Mark Steyn famous quotes

Americans and other Westerners who want their families to enjoy the blessings of life in a free society should understand that the life we've led since 1945 in the Western world is very rare in human history. Our children are unlikely to enjoy anything so placid, and may well spend their adult years in an ugly and savage world unless we decide that who and what we are is worth defending.
-- Mark Steyn

#Children #Blessing #Years

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?
-- Mark Steyn

#Party #Racism #Slavery

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

#Country #Age #Demand

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

#Party #Racist #World

Big Government is erecting a panopticon state - one that sees everything, and regulates everything. It’s great “customer service,” except that you can never get out of the store.
-- Mark Steyn

#Government #Stores #Bigs

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.
-- Mark Steyn

#Pain #Ransom #Lasts

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

#Black #President #Slavery

When is black America going to forgive white America for slavery?
-- Mark Steyn

#White #America #Black

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

#War #Race #White

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.
-- Mark Steyn

#Running #Doors #Dollars

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?
-- Mark Steyn

#Civilization #Dying #Islam

Question: How much do you have to invest in the future before you've spent it and no longer have one?
-- Mark Steyn

#Political

Those who can do. Those who can't form a supercommittee.
-- Mark Steyn

#Political #Form

We're on the brink of a world in which the wealthiest nations, from Canada to Norway to Japan, can barely project meaningful force to their own borders while the nickel 'n' dime basket-cases go nuclear.
-- Mark Steyn

#Meaningful #Japan #Political

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

#Political #President #More Money

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.
-- Mark Steyn

#Mean #Years #Political

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.
-- Mark Steyn

#Strong #War #Fall

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.
-- Mark Steyn

#Insecure #Self #Government

Most mainline Protestant churches are, to one degree or another, post-Christian. If they no longer seem disposed to converting the unbelieving to Christ, they can at least convert them to the boggiest of soft-left clichés, on the grounds that if Jesus were alive today he’d most likely be a gay Anglican bishop in a committed relationship driving around in an environmentally friendly car with an “Arms are for Hugging” sticker on the way to an interfaith dialogue with a Wiccan and a couple of Wahhabi imams.
-- Mark Steyn

#Christian #Jesus #Couple

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
-- Mark Steyn

#Real #Sea #Civilization

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.
-- Mark Steyn

#History #Half #Morbid

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
-- Mark Steyn

#School #Firsts #Adults

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

#Comfort #Vote #Moments

Byrd, the former Klu [sic] Klux Klan Kleagle, is taking a stand over states' rights, or his rights over State, or some such. Whatever the reason, the sight of an old Klansman blocking a little colored girl from Birmingham from getting into her office contributed to the general retro vibe that hangs around the Democratic Party these days.
-- Mark Steyn

#Girl #Block #Party

I don't think Donald Trump is a conservative. I think his line on China for example, that he's going to talk tough to China. China didn't create Social Security, Medicare. China isn't spending a fifth of a billion dollars every hour that it doesn't have.
-- Mark Steyn

#Thinking #Example #Dollars

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.
-- Mark Steyn

#Country #Issues #Political

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.
-- Mark Steyn

#Years #Essence #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.
-- Mark Steyn

#Government #Care #Minutes

The greatest crime of welfare isn't that it's a waste of money, but that it's a waste of people.
-- Mark Steyn

#People #Waste #Rich

...we live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are children if they're serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President Clinton's Oval Office...
-- Mark Steyn

#Children #Office #Choices

Much of America is now in need of an equivalent of Mrs. Thatcher's privatization program in 1980s Britain, or post-Soviet Eastern Europe's economic liberalization in the early Nineties. It's hard to close down government bodies, but it should be possible to sell them off. And a side benefit to outsourcing the Bureau of Government Agencies and the Agency of Government Bureaus is that you'd also be privatizing public-sector unions, which are the biggest and most direct assault on freedom, civic integrity, and fiscal solvency.
-- Mark Steyn

#Integrity #Agency #Government

There's a kind of decadence about all this: If 9/11 was really an inside job, you wouldn't be driving around with a bumper sticker bragging that you were on to it. Fantasy is a by-product of security: it's the difference between hanging upside down in your dominatrix's bondage parlor after work on Friday and enduring the real thing for years on end in Saddam's prisons....
-- Mark Steyn

#Friday #Jobs #Real

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.
-- Mark Steyn

#Growing Up #Real #Simple

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

#Country #Gun #Safety

The salient feature of America in the Age of Obama is a failed government class institutionally committed to living beyond its means, and a citizenry too many of whom are content to string along.
-- Mark Steyn

#Ignorance #Mean #Class

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

#Hollywood #Film #Terrorist

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.
-- Mark Steyn

#Hate #Cities #America

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.
-- Mark Steyn

#Reading #People #Example

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

#Happiness #Success #Men

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

#Practice #Carnegie #Get Away

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.
-- Mark Steyn

#Self #Europe #Culture

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.
-- Mark Steyn

#Brother #Kings #Son

Almost by definition, secularism cannot be a future: it's a present-tense culture that over time disconnects a society from cross-generational purpose. Which is why there are no examples of sustained atheist civilizations. "Atheistic humanism" became inhumanism in the hands of the Fascists and Communists and, in its less malign form in today's European Union, a kind of dehumamism in which a present-tense culture amuses itself to extinction. Post-Christian European culture is already post-cultural and, with its surging Muslim populations, will soon be post-European.
-- Mark Steyn

#Christian #Atheist #Hands

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

#Fading #West #Population

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

#Gay #Past #World

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

#People #President #Republic

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.
-- Mark Steyn

#Thinking #Ideas #Two

Indeed, if I understand this global-warming business correctly, the danger is that the waters will rise and drown the whole of Massachusetts, New York City, Long Island, the California coast and a few big cities on the Great Lakes - in other words, every Democratic enclave will be wiped out leaving only the solid Republican heartland. Politically speaking, for conservatives there's no downside to global warming.
-- Mark Steyn

#New York #Islands #Cities

Americans tote guns because they're assertive citizens, not docile subjects of a permanent governing class. They love their military because they think there's something contemptible about Europeans preening and posing as a great power when they can't even stop some nickel'n'dime Balkan genital-severers piling up hundreds of thousands of corpses on their borders.
-- Mark Steyn

#Military #Gun #Thinking

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.
-- Mark Steyn

#Book #Self #Media

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.
-- Mark Steyn

#School #Thinking #Differences

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.
-- Mark Steyn

#Fighting #Men #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.
-- Mark Steyn

#Reality #Government #Lines

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.
-- Mark Steyn

#Unique #Egypt #Iran

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.
-- Mark Steyn

#Taken #Past #Other Cultures

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.
-- Mark Steyn

#Government #Europe #Growth

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.
-- Mark Steyn

#Ambition #Hands #Order

There may be many things wrong with the United States but only a blind fool who hasn't been paying attention for the last twenty years would hold up Europe as the alternative.
-- Mark Steyn

#Years #Europe #United States

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.
-- Mark Steyn

#Fall #Home #Opportunity

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.
-- Mark Steyn

#Believe #Law #Support

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.
-- Mark Steyn

#Abortion #Mind #Voters

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

#Thinking #Government #Citizens

The Democrats smell blood and don't want to be told that it's their own.
-- Mark Steyn

#Smell #Blood #Politics

Can't spell, can't spot fake Shakespeare, can't tell one wacky foreigner from another: it's increasingly obvious that Barbra is some deep sleeper planted by the Republicans to discredit the very concept of activist celebrities. Poor old Democrats, in thrall to her fundraising: people who need Barbra are the unluckiest people in the world.
-- Mark Steyn

#Fundraising #People #Fake

Jesse Jackson's living depends on the maintenance of an African-American victim culture
-- Mark Steyn

#African American #Politics #Culture

You can't uninvent things, you can only make them obsolete... Ronald Reagan understood that the surest method of neutralising any weapon is to make it obsolete.
-- Mark Steyn

#War #Weapons #Cold

Our leadership class's real accomplishment is résumé padding.
-- Mark Steyn

#Real #Class #Accomplishment

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.
-- Mark Steyn

#Queens #War #Past

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

#Mysterious #Problem #Source

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

#Israel #Palestinian #Hamas

If you took every single penny that Warren Buffett has, it'd pay for 4-1/2 days of the US government. This tax-the-rich won't work. The problem here is the government is way bigger than even the capacity of the rich to sustain it. The Buffett Rule would raise $3.2 billion a year, and take 514 years just to pay off Obama's 2011 budget deficit.
-- Mark Steyn

#Government #Years #Pay

LBJ held up Detroit as a model of what the Great Society could accomplish. He was right.
-- Mark Steyn

#Detroit #Lbj #Accomplish

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.
-- Mark Steyn

#Europe #People #Liberty

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

#Guy #Tennis #Cultural Relativism