion on his community-organizing pals at the highly inventive 'voter registration' group ACORN for 'neighborhood stabilization activities.

The United Auto Workers is AARP in an Edsel: It has three times as many retirees and widows as 'workers' (I use the term loosely). GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people.

In Europe, nothing is certain except death and welfare, and why let the former get in the way of the latter?

In the Western world, countries that were once the crucible of freedom are slipping remorselessly into a thinly disguised serfdom in which an ever higher proportion of your assets are annexed by the state as superlandlord. Big government is where nations go to die - not in Keynes' 'long run,' but sooner than you think.

Long before they slump into poverty, great powers succumb to a poverty of ambition.

Like most people, I have no wish to live in a community organized by community organizers.

For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ's Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population.