P-Q

Pacifism

“An antiwar movement is comfortable space.” – MATT BAI (of the Washington Pest. Another way of saying “ignorance is bliss”.)

"If we didn't have warriors among us, then pacifists would be dead. Pacifists can only exist if there are people brave enough to find and defend their right to exist. In that sense these earnest plums are more like parasites -- living off a host they despise, but the first to die if the host surrenders." -- GREG GUTFELD

“Those who hammer their guns into plows will plow for those who do not.” ~ THOMAS JEFFERSON

"It's hard fighting against your own nature when it's in your nature to fight." -- GRAHAM SWIFT

"The Sermon On The Mount says 'blessed are the peace makers'. It does not say 'blessed are the peace lovers'. There's nothing special about a peace lover." -- HENRY LUCE (the founder of the TIME-LIFE empire, in May 1965. It's hard to believe, given the disgraceful performance of most of his "journalists" during the Vietnam War, but he, at least, was a supporter of our exertions there.)

“Those who abjure violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.” – GEORGE ORWELL

“For years before the war, nearly all enlightened people were in favour of standing up to Germany; the majority of them were also against having enough armaments to make such a stand effective.” – GEORGE ORWELL (in 1946)

“Pacifism — which is nothing more than compelled helplessness — is thus the worst possible response to attack, not just tactically and strategically stupid in secular terms but also a direct abdication of a sacred responsibility.” – DAVID FRENCH

"He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.” —JESUS CHRIST                                                                                                                                       (End of bloody story.  Luke 22:36) 

“Paradoxically, the only means of enforcing deals meant to avoid war is war itself.” – ANGELO CODEVILLA

“Peace depends upon the threat of violence. The threat cannot always be idle. Privately and in the aggregate, we walk through life with chips on our shoulder, and when the chip is knocked off, we must fight.” – JOHN UPDIKE

"To be an adult is to be a killer. Pacifists and non-combatants are just fooling themselves, letting others do the dirty work." -- JOHN UPDIKE

“Insofar as a peace march proclaims peace to be nicer than war, it is fatuous, surely. The question is, short of the Second Coming, is war always the worst pssible alternative? The Bible says not. I say not.” – JOHN UPDIKE (in “’A Month Of Sundays”, of 1974)

“I come to bring not peace but a peace demonstration.” – JOHN UPDIKE (also in “A Month Of Sundays”, of 1974)

 "To be alive is to be a killer. Peace is not something we are entitled to but an illusory respite we earn. On both the personal and national level, islands of truce created by balances of terror and potential violence are the best we can hope for. Pacifism is a luxury a generous country can allow a small minority of its members, but the pacifism invoked in the anti-Vietnam protest was hypocritical and spurious. Under the banner of a peace movement, rather, war was being waged by a privileged few upon the administration and the American majority that had elected it." -- JOHN UPDIKE                                    (in 1989)

"I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket." -- GENERAL SMEDLEY BUTLER, USMC (In 1933. This guy was a legend even in his own time. An account of his life reads not unlike a surreal Denis Johnson adventure novel... The man did win a couple of Medals of Honor, but at a time when they were, sadly, given out rather cheaply -- his were for actions in Mexico and Haiti, and he tried to return his first one, but the return was refused and he was even ordered to wear it. He became a bit of a leftist/pacifist crackpot towards the end of his life, dying in 1940, but not before voting for the Socialist Party candidate, Norman Thomas, in the 1936 Presidential election)  

"His detestation of war does him credit, but seems to blind him to the fact that one is already in progress." -- CHARLES MOORE     (speaking about Germany's Chancellor Olaf Scholz, in March 2024)

“If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.” -- THOMAS SOWELL

Paganism

“Paganism holds all the most valuable advertising space.” – T.S. ELIOT

Pain

"They tell you when you're hurt and when you're not." -- CHRIS KYLE (The American Sniper, commenting on going through SEAL training with a broken toe. By the way, his book is just as good, in a slightly different way, as the flick.)

“If you avoid pain for too long, you'll end up in terrible pain – the pain of diabetes, obesity, autoimmune diseases, gout, piles, stiff necks and backs, bad hearts and weak lungs.” – WILLIAM LEITH  (in the SPECCIE, May 2017)

“With the help of the thorn in my foot, I spring higher than anyone with sound feet.” – SOREN KIERKEGAARD

Pakistan

“The airport at Karachi, an ugly structure full of unhelpful brown functionaries who do as little work as possible because this is Ramadan.” – ANTHONY BURGESS

“Karachi is a geographically contained trauma.” – SAMIRA SCHACKLE (who wrote a book about the city)

"They have these women up in Pakistan who live to be one hundred and sixty. They haul pianos up and down these hills. They eat a lot of yoghurt." -- MUHAMMAD ALI (in conversation with, and reported by, George Plimpton) 

"Pakistan is the closest thing to a nation of hysterics that can be found anywhere on earth." -- JACK JOLIS (in May 2023)

"Pakistanis live in a world of self-deception, an incurable affliction. They can't be trusted." -- BING WEST

Palestine (-ians)

“We forgot that the Palestinian Authority, despite the many enlightened and hard-working Palestinians we met with, was not a market democracy with the transactional trust required for commerce and investment, but simply a gangland dictatorship running a protection racket.” – GLENN YAGO (of something called the Milken Institute,  a private philanthropic foundation in 2002, describing efforts to help “get a rational economy off the ground”.)

“If I were a Palestinian, I’d occasionally wonder what I had to do to get a bad press.” – MARK STEYN

"Palestinian nationalism—and one day nationhood—is entirely a product of Israel’s existence. Had there been no Israel in 1948, “the Palestinians” would be Arabs living in Egypt, Jordan, etc." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“Nothing has so completely soured the world on the idea of a Palestinian state as the experience of it.” – BRET STEPHENS (of the WSJ, on the Gaza spectacle, 2007)

“The only difference between Hamas and Arafat is that Arafat was above all and first of all a liar, whereas Hamas is honest and open about what it wants: war, war now, war first, war forever until all the Jews of Palestine are either dead or gone.” – MARIO LOYOLA (of the Federation in Defense of Democracy, in 2007)

“Palestinians simply hate the Jews more than they love anything, even their own children.” – GOLDA MEIR

"I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.” -- JOE BIDEN (on 22 April 2024 -- as Hamassholes were taking over campuses and rioting in cities across America) 

"He's (Biden's) become like a Palestinian, but even they don't like him, because he's a weak Palestinian." -- DONALD TRUMP      (during the debate on 27 June, 2024)

“When I speak with the American, I speak with someone who doesn't know anything. As for the Palestinian who has a martyr brother or something, I know how to address him, you see?” – NIHAD AWAD (The “Public Relations Director” of something called the “International Association of Palestine”, explaining “Taqiyya”, the charming Muslim injunction of saying one thing to   one audience and quite another to another audience.)

“It’s not so much the murder of Israelis as the mass public celebrations by Palestinians — that’s what gets you. Every society has its murderers and horrors. But not every society celebrates those murderers and horrors.” -- JAY NORDLINGER

“Virtually the whole of the U.N. is devoted to the Palestinians.” – JAY NORDLINGER (in June 2012)

"If a U.S. leader isn't offending Palestinian leaders, he's probably doing something wrong. And when Hezbollah and Hamas talk about their desire for a booming economy, they don't mean the term the way we do." -- JIM GERAGHTY (Of NRO, writing in his "Morning Jolt" column, referring to Romney's supposedly "controversial", i.e., they pissed off some Palestinian panjandrums, comments he made in Israel. And about which HUMAN EVENTS columnist David Harsanyi asked "Is anyone really under the impression that the average American voter cares that Mitt Romney insulted the Palestinians?" )

"Let me give you a very clear message. I don't see Hamas as a terrorist organization." -- RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN

"The truth is that Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan." -- KING HUSSEIN BIN TALAL (of Jordan, 26 November 1981)

“There is no such thing as ‘Palestine’ in the Koran. Your demand for the Land of Israel is a falsehood and it constitutes an attack on the Koran, on the Jews and their land. Therefore you won’t succeed, and Allah will fail you and humiliate you, because Allah is the one who will protect them (i.e., the Jews).” -- SHEIKH AHMAD ADWAN (a Muslim scholar who lives in Jordan.... and I would hope he's under some kind of Ay-rab Witness Protection Program... at least a false nose and moustache, although maybe with Palestinians that doesn't work so well – alright, then, maybe a brown paper bag with eye-holes....)

“Who are Palestinians? Palestinians don't come from Palestine. Brothers, half of the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis.” – FATHI HAMMAD (A Hamas “government minister” in March 2012)

“If the Palestinians were given Israel they would turn it very quickly into Somalia.” – ROD LIDDLE

"They are children when they are Palestinian. They are violent young men when they try the same thing anywhere else." -- ROD LIDDLE

“Actually, other Arabs don’t like Palestinians, equating them with Jews and envying their intelligence, commercial know-how and work ethic.” – DUANE “DEWEY” CLARRIDGE (the semi-legendary CIA officer-executive – and in my opinion, this is less a comment on the  Palestinians than a comment on the other Arabs....)

"Hamas and Hezbollah are social movements that are progressive and are part of the Global Left" -- JUDITH BUTLER (in 2006. And she may be a commie swine -- she's a "gender studies" prof at Berkeley, after all -- but here she's quite right.)

"There is not a single Palestinian leader, past or present, who wants a 2-state solution. It is a fantasy of American liberals. If they wanted 2 states that would have existed long ago. They want no Israel, they say this, their supporters in the west say it. Face it." -- KAROL MARKOWITZ      (born in Russia -- now of the NY Post and Fox News)

"Israel gave Gaza to the Palestinians and the Palestinians gave Israel Hamas and war. That benighted strip. A strip which Egypt owned but nobody wants." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY (in Nov. 2023)

“The Palestinian leadership are like ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’, they are useless, and therefore replacing them with one another will only lead to the same result.” -- ABDULLAH BIN ZAYED     (UAE's Foreign Minister, in June 2024)

Palin, Sarah

”Sarah Palin was put on this earth to do two things: kill caribou and kick butt. She's all out of caribou” -- JONAH GOLDBERG (who knows Alaska pretty well, his wife being from there and he family still living there.)

“Many liberals claim to love working class families, but the moment they glimpse a hunter with an uneven college record, they hop on chairs and call for disinfectant.” – DAVID BROOKS (this was before liberals – and David Brooks – stopped even claiming to “love working class families”)

“Sarah Palin embodies a right-wing archetype of the Real America in much the way that Barack Obama embodies a left-wing archetype of Multicultural Man.” – ROSS DOUTHAT

“The problem is not that Governor Palin can’t conform to upper-middle-class norms. It’s that she won’t.” --  SAM SCHULMAN (An American writer from Virginia, and he meant this approvingly)

"Sarah Palin drew a line in the sand all right, but the actual dividing was the result of people being uncomfortable about where they fall on it.” — ANNE JOLIS (when she was still at THE WALL STREET JOURNAL)

"What she (Sarah Palin) knows, you can't teach, and what she doesn't know she can learn — and she's learning fast." -- MARK McKINNON (a top strategist for George W. Bush and McCain)

“In the eyes of the political/cultural aristocracy, Sarah Palin is the embodiment of its worst nightmare: the revolt of the masses against their masters.” – VICTOR VOLSKY (writing in THE AMERICAN THINKER, 3 Jan 11)

“To this liberal crowd, Palin's the lady that comes over and does the laundry. They think she's not entitled. But she's not the enemy. This whole thing with Palin, among comedians, is class discrimination. 'How dare she raise her voice?' It's not what Palin says. It's that she doesn't qualify – they qualify. It shows the desperation of liberals to single her out.” – MORT SAHL (the old lefty comedian, still going strong, said this in 2011, and it sounds like he was going a little Nat Hentoff....)

“Sarah Palin we hated before anyone had ever heard of her.” – JEREMIAH DUBOFF (of his fellow New York Jewish liberal friends and family, writing in PajamasMedia.)

“Part of the Left's savage animus against Sarah Palin is attributable to her status not as a woman, neither as a Conservative, but as a Worker. Sarah Palin was a commercial fisherman. She actually worked with her hands; and, so, she like Harry Truman, was, to the Left, an object not only to be dismissed, but to be mocked. For the Left loves 'the workers' only in the abstract.” – DAVID MAMET

“The visceral hostility of liberals against Sarah Palin is something that liberals themselves ought to be concerned about. After all, she is just someone who has a different opinion about politics and a different social background and style. What I fear the liberals most resent is their perception that she is someone who is talking back to her betters.” – THOMAS SOWELL

“Liberal love of Hillary Clinton strikes me as the mirror of liberal hatred for Sarah Palin; both depend on a large dose of irrationality.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"I know her (Palin) a little, and like her a lot." -- NEAL FREEMAN

“The conservatism of some people and commentators was merely marketing. Sarah Palin amused them. She was harmless. McCain put her on his ticket as a lark. He knew his place in history was to lose gracefully to the first black president. But Palin actually pushed McCain into the lead and he panicked. He might win and ruin his place as a wonderful footnote to history.”– DON SURBER

“The late French chief spook Count Alexandre de Marenches once remarked to my dad, regarding Reagan, ‘Your man Reagan there may actually know very little – but he understands everything.’ Which is exactly what I feel about Sarah Palin.” – JACK JOLIS

Panic

“Pro bono publico, nil bloody panico.” –  REAR-ADMIRAL SIR MORGAN MORGAN-GILES (actually, the fabulously monikered Rear-Admirable was also a Member of Parliament when he counseled this… I believe it was in the 1970s, somewhere in there....)

“One rarely improves upon the prospects of anything by setting fire to it.” – CHARLES C. W. COOKE

"People in a panic get very, very mad at people who choose not to panic." -- JON GABRIEL                            (the Editor In Chief of "Ricochet", on 21 Dec. '21)

Parades

“The smaller the man, it seems, the greater the motorcade.” – MICHAEL WALSH

Paradoxes

“Paradoxes make everyone anxious and miserable.” -- LIAM MULLONE (in THE SPECTATOR. And when you think of it, this is an absolutely gloriously splendid quote, resplendent in its meaninglessness.)

Paraguay

“It’s a pleasant change to be in a country that isn’t ruled by its people.” – PHILIP, DUKE OF EDINBURGH (in Paraguay, to then-Dictator Alfredo Stroessner.  Cool.)

Paranoia

“If you blame everyone for everything, it’s impossible to blame someone for something or anyone for anything.” – JOE QUEENAN

"If you carry a gun, people will call you paranoid. That's ridiculous... If I have a gun, what in the hell do I have to be paranoid for. – CLINT SMITH

“Nothing makes a man sound crazier than to describe what crazy people are trying to do to him.” – CHARLES McCARRY

"The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes." – BENJAMIN DISRAELI

“Only the paranoid survive.” – ANDY GROVE                                                                                             (The Hungarian-American entrepreneur who founded INTEL Corp.)

Parents (-hood)

“To tactfully absent yourself from your children’s lives is ultimately as much of a duty as that earlier duty to be present.” – MARTYN HARRIS

"You're only as happy as your unhappiest kid." -- BERNARD MCGUIRK (the late conservative talk radio giant, speaking to his WABC colleague Frank Morano)

“There are no citizen factories. The State cannot create citizens on a mass scale (history is full of bloody failed attempts to demonstrate otherwise). In a successful society, citizens must be made by small artisans working on a case-by-case basis. We call these artisans ‘parents’. I have no doubt that in a world of bad parents some children would still become good citizens. But not enough, not nearly enough.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"One of the things I tell new parents is something that was told to me when my daughter still had that new-baby smell: 'Prepare for long days but short years'.” -- JONAH GOLDBERG (“Long days but short years” was also a theme used by my man Gen. CREIGHTON ABRAMS, to describe his time in Vietnam)

“There are times when parenthood seems nothing but feeding the mouth that bites you.” – PETER DE VRIES

“You will not save your children – from beer or dope or lust or money or The Red Army or atheism or AIDS or The Lifestyle Of The Rich And Famous or anything else – until you stop trying to scare them out of their britches and start telling them just what it is that they are being saved for.” – BRYAN F. GRIFFIN (author of “Panic Among The Philistines”)

“Traditionally women dealt with the home and men dealt with the World. Men and women are both parents, but only one of them is created to be a mother. That there is no difference can be asserted only by those who have not raised children.” – DAVID MAMET

“In other countries, parents often impose their tastes on their children, somehow the reverse happens in the U.S.” – VERONIQUE DE RUGY

"Mothers love you for what you are. Fathers love you for what you do." -- ANGE MOUTABOUNGOU    (a Brazza-Congolese hunter and part-time witch-doctor who goes by the name of "Doubla", to his friend the explorer-travel-writer Redmond O'Hanlon, quoted in 1996)

“I’m to the right of your father and Ronald Reagan and if you think I’m going to let my daughter be raised by some fucking Communist hippie, you’re sadly mistaken.” –  WARREN ZEVON (I love this quote. The “Excitable Boy” actually said this to his ex-wife Crystal, who was at the time trying to drag their daughter on a “peace march” through France).

“The night went on and on and then it was time to meet my little girl for lunch, but the less said about that the better. Daughters do not like to see their fathers in a certain state, it invites lèse majesté.” --TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

“There's a use-by date when it comes to blaming your parents.” – NATHAN FILER (Author of the novel “The Shock Of The Fall”)

“Our parents were hypocrites. No matter what they were up to they tried to look and act like they were doing the right thing. They didn’t exactly pride themselves on their hypocrisy, but they were proud of knowing right from wrong, and being a hypocrite showed you could tell the difference.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

“There's no such thing as a single parent. They've become dependent on other people in commercial transactions, such as their employers and child-care providers. A single mother may look like she's doing so much 'on her own' but she has merely commercialized the things the father would have done.” – JENNIFER ROBACK MORSE

“We are all our parents' battlegrounds.” – HOWARD JACOBSON (the half-nuts Jewish English comic novelist, who's pretty funny, but not quite as funny as he things he is....)

"His mother and father, long dead. In the end, that's what you come back to, the only thing that matters, those who love you though you have failed." -- MARK HELPRIN

"One of the many punishments of age is watching your own characteristics duplicated in your children." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS (the comic English novelist)
 

“To be a parent is to get punched in the face. Repeatedly.” – KYLE SMITH

"You might say that being a parent is mainly about saying 'No'.” – KYLE SMITH

 "Parenthood is like a rocket voyage: Most of your ship consists of material designed to be dumpable. Huge chunks fall off in stages, continuously lightening your load until all that's left is the nubbin, zinging along unencumbered." -- KYLE SMITH

"Being cast aside by one's children is not unlike losing a job: the disorientation, the nostalgia." -- KYLE SMITH

“Every generation, no matter how it repines the passing of old times, believes two things of itself: that it has worked out a better way to parent and a better way to act. They’re always wrong.” -- JULIAN FELLOWES                                                                                                  (Julian Alexander Kitchener-Fellowes, Baron Fellowes of West Stafford DL is an English actor, novelist, film director and screenwriter, and a Conservative peer of the House of Lords.)

“Parents do pry. Our first lies are to them.” -- JOHN UPDIKE

"Our parents hatch us but cannot partake of our work in the world." -- JOHN UPDIKE

"We do not see our parents well; they are too big, and too close." -- JOHN UPDIKE 

"Our pretensions come from our parents' dreams for us." -- J. P. DONLEAVY

“You can’t let a young'un decide for himself. He’ll grab at the first thing with shiny ribbons on it. Then when he finds there’s a hook in it, it’s too late… All a parent can do is say, 'Wait. Trust me'. and try to keep temptation away.” -- ANDY GRIFFITH (wait — the kids can’t be trusted to administer “puberty-blockers” to themselves? Sadly, Andy never got around to addressing the matter….)

“Parents love their children more than their children love their parents – that’s a fact of life.” -- MARGARET DRABBLE (the famous English novelist)

"Parents tend to be more upset by children moving to their right than to their left. This is because non-conservative politics is pseudo-religious.” -- CHARLES MOORE

Paris

“Paris is a city where people judge everything by appearances. There is no other place in the world where it is easier to impress people.” – GIACOMO CASNOVA (The “Casanova”…)

“Paris is a black hole of grubby uncertainty in any transport itinerary.” – MATTHEW PARRIS (the poofter Brit conservative politician-journalist was referring specifically to the endemic strikes and general wretchedness of the Gare du Nord when he unloaded this harrumph.)

"Parisians spend their lives trying to have private conversations in cafés while sitting six inches from the next table, trying to keep their toilet visits and orgasms silent, and managing the neighbors." -- SIMON KUPER     (in his 2024 book "Impossible City: Paris in the 21st Century")
 

“Paris is smaller than The Bronx. It has as much intellectual diversity as a staff meeting at Mother Jones." – KYLE SMITH

“Paris is Europe’s whorehouse.” “Paris est le bordel de l’Europe.” – MARIE-JOSE GRANSARD (This lady is an author, art historian, professor, and “art”-tour guide in Venice. And her quote, although fairly self-evident, is pithy – and I include it to honor the memory of my late kid brother, Alsie.)

Parliament (the UK)

“At their meetings, nothing is heard but cries, shouts, and confusion. I am surprised that my ancestors should ever have permitted such an institution.” -- KING JAMES I (to the Spanish ambassador, in 1603)

“You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!” – OLIVER CROMWELL (Oliver Cromwell famously to Parliament, in 1653, and I must say, it was one of the best legacies from this old grouch… A very useful quote.)

“The object of Parliament is to substitute argument for fisticuffs.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

Parliament (the UK)—The House Of Lords

"Their Lordships are proof of life after death." --JEREMY THORPE (The disgraced-then-exonerated poofter leader of the UK Liberal Party in the 60s and 70s)

"Send me to Parliament to be a bloody nuisance! -- NIGEL FARAGE      (in June 2024)

Parochialism

“We are by nature indifferent, even hostile, to strangers; we are prone toward parochialism and bigotry. Some of our instinctive emotional responses, most notably disgust, spur us to do terrible things.” – PAUL BLOOM (Yale Univ. prof of Psychology and “Cognitive Science”)

“For most of human history, few humans ever saw other humans who looked physically different from them.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

Parties (“party” parties, not the “political” ones)

“That’s what parties are all about, eating food you don’t like.’ – MARGARET THATCHER (I said “not political” and who do we kick off with, here.  Anyway, the Great She, in the words of “reporter” Simon Hoggart, “as the Leader of the Opposition, she made a guest appearance at the Commons Press Gallery children’s party and found a little boy crying. ‘They’ve given me blancmange, and I don’t like blancmange’  he wailed.”  This was her (predictable) response.)

«Never show up at a party at which you are the piñata.» -- LTC TONY SHAFFER

“Stage parties are so often, in my experience, the best reason for wishing you had been born a woman: all that pressure to show yourself the alpha male, among painfully mismatched, pumped-up lads you often barely know, having to drink more than you'd like, watching skanky whores that do the opposite of arous you. Can't tell you how glad I am to have got past that stage of my life.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

“No one really enjoys parties, at least not until they’re a bit sloshed.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

“At ‘dinner’, the conversation is often about the food being eaten; at ‘dinner parties’, the conversation is often about food being eaten elsewhere.” – JACK JOLIS

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." -- GROUCHO MARX

“I never want to go to any party until I get there.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

"In New York, a party was something to which you invited people you didn't know but figured you should." -- TOM WOLFE

"There's one thing I've noticed about parties that are mostly female -- they take their food very seriously." -- ROBERT PLUNKET

"I am standing in the crunch of a large gathering of intellectuals in downtown Manhattan. There is something of ancient  Rome in these American stand-up parties. Someone always seems to be lurking about with a pair of daggers concealed in the toga." -- VASSILY AKSYONOV 

“He was continuing his attempt to break the thousand-beer-weekend barrier. Everyone was upful. Winter fucking Carnival! Winter Carnival was the greatest invention in the history of the human race.” – CHRIS MILLER (on Winter Carnival at his school, Dartmouth, in his – and my – fraternity house, ΑΔΦ)

Parties (political)

“Polls work for Democrats. Democrats essentially buy their way into office, by putting together coalitions of fiercely engaged interest groups who could not survive without government subsidies. For Democrats, polls are like menus, polls help Democrats take orders to ensure the crucial interest groups are satisfied. Republicans who try to beat the Democrats on their own turf of interest-group politics are doomed. Republicans have to win by being leaders. If they kow-tow to public opinion polls they become followers, and in the end they arouse the contempt of the public, and they can even be beaten by Democrats.” – GEORGE GILDER

“There are a small group of people who agree on most issues, and they are called Republicans. Everybody else is a Democrat.” – NEWT GINGRICH

“Republicans believe that the American economy is essentially a private economy,  Democrats really believe, honest, that it is essentially a government economy." – RUDY GIULIANI

“There are plenty of countries where they've managed to get beyond ‘partisanship’. They're called one-party states.” – MARK STEYN

“I’m  not terribly comfortable as a Republican, but I’m even less comfortable as a sissy. These Democrats are unbelievably cowardly.” -- JOHN PERRY BARLOW (former lyricist for the Grateful Dead)

“There are but two parties now: Traitors and Patriots.” – ULYSSES S. GRANT

Passion

“Of all human traits, passion is the most overrated because so many wrongdoers hide behind it.” – MICHAEL HENDERSON (Brit sportswriter.)

“Don't be fooled. When someone says you are ‘passionate’, what they really mean is they think you are crazy. They're just trying to be nice” – MARK PRASEK (a guy who calls himself a “Christian technologist” in Tallahassee, FL)

“Passion makes idiots of the cleverest men, and makes the biggest idiots clever.” – THE DUKE DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

"Passion is a disease that affects two people. Sooner or later one of them turns into a monster." -- RICHARD RAYNER 

“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” – DAVID HUME (Scottish philosopher, 1711-1776)

Past, The

“The past you can grasp. It has been moulded into stories: Joseph of Arimathea, the decline of tin, the demise of the pilchard. You can hold these things in your hand like a box of eggs, all neatly parceled and recognizable.  But the present is smashed egg. It drips between your fingers. It’s a mere mess.” – JOE BENNETT

“Anything that portrays people as behaving in ways once represented as appropriate to their sex, nation, profession, or social position is now critically verboten – as it it were illegitimate in itself to look at the past as the people who lived in it did.” – JAMES BOWMAN

“If the past is so great, how come it's history?” – JULIE BURCHILL

“The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.” – EDWARD THOMAS (An English “WWI poet”, in 1915)

“There is no such thing as ‘was’—only ‘is.’ If ‘was’ existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.” – WILLIAM FAULKNER

“The past is the price we pay for the present.” – ALAN JUDD

"The two most fascinating subjects in the universe are sex and the 18th century." -- BRIGID BROPHY (Lady Levey, as was her formal title -- the British novelist, 1929-1995)

"What is modern is not necessarily good. The past is really the only storehouse of ideas we have and so, if we care about the future, we ought to make the best possible inventory of it. The Renaissance was based on that thought." -- CHARLES MOORE

“Most young people couldn’t care less about the past: for them the present moment and its so-called pleasures are all-important. No, all-important is not quite the word, for it implied an awareness, albeit subliminal, of something other than the present moment. In fact, young people these days don’t even know there had been a past: the world began with them, and each moment was unconnected with any other.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE (in his 2017 short story “Bildungsroman”)

"If you break with your past, you don't seek to hide the past." -- VLADIMIR BUKOVSKY (Bukovsky was a great man, but this is a little opaque.)

“In case there was no future, there was always the past.” – MARTIN CRUZ SMITH (A little grim)

“The past is never where you think you left it." – KATHERINE ANNE PORTER (Cute)

“We need to learn from the past. That is what the past is for.” – JEANNETTE WINTERSON (She’s actually wrong here – that’s not what the past is “for”... but it’s a passable quote nonetheless.)

"The Past is nothing more than a series of incomprehensible mistakes, inhabited by people of dubious taste and questionable judgment who do not measure up as human beings when compared to such remarkable people as, say, us." -- JOE QUEENAN 

Patience

“Patience is a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.” – AMBROSE BIERCE (clearly I wasn’t gonna reproduce “The Devil’s Dictionary” here, but this one was too good to leave out.)

“Patience is also a form of action.” - AUGUSTE RODIN            (The French sculptor, 1840-1917)

"I like my patience being tested, or what is patience for?" -- PHILIP HENSHER (not me)

"If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient observation than to any other reason." -- SIR ISAAC NEWTON

“

I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end." – MARGARET THATCHER

Patriotism

“Patriotism, whomsoever it might be, can all too easily turn into abject self-worship.” — THEODORE DALRYMPLE (I’m patriotic, but this is true enough, and well-said. Yah hof ti be triuuue abaht dese tings…)

“It is repugnant for American students to learn that they are above all citizens of the United States, as opposed to having primary allegiance to democratic humanism.” – AMY GOODMAN (President, believe it or not, of The University of Pennsylvania. Quoted by Samuel Huntington. In his book “Who Are We”, in 2004)

“Patriotism is another name for paganism." – AYATOLLAH RUHOLLAH KHOMEINI (the noted “one-worlder”. One Islamic world, of course….)

“To condemn patriotism because people go to war for patriotic reasons, is like condemning love because some loves lead to murder.” – G. K. CHESTERTON

"Always love your country, but never trust your government." -- ROBERT NOVAK

“Patriotism means stand by the country. It does not mean stand by the president.” – THEODORE ROOSEVELT

“I don't question liberals' patriotism. I presume they have none in any meaningful sense.”—KURT SCHLICHTER (Heh, I’ve used this one more than once....)

“I never say liberals are unpatriotic, I say they are confused about patriotism.  For instance, Barack Obama has voiced his desire to ‘fundamentally transform the United States of America,’ a locution, I think, that is hard to square with a love for America as it is. Don’t believe me?  Tell your wife or husband ‘Honey I love you, I just want to fundamentally transform you'.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“Liberals love America the way a wife beater loves his spouse. That's why they're always beating up the country ‘for its own good’. Doesn't the country understand that liberals have to hit it in the mouth because they love it so much?” – JOHN HAWKINS                                                                              (a columnist at TOWNHALL.com, and his comment nicely complements Jonah's above)

"Flattery, like patriotism and idealism, was all very well so long as you didn't inhale." -- NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE 

"Sure I wave the American flag. Do you know a better flag to wave? " -- JOHN WAYNE

"Patriotism is easy to understand in America. It means looking out for yourself by looking out for your country."—CALVIN COOLIDGE (May1923)

«Patriotism goes only so far, after all. Sooner or later, love of country disappears if one becomes convinced that the country does not love one back.» –  JAY COST

"I distrust patriotism; the reasonable man can find little in these days that is worth dying for. But dying against -- there's enough iniquity to carry the most urbane or decadent into battle." -- GEOFFREY HOUSEHOLD (I've always considered myself a pretty patriotic sort of guy, but I must say, the older I get the more I can sympathize with Squire Household's sentiment, here, that he expressed... in 1939....)

"If you were asked to fight for your country, what would you be fighting for now? There is nothing left worth bothering about. They have done away with religion, with our history, and with our present and left nothing to put in its place." -- ROD LIDDLE (in April 2022)

“To my knowledge, no one has ever burned an American flag at a trade school.” – MIKE ROWE

“Intellectuals would rather be caught stealing from the poor box than standing up for the national anthem.” – GEORGE ORWELL

 "Our relationships with our nations might be, on the whole, forced marriages but the loyalty, when challenged, was intense." -- MARK LAWSON

"In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, brave, hated, and scorned. When his cause succeeds however, the timid join him, for then it cost nothing to be a patriot." – MARK TWAIN (As I type, in November 2020, where we have just had a crooked election, it costs quite a bit to be a patriot in the United States.)

“Americans respect patriotism; And they respect it in others.” – HUGH LAURIE

"I don't think that we should take knees in protest instead of be standing up for our flag." – JIM BROWN    (the greatest football running back of all time, in the White House, 11 Oct 18)

"Who would stay and fight for a country that you have been told is rotten from the start, has no legitimate heroes and is riddled through, even in the present day, by 'white supremacy' and 'institutional racism'? Putin, the Chinese Communist party and others think we are awful and irredeemable, and they are delighted if large swathes of our populations and political and cultural figures agree with them." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY (in April 2022) 

Patriotism vs. Nationalism

«Patriotism is loyalty to the state as a political entity, while nationalism is fraternal (and sororal) solidarity with the sovereign nation or people whom the state exits solely to serve. Nationalism is more fundamental than patriotism. Think of the nation as a condo association and the state as the condo management.» – MICHAEL LIND (author of «The Next American Nation»)

“The difference between patriotism and nationalism is the difference between the love a father has for his family and the love a Godfather has for his ‘family’."  Patriotism is a warm and personal business. Nationalism is another business entirely.” – P. J. O’ROURKE (myself, I just don’t see that big a difference between the two, nationalism and patriotism, but I know others do, and I include this one from Peejay because it’s amusing. He wrote this in October 2019)

Paul, Ron

"Instead of being angry at him, we should ask ourselves what did we do to cause Ron Paul." – JIM GERAGHTY

"Ron Paul seems to fear everything except our actual enemies." – GUY BENSON (a young conservative “talking head”)

Peace

“To be a man of peace you need to be able to kick someone across the room”. – TONY PARSONS               (English author and journalist, in 2001)

"Wherever in the world there are C-130's, or Gurkhas, there you will find peace, security, salvation and happiness!" – PAUL JOLIS (He’s a big fan. Big fan. You go, Pal!…)

“The only excuse for going to war is that one may live in peace, unharmed.” – CICERO (in his “On Obligations”, 44 B.C.)

“If you want peace, prepare for war.” – VEGETIUS (an even terser wise old Roman, only this one considerably less old – late 4th Century AD)

“We speak of peace, yes, but whose peace? Poland’s? Bulgaria’s? the peace of the grave?” – MARGARET THATCHER (in the middle of The Cold War) 

“When you are in the process of beating swords into plowshares, you can't fight and you can't plow.” – J.D. CROUCH             (the Deputy National Security Adviser to GWB during 9/11)

“'Peace is one of those boomerang words – it goes out meaning one thing, and comes back at you meaning the opposite.” – BEN HART (The son of NR co-founder and Dartmouth prof Jeffrey Hart, and the author of “Poisoned Ivy”, about Dartmouth)

“Peace is not just the absence of violence but the absence of the threat of violence.” – CHARLES C.W. COOKE (in Dec. 2011)

“The conqueror is always a lover of peace; he would prefer to take over our country unopposed.” -- CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ  

“I have learned one thing in life and that is that peace is not for this world. Peace is what God gives us when he takes us into his rest. Beat your sword into a plowshare if you like, but beat your enemy into smithereens first.” – SAKI (Real name Hector Hugh Monro. A great English writer, 1870-1916, mostly of terrific short stories – a sort of proto-Roald Dahl for grown-ups.  A closeted  – necessarily so, in those days – poofter, he was politically a self-described reactionary Tory and, although way over-age, he enlisted in the British Army in WWI and was killed in the trenches by a German sniper. His last words were "Put out that bloody cigarette!")

"You so quickly get used to peace. It is like being well -- you take it for granted, and forget that when you were ill to be well again had seemed everything." -- V. S. NAIPAUL

“You know that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.” – BOB DYLAN

“I am a man of peace – god knows how I love peace. But I hope I shall never be such a coward as to mistake oppression for peace.” – LAJOS KOSSUTH (The “Governor-General” of Hungary inside the Hapbsburg Empire during much of the 19th Century.)

“They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.” – JEREMIAH  (yeah, that's right, the Old Testament profit.... not the bulldog....)

“As far as I'm concerned, the KGB gave birth to the antiwar movement in America.” – ION MIHAI PACEPA

“Peace depends upon the threat of violence. The threat cannot always be idle. Privately and in the aggregate, we walk through life with chips on our shoulder, and when the chip is knocked off, we must fight.” – JOHN UPDIKE

“A bad peace is worse than war.” – TACITUS

“Peace Dividend”

“The peace dividends have never delivered peace, but rather have a 100 percent track record of delivering readiness crises.” — JOHN HILLEN (an excellent and savvy hawkish bloke, writing in NR in Sept. '15)

“Peace Keeping”/”Peace-Making”

“Our soldiers are now so often reduced to being lady almoners with flak jackets and walkie-talkies…. fulfilling a peace-keeping role, not a war-like one. And so we can bully, but we cannot fight.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

"The Sermon On The Mount says 'blessed are the peace makers'. It does not say 'blessed are the peace lovers'. There's nothing special about a peace lover." -- HENRY LUCE (the founder of the TIME-LIFE empire, in May 1965. It's hard to believe, given the disgraceful performance of most of his "journalists" during the Vietnam War, but he was a supporter of our exertions there.)

“War is hell, but global 'mentoring' is purgatory.” – MARK STEYN

“The concept of fighting for peace can be difficult; it can even seem perverse. But it gets less difficult, and less perverse, when you think of the neighborhood bully, and the necessity of dealing with him, so that the neighborhood can live in peace.” – JAY NORDLINGER

“Cursed are the peacemakers for they make the next war harder than the last.” – NELSON DEMILLE

“Peace Process”

“God help anyone subjected to a peace process.” – DOT WORDSWORTH (actually, her husband said this wise thing, but he remains wisely anonymous, so it goes to Dot)

"The sad thruth is that you can have peace processes all you like, but if one side is committed to war, then it's war." -- JOHN PODHORETZ

"What has become known as a 'peace process': This consists of identifying the people who have the power to stop (and start) violence and then, instead of killing them, conceding part of their demands in exchange for their promises to talk to us about peace." -- ANGELO M. CODEVILLA

"The US government has fostered and paid for 'peace processes" in Northern Ireland, Colombia and Israel. This misunderstanding of war produces not peace but the slow motion surrender of the feckless to the bloody-minded." -- ANGELO M. CODEVILLA (in April 2006)

Pederasty

"The only thing that our society abhors even more than racism is child abuse. Check in with anyone of any social class and they will agree that nonces (child molesters in Britspeak) are the worst." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY

Pelosi, Nancy

“Nancy Pelosi is extremely evil, she comes from the Baltimore Democrat corrupt machine the D’Alesandro family, both her father Tom D’Alesandro and her brother Tommy D’Alesandro were mayors of Baltimore, a well-oiled corrupt Democrat family.” – RONALD REAGAN

Pence, Mike

"Mike Pence comes across like everybody’s ex sister-in-law." -- KURT SCHLICHTER

Pennsylvania

“What is Pennsylvania? It’s Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, and it’s Alabama in the middle.” --  DAVE “MUDCAT” SAUNDERS (a Democrat “political consultant” from southern Virginia. He may have been repeating James Carville, who, according to Richard Brookhiser, is the real author of this “bon mot”.)

"The one thing I hate about Pennsylvania: The constant sound of lawn mowers..." -- WARREN PLATTS (eh? Say again? As opposed to where? Still, Ilike it — it’s very Updike-y…)

People

“Never forget 3 types of people in your life: 1/ who helped you in difficult times? 2/ Who left you in difficult times? 3/ Who put you in difficult times?” – RITA GHATOUREY                                                                          (the mysteriously anonymous Indian lady wisdom-dispenser)

“People are trouble.” - HENRY B. HYDE                                                                                                                       (The Anglo-American Wall St. Lawyer and OSS buckaroo during WWII who was a friend of my  dad’s, who was also a WWII OSS buckaroo)

“People are trouble. That’s why rich people build walls around their houses. People in general want something for nothing; they want your money, your wife and free advice.” – HENRY B. HYDE (What he said – see above – in full.)

Perception

"To understand someone, you have to understand what the world looked like when they were twenty." -- NAPOLEON

“Perception is one thing, truth is another. And it's time our politicians learned the difference.” – CHARLIE DANIELS (yes, the country-rock legend – and a good conservative, to boot.)

"Perception wins all the battles, reality wins all the wars." – SHERMAN LOGAN                                  (A commenter on NRO, and while I sympathize with him, I don't think this is always true – in some cases, such as Vietnam, perception becomes reality. To our detriment, of course....)

“Politics isn't about what is, it's about what it seems to be.” -- RUSH LIMBAUGH

Perfection/Imperfection

“You have to accept limited happiness because all happiness is limited, and to expect perfection is the most neurotic thing of all; you must live with the sadness as well as with the joy.” – ELIA KAZAN

“There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.” – LEONARD COHEN

“It would not surprise me for an instant to discover that there is an evolutionary instinct which causes us to prefer a slightly nasty and authentic person to someone who implausibly pretends to be flawless. People, men in particular, seem to prefer others who have some visible flaws, or who are capable of self-deprecation.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

“Many people would rather be precisely wrong than vaguely right.” – JOHN MAYNARD KEYENES

“The lefties are ghastly, so many of them, because, like Rousseau, they believe in the perfectibility of man, and are peeved when life, with its much and nettles, disappoints them. Possessed by a sense of virtue they deny to others, it is no surprise that so many become humourless prigs.” – MICHAEL HENDERSON (English journalist and sportscaster, in February 2017)

“To improve is to change. To be perfect is to change often.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

 “Coach Tom Landry is such a perfectionist that if he was  married to Raquel Welch, he would expect her to cook.” -- DON MEREDITH (ex-Dallas Cowboy quarterback)

“There is barely a straight line in the Parthenon. The floor curves upwards in the middle; the sides bow out; the columns swell in the middle (a trick borrowed by the designer of the Rolls-Royce radiator grille). The Parthenon is not designed to be perfect, but to look perfect to a human standing 100 yards or so downhill.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 "The more perfect something is, the less it can be loved." -- MARK HELPRIN

“It's so much easier to imagine someone's perfect when you haven't yet met them.” – MARY WAKEFIELD

"Striving for perfection is the surest way to kill beauty." -- ROBIN WHITE (The author of the thriller "Siberian Light", and I have no idea what this means, but it sounds... heavy.)

"True socialists do not want a better world, they want a perfect one." -- THEODORE DALRYMPLE

"Most people in show business are perfectionists. They may be producing crap, acting in crap, writing crap, but they want to make it perfect crap." -- DAVID LODGE 

“They say that nobody is perfect. Then they tell you practice makes perfect. I wish they'd make up their minds." – WILT CHAMBERLAIN

“We have to have leaders who say: 'You know what? We don't have to be perfect to be good and we just need to be better than all the alternatives'." -- VICTOR DAVIS HANSON (in March 2022)

Perry, Rick

"Every time (Rick Perry) speaks to a women's group, he gets a standing ovulation.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

“God talks to televangelists, football coaches, and people in mental hospitals. Why shouldn’t he talk to Rick Perry? In the spirit of Joseph Heller, I have a covenant with God. I leave him alone and he leaves me alone. If, however, I have a big problem, I ask God for the answer. He tells Rick Perry. And Rick tells me.” – KINKY FRIEDMAN (A fellow Texan.  In fact, his band is – or was – called The Texas Jewboys)

Persistence (& Perseverance)

"Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never -- in nothing, great or small, large or petty." -- WINSTON CHURCHILL

“KBO—Keep Buggering On!” – WINSTON CHURCHILL (apparently a favorite exhortation of his.  I like it…)

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" – MOHANDAS K. GHANDH (I was never a big fan of the little South African lawyer, whose “genius”, in the opinion of my late  father, consisted of nothing more than having had the good fortune of, (like his disciples, M.L. King and Mandela after him) having a relatively benign “regime” to “non-violently” oppose –  (“How far do you suppose old Ghandi would have got if he’d gone up against Stalin or Hitler?” my old man would ask).  But here, the man who D.K. Mano once said would have been “Columbia University’s idea of an ideal middle line-backer” is pretty cute…)

“Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.” – GUSTAVE FLAUBERT (I dunno, man... I can think of a LOT of things that become LESS interesting the more you look at them...)

 "One seldom knows whether perseverance is noble or stupid until it's too late." -- EDWARD ST. AUBYN

"A Champion is someone who gets up when he can't." -- JACK DEMPSEY

"I insist on persisting." -- JOE MALLEIS (my friend known as "Gadsden Jazz" on the Twoot)

“When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this: You haven’t.” -- THOMAS EDISON

 Personality

“All of our personalities are just hot dogs crammed with bits and pieces of books and movies and songs, aren't they?” – KYLE SMITH

Perspective

"The game doesn't count, but it mattered." -- DON SURBER (retired newspaperman, author of “Trump the Press” and “Trump the Establishment”)

"A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points." -- ALAN KAY (A "computer scientist")

Persuasion

“He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.” – JOSEPH CONRAD

"The moment one gets into the area of $25 million and above, let alone a billion, the listener is completely out of touch, no longer really interested, because the figures have gone above his experience and almost are meaningless. Millions of Americans do not know how many million dollars make up a billion.” -- SAUL ALINSKY

“The art of sloganeering can serve two powerful ends – persuasion or cementing tribal allegiance. Usually you can’t do both.” -- RORY SUTHERLAND

Pessimism

“Whatever  happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.” – LORD SALISBURY (There’s the spirit we like to see! The Noble Lord in question, by the way, was Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, Third Marquess of Salisbury, Prime Minister of Great Britain for most of 1885 to 1902, the apex, amongst other things, of The British Empire.  Wotta bloke….)

“More will mean worse.” – KINGSLEY AMIS

“The good and the possible seldom seem to coincide.” – GEORGE ORWELL

"I never say it can't get worse." – BUDDY BELL          (Manager of the Kansas City Royals, after losing their 10th straight game. As spiritual heir to Sir Kingsley…)

“You ought to learn to laugh, my young friends, if you are hell-bent on remaining pessimists.” – FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

"You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from." -- CORMAC McCARTHY
 

“It’s always darkest right before it’s totally black.” — JOHN McCAIN (unsure if he was copying Mao – see below – or vice-versa)

"I am under no illusions about people's propensity to do the wrong thing." -- FRED D. THOMPSON

“It’s always darkest before it’s totally black.” – MAO TSE-TUNG (the guy was never noted as a humorist — as P.G. Wodehouse would say, “cheerful cove”….)

"Every dire prediction comes true eventually." – JOHN DERBYSHIRE (He calls this “Derbyshire’s First Law Of Pessimism”)

“Pessimism doesn't come easily. You have to struggle your way toward it.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

"Once more remind myself for the umpteenth time, expect the worst and that's what you'll get only it will be much worse." -- J. P. DONLEAVY

"Pessimism is the hand-maid of statism." -- MATT RIDLEY

"Life's not ever so unfair that there's not a worse unfairness than yours, and that you can't ever get so stuck in your ways that there aren't worse ways of being  stuck." -- GRAHAM SWIFT  

"Tings are gonna git worrrse, beforrre they git even worrrser." -- LORD GEORGE ROBERTSON (One-time British Minister of Defence and one-time NATO boss. Contrary to how I've made him sound above, he was no bumpkin, but rather a Scot who spoke with a pronounced Scottish burr. He was on the right wing of the Labour Party and was, all in all, a pretty good egg.)

“The tragic view recognizes that between Good and Evil there is no choice, and thus a moral choice means a choice between two evils.” – DAVID MAMET

"What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass." -- WILLIAM LAMB, 2nd VISCOUNT MELBOURNE (British Whig Prime Minister, 1835-1841, and fast becoming one of my favorite historical statesmen. In these few words he pretty much sums up the entire history of the political Left -- even before it happened.)

"Scratch a pessimist and you find often a defender of privilege." -- WILLIAM BEVERIDGE  (the architect of Britain's welfare state. 1879-1963)

"One of the central insights of conservatism is the wisdom that things can always get worse." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY 

“You might as well stay. They might send me somebody even worse.” – DAVID LODGE (in his excellent comic novel, “Nice Work”)

"Just when you think you've hit bottom, you hear a faint knocking sound from below." -- TOM FLETCHER               (former British ambassador to the Lebanon)

“Because I am a conservative, I find it impossible to take seriously the notion that the state of this or that ‘couldn’t be any worse.’ Things could always be worse, and so I am not very eager to fast-forward through the next 200 years of political and intellectual development (or decadence) to see where things end up.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

Philadelphia

“No other city in America pursues the twin ideals of corruption and incompetence with quite the same enthusiasm as Philadelphia.” – BILL BRYSON

“Philadelphia is the only city in the world where you can experience the thrill of victory and the agony of reading about it the next day.” – MIKE SCHMIDT (Hall of Famer catcher for the Philadelphia Phillies, in 1983, here referring to the notoriously shitty fans and sportswriters of the spectacularly ill-named City of Brotherly Love…)

“The brothers and sisters are running this city. Running it! Don’t you let nobody fool you; we are in charge of the City of Brotherly Love. We are in charge!” – JOHN STREET (in 2002, the then-Democrat Mayor, needless to say black, here addressing some NAACP revival meeting,  and for once, he wasn’t lying….)

“Philadelphia is famous for two things: cheesesteaks and murder.” – KEVIN WILLIAMSON (see Brother Street, above…)

“Oh, Philadelphia: If you didn’t exist, nobody would invent you.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Philadelphia is nothing but Baltimore with electricity.” – SHERROD SMALL                                                     (a comedian)

“I recently visited Temple University with my daughter. Driving through north Philly, one can imagine life in Aleppo, Syria.” – KARL NITTINGER (A guy on the Twoot, on 12 March 2016)

Philanthropy

“I have never known much good done by those who affect to trade for the public good.” – ADAM SMITH

“It takes a lot of weapons to do good works (as Richard the Lionhearted could have told us). Try standing unarmed on a street corner in Compton handing out twenty-dollar bills and see how long you last.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

“Philanthropy is the most intellectually lazy and complacent field I have ever been around." – DANIEL HENNINGER (Of the WALL STREET JOURNAL)

"It is nearly always easier to make $1,000,000 honestly than to dispose of it wisely." – JULIUS ROSENWALD (The founding “man” behind Sears Roebuck, and a huge – if unsung – philanthropist)

"We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know." -- W. H. AUDEN (and here I thought I was gonna make it through an entire lifetime without ever larffing out loud at anything this ould tapette had to say.....)

“Actually, when it comes to waste, pouring money into deprived areas to combat poverty beats everything. When the government has a go, money simply disappears; in the hands of men of goodwill, it is worse still – it's hard to avoid doing harm.” -- JONATHAN RUFFER (A rich British investment banker and, yes, philanthropist....)

“Welfare programmes and international aid: we are so eager to believe in the value of good intentions that any mention of self-interest or adverse consequences in discussing such activities is met with self-righteous fury.” -- RORY SUTHERLAND

“Legal plunder has two roots: One...in human greed, the other in false philanthropy.” – FREDERIC BASTIAT

«Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do.» -- VOLTAIRE

“Woe betide any organisation that thinks of itself as especially good. It'll give itself leeway to behave in a terrible way.” – MARY WAKEFIELD

“Because of course a lot of conflict erupts at places where a large number of people benefit from organized kindness.” – CHARLES ALBERT REIS HILLS (An English novelist, author and writer on poverty)

“Money is made, and then it sets about dignifying itself.” – PHILIP  HENSHER

Philip, Prince (The Duke of Edinburgh)

“Philip represents those values of robust masculine common sense which in the post-war years when I grew up were taken for granted, but which in our public life are today little more than a memory. Last year one newspaper marked his 90th birthday by publishing  a list of his 'notorious gaffes'. Since then I have met several people who, like me, went through that list ticking off every one of his supposedly embarrassing comments with a nod of amused approval.” – CHRISTOPHER BOOKER (the conservative English curmudgeon, author, and supreme “Eurosceptic”.)

“When Prince Philip stood down, the whole country saluted his contribution to British life. He is well-liked because he only opened his mouth when he had something massively inappropriate to say. Rather than make a parade of sensitivity, he made rude jokes to cover up the whole awkwardness of being royal.” – FREDDIE GRAY (in May, 2017)

Philippines, The

“The archipelago’s Spanish-American history, as summarized by its residents is ‘three hundred years in a convent and fifty years in a whorehouse’.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

"Never get drunk before noon in the Philippines. It's too hot, You get sick and then you get robbed." -- JAMES WEBB (Ex-senator, decorated USMC Vietnam War platoon-leader, and author of the great "Fields Of Fire") 

“The Philippines are the Mexico of Asia.” – DANNY GOLD                                                                                      (a journalist at the WSJ)

Philistines, (-ism)

"The philistine is always confident, always indignant, always confused, seldom interesting... and always, always wrong." -- DAVID COLLARD (in his 2022 book on James Joyce, "Multiple Joyce")

Philosophy

“Essentially, after more than 2,000 years of head-scratching, Socrates and Philip K. Dick are pretty much saying the same thing. Socrates said he didn't know anything. Dick says we can't know anything (probably because they won't let us) or, at best, we can't be sure we know anything.” – TIBOR FISCHER         (the Booker Prize-winning British novelist)

“There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it.” – CICERO (and remember, he said this a LONG time ago. Think of all the bilge that’s been spilled by philosophers since then…)

“Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy must be answered.” C.S. LEWIS

“All philosophy looks weird when you don't have one.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"Philosophers have always had a problem with humor." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“I have tried in my time to be a philosopher, but, I don't know how, the cheerfulness was always breaking through.” – OLIVER EDWARDS (Squire Edwards was a lawyer – a “solicitor” -- and schoolboy pal of Dr. Samuel Johnson, to whom he vouchsafed this bon mot...)

“Aristotle's ponderings on ethics and politics were written from a position of rank snobbery – he had no concern for women, slaves, servants, farmers, fishermen or anybody who made anything.” – ALASDAIR MACINTYRE (Scottish philosopher)

“His philosophical researches had revealed that there were no female philosophers, no Mrs. Kants, no Daphne Spinozas or Gladys Wittgensteins.” – DAVID NOBBS

“The college environment, where we all stood pre-acquitted by the great liberations of Rousseau, Nietzsche, Freud and Marx, who to such universal amazement and relief had shifted villainy from the individuals to the society.” – JOHN UPDIKE

“All philosophy is autobiography.” – FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

“He had, he said, studied the great philosophers and had therefore come to expect very little in this live, and rather less in the rest.” – ALEX ATKINSON (1916–1962. An English journalist, novelist and playwright)

“The great enemy of all philosophical thought is certainty.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

"Philosophers always look like idiots." -- SOCRATES (commenting on his colleague Thales, who fell down a well while trying to study the night's sky.)

“The founders of advanced education were mainly Greeks, who were great talkers, especially when the subject was themselves. Their reputation survives because nobody reads them. One of the last to subject himself to that agony was Thomas Babington, First Baron Macaulay; those who have emulated that great critic are not inclined to disagree with his judgment on Socrates – that the more one reads him, the more one wonders why they didn’t knock him off sooner.” – PROF. JOHN GREENWAY (the late “Gonzo Anthropologist” from Colorado)

Phobias                                                                                                                      

“To brand opinions you don't like as 'phobic' means damning them as symptoms of a psychiatric disorder. And there is no point debating with irrational and dangerous 'phobics'. Far better to muzzle and quarantine them.” – MICK HUME                                                                                                             (author of the book “Trigger Warning”)

«In today's vernacular, 'phobic' means 'not sufficiently enthusiastic about'." – GAVIN McINNES (The English-born Canadian “writer, actor, comedian” and founder of “VICE - Media”)

Photography

“Indians smile in pictures (they smile a lot period, as you know), as opposed to les Chinois who never do and look like stupid statues in every photograph." – JANE JOLIS

"Those who take photographs to be an accurate representation of reality must be mad. On a four-and-a-half month truck journey across Africa in the late 1980s I took a cheap camera and a single 24-exposure roll of film and I didn't reach the end of it. The best-composed of the developed pictures were those taken by whoever stole the camera in Bangui, then very sensibly threw it away in disgust, and a close-up taken by our Australian driver of a distended boil on my anus. So I've never been one to get out the family albums from time to time for an orgy of reminiscence." -- JEREMY CLARKE

"There are people who smile when having their pictures taken in a passport photo booth (and come out looking like lunatics) and those who prefer a thoughtful expression (the murderers). -- MILES KINGTON

“When being photographed one should say ‘lesbian nuns’.” – NOEL COWARD

 "I must confess that I find virtually everybody in ancient photographs so unattractive that I marvel that back then the human race managed to reproduce itself at all." -- JACK JOLIS

“The invention of the camera gave us all eternal life.” – STEPHEN FRY

“Without cameras, tourists would not know what on earth to do with their hands. Perhaps they would take to carrying walking sticks – but that would make them travellers. (sic)” – KEITH WATERHOUSE

"You cannot record life and live it properly at the same time." -- MARY WAKEFIELD

"To have your photo taken is to be told 'You exist'." -- DAVID MITCHELL    (the serious novelist, not the comic actor)

"Painting was invented because we didn't have cameras; now we have cameras, so why paint?" -- JAMES WEBB   (the Marine, author & ex Senator)

 “This is the photo-age:no-one really believes anything until they’ve seen the prints. Weddings are just photo-opportunities nowadays; births are going the same way: at the moments we should feel most alive, we are half-thinking Hey, these be nice pics! Funerals are the last video-free zone, the last-ditch fortress of unfilmed emotion.” – JAMES HAWES (the English novelist, in 1997)

"The tradition of the passport picture as a demeaning and shame-making corollary of modern experience has been constant since 1915). -- PAUL FUSSELL (1915 was when passports first started being used, around the world)

"Only with effort can the camera be forced to lie: basically it is an honest medium." -- EDWARD WESTON (Famous American photographer, 1886-1958)

"All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth." -- RICHARD AVEDON

"A photograph creates a stutter in the relentless drift of time." -- ROBERT  DOUGLAS-FAIRHURST        (an author and Prof. of English at Oxford -- and I salute the poetry of these few words of his)

"Photography is the inventory of mortality. A touch of the finger suffices to invest a moment with posthumous irony." -- SUSAN SONTAG (her words here are fully as pompous as she was)

Physics

“Since I last studied physics, as an undergraduate in the 1980s, the subject has lost all pretence of good behaviour: it is now much kookier than anything in the Bible.” – ALEXANDER MASTERS

“In String Theory, strings are vibrations of nothingness, ‘like the blur of a guitar string without the string itself’. A billion billion billion times smaller than the width of a human hair, each string is capable of giving rise to a universe. String theorists call these universes ‘branes’. Out of nothing comes everything, and our universe is a brane. If anyone emits a peep of complaint about the modest idea of a god or the myths of Genesis , I’m going to be down on him like a ton of exploding suns.” ALEXANDER MASTERS (In the SPECCIE, August 2015)

“Physics is the only science, all else is stamp-collecting.” – JOHN BATCHELOR (the late-night radio guy – and he said this was a “proverb” but I never heard such a proverb, so as far as I'm concerned, he said it.)

“Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.” – RICHARD FEYNMAN

"Physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is the atom's way of knowing about atoms." -- GEORGE WALD  (scientist an(d Nobel laureate, 1906-1997)

“Matter isn’t chaos. It has laws, legislated by what can’t happen.” – JOHN UPDIKE

Picasso, Pablo

“Picasso must have been one of the few who emerged from the war (World War II) richer than when he entered it.” – PAUL JOHNSON

“From the moment that art ceases to be the nourishment of the best brains, the artist can use all the tricks of the intellectual charlatan. The refined people, the rich ones and the professional layabouts, only want what is sensational or scandalous in modern art. And since the days of Cubism I have fed these boys what they wanted and pacified the critics with all the idiotic ideas that went through my head. While I amused myself with all these pranks, I became famous and very rich. I am just a public clown, a fair-ground barker. It is painful for me to confess this, but in the end it pays to be honest.” – PABLO PICASSO     (A  crap “artist” and a commie dupe to boot, but at least, in the end, an honest dude….)

"As I child I drew like Raphael, and it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like children." -- PABLO PICASSO

Pity

"Pity is the intelligent anticipation of one's own future troubles." --  FRANCOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

“We have a duty to pity before we comprehend.” – FERDINAND MOUNT (actually, he said this in the context of us looking back upon the past.)

“People of the right do not ask for pity, because they recognize that to do so is not just self-indulgence but also only adds to the general misery. So they don’t go around pleading for sympathy, which is not just a difference between right and left, but between victims and victors. Something the left might think on, if they could.” -- DOUGLAS MURRAY

Plagiarism

“If you’re a writer, the worst crime you can commit is plagiarism. It gets you drummed out of the Brownies. But in the art world, they don’t call it plagiarism, they call it ‘influence’.” – SUE PRIDEAUX (an English novelist and biographer)

“Plamegate”

“The scandal here is not that ‘BUSH LIED!!!’ about Saddam’s nuclear ambitions, not even that Wilson lied about Bush lying, but that the world’s most lavishly funded intelligence agency can do no better on a priority security matter than flying in a vain unqualified buffoon for a week of pseudo-spook tourism” – MARK STEYN

Plans (+ Planning + Government Planning)

“The plan is nothing, planning is everything.” – DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER

“A good plan executed violently now, is better than a perfect plan executed next week.” – GEN. GEORGE S. PATTON

“We should begin with the end in mind.” – STEVEN R. COVEY (apparently an author, educator – basically one of those “self-help” guru-type guys....)

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” -- MIKE TYSON (if he actually invented this himself, ol’ Iron Mike is responsible for one of the most insightful “apéçues” ever....)

“No plans are better than those you carry out without the enemy's knowledge in advance.” – VEGETIUS (A Roman “military tactician” in about AD 400, and I would have thought that this bit of obviousness rather went without saying, but as it's such an old chap, I'll include it.)

“From the Soviet five-year plans to Obamacare, all central-planning exercises begin in hubris and end in chaos.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"A shotgun and a pillowcase full of Krugerrands is a viable Plan B." – HUNTER S. THOMPSON

“It is a bad plan that admits of no modification.” - PUBLILIUS SYRUS (a Roman writer, about 55 B.C. And yes, it was “Publilius”.)

“The words 'industrial' and 'strategy' ought never to appear in the same sentence.” – SAJID JAVID (a UK Conservative Party bigwig, in 2016)

 "I'm working as hard as I can to get my life and my cash to run out at the same time. If I can just die after lunch Tuesday, everything will be perfect." -- DOUG SANDERS (professional golfer)

"The best-laid plans of mice and men, as the Scottish poet might have said, sometimes end up looking like a dog's breakfast." -- FREDERICK FORSYTH 

"Any plan which relies on the ineptitude of your opponent is hardly a plan at all." -- STEPHEN GREEN  (writing on the INSTAPUNDIT blog, June 2018)

"Any plan that involves running after people isn't such a great plan." -- DAVID SHORE                                     (author of Episode 1, Season 1 of "Sneaky Pete", in which this is spoken by the actress Marin Bowman playing the character Julia Bowman)

"No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy." -- HELMUT VON MOLTKE (famous Prussian general, 1800-1891)

“You can hire an architect, you know, but the man with the hammer builds the house.” – EVERETT EHRLICH

“The more the state plans, the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.” – LUDWIG ERHARD (West German Chancellor, 1963-66, and before that he was Economics Minister, and the “architect” of West Germany’s post-war economic “miracle”.)

Pleasure

"That man is richest whose pleasures are the cheapest." – HENRY DAVID THOREAU

“One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.” –  JANE AUSTEN (through the mouth of her character Emma Woodehouse)

"He came from a  climate in which pleasure was dangerously close to luxury and luxury dangerously close to sin." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS    (speaking of his old man, who'd been a headmaster) 

“Perhaps the world could be saved a great deal of wasted effort and misdirected ambition if only an independent panel of experts were given the job of ranking all forms of expenditure in order of pleasure delivered per pound spent. In this putative hedonic index, dinghies might score several thousand times higher than yachts. Quad bikes and go-karts would trounce Bugattis. Owning a cat or dog would beat owning a Renoir. And in first place on this list, just ahead of tea, sex, the ride-on lawnmower and the full English breakfast, would be the Syma S107 3-Channel Infrared Controlled Helicopter with Gyroscopic Stability Control (Amazon, £16.18 – colours may vary).” – RORY SUTHERLAND (the vice-chairman of the Ogilvy Group UK)

“In youth, one becomes acquainted with the pleasures life offers. The rest of one's days are spent attempting to resist these pleasures – because they are illegal, immoral, or fattening.” – CLIFFORD D. MAY      (long ex-of the NY Times, a honcho at the Foundation For Defense of Democracies)

Plunder

“The unarmed rich man is the prize of the poor soldier.” -- MACHIAVELLI

Podcasts

 "It seems possible, given the exponential growth of podcasting, that eventually there will be no novels, no non-fiction, no memoirs and no original writing of any kind. There will only be podcasts and books based on podcasts and social media posts and YouTube channels and TV-celebrity spinoffs. Dread future." -- IAN SANSOM (The author of "The Mobile Library Mystery Series")

"When women gossip we get called bitchy; but when men do it's called a Podcast." -- SIKISA BOSTWICK-BARNES (a leftist, black British lady comic)

"Podcasts are 'friendship simulators'. You don't really pay attention to what's said, you just let the ambience of happy chatter wash over you when you do something else, alone." -- SAM KRISS     (A Brit writer/journalist, often on media and culture subjects)

"If you want to experience autism in a crowded environment, try listening to several podcasts at once." -- EDMUND WEST      (uh.... no thanks....)

Poetry

“The wonder is that communism lasted so long.  But, then again, modern poetry lasted a long time too.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

“Tomorrow morning some poet may, like Byron, wake up to find himself famous, for having written a novel, for having killed his wife; it will not be for having written a poem.” – RANDALL JARRELL (“American poet” – and boy, has he got that right…)

“Everyone knows poetry can seriously damage your health.” – WENDY COPE

“Poetry is a pantomime of philanthropy enacted by beaming liberals and grumbling outcasts.” – LLOYD EVANS   (an English theater critic and journalist)

“It is infinitely preferable to be ruled by mean-spirited shopkeepers, avaricious commercial travelers or even drunken reprobates than by poets who dream of redemption.” – ANTHONY DANIELS (a.k.a. THEODORE DALRYMPLE)

“ ‘Free  verse’ is like playing tennis with the net down.” – ROBERT FROST

“Nobody can live by writing poetry, and there’s no pension. I’ve had to prostitute myself to live comfortably and get plenty to drink.” – JOHN BEJTMAN                (the great British Poet Laureate)

“Poetry ought to deal with what did not happen.” – CHARLES McCARRY (the great American spy novelist)

“What is it about lefty politicians, that they feel the irrepressible urge to express themselves in verse? Jimmy Carter gave us a whole book of poems. Now Al Gore has succumbed to the temptation, further strengthening my longstanding demand for a poetry-licensing system. We don't let people drive cars or fly planes without a license. Why should we let them write poetry? I'd like to see a rigorous test, in which the applicant has to demonstrate full mastery of alliteration and assonance, imagery and metonymy, amphibrach and amphimacer, rondeau and pantoum, triolet and villanelle. Three failures on the test should result in a lifetime ban.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

“A poem is any group of words which do not quite reach the margins.” -- (REVD. DR.) PETER MULLEN

(a letter writer to the SPECCIE from London ED3 in May 2010)

“Free verse? You may as well call sleeping in a ditch 'free architecture'” – G.K. CHESTERTON

“Indignation creates verse.” – JUVENAL

“The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell hi, secrets of state, and his fellow-poets. The actual audience he gets consists of myopic schoolteachers, pimply young me who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow poets. This means, in fact, he writes for his fellow poets.” – W.H. AUDEN

"The other day, when I was killing time in the bathroom, it occurred to me that I would like to be a poet. The chief qualification, I understand, is to be born." -- SAKI

“All poetry has gone wrong since the great Homeric deviation.” –  STEPHANE MALLARME (the 19th century Frogue pote, whose last name, by the way, means “badly armed”)

“The world of poetry is not large; successful poets establish their success either by sitting on panels that hand out awards for poetry or accepting awards for poetry from panels that other poets sit on.” – ANDREW FERGUSON

“I have mixed feelings about poetry. Not many are capable of doing it well. I think you should have some sort of official certification to perform or write poetry. We could call it a poetic license, if you will.” – CRAIG FERGUSON

"As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines." -- THOMAS MACAULAY (good)

“Poetry is just memorable speech.” – W. H. AUDEN

“Some of the most memorable moments in poetry occur when it isn't clear what the poet is talking about.” – ALAN BENNETT

“The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.” – EDGAR ALLAN POE

“I can’t understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: it’s like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.” – PHILIP LARKIN

"A poem is not a statement and the poet 'affirmeth nothing'." -- KINGSLEY AMIS (no mean pote himself.)

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” – PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (As if.)

“The only skill a poet needs, apart from egotism, is the ability to concentrate.” – STEPHEN FRY (is egotism a “skill”?)

“What is poetry if not the compression of the prosaic?” – STEPHEN FRY

“Poetry went to the dogs under the Taft administration.” – PETER DEVRIES- (in 1958)

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

Pol Pot

"The difference between Che Guevara and Pol Pot was that Guevara never studied in Paris." -- ANTHONY DANIELS (Anthony Daniels is the real name of the redoubtable British doctor, author and wise observer of the world's foibles, who normally writes under the name of Theodore Dalrymple. And this quote of his reminds me that Pol Pot was not the only noted Southeast Asian "community organizer" to have "studied in Paris" -- Jane Fonda's dear "Uncle" Ho Chi Minh was a co-founder of the French Communist Party in 1920, while a student at the Sorbonne....)

Poland

"(Ex-Polish President) Kaczynski may have been a nut, but on balance, in the well-populated department of European nuts, Kaczynski was not one of the ones to worry about." – ANNE JOLIS

“Poles smile and are polite and are the best people of Europe, according to the great anthropologist Taki.” –  TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

“Warsaw is what the world would look like if the Reformation had never taken place.” – PETER BIDDLECOMBE

“Too much history and not enough geography. Poland was once divided up between Russia, Prussia and Austria-Hungary, and then wiped off the map. Germany arrived in 1939, followed by Russians who terrorized Poles for the next 45 years. Poles have spent the best part of two and a half centuries literally fighting for the right to exist.” – OLENKA HAMILTON (an editrix at THE CATHOLIC HERALD, in March 2021)

“We don’t need your ‘doctors’, we don’t need your ‘engineers’. Take them, take them all, and pay for them. We don’t need them. “You know why? Because there are zero terrorist attacks in Poland. Why? Because there is no illegal migration in Poland.” — DOMINIK TARCYNSKI (Dominik Tarczyński is a Polish Member of the European Congress, and he said this in Oct. '23)

Police, (the)

“When seconds count, the cops are just minutes away. I carry a gun cause a cop is too heavy.” – CLINT SMITH (Vietnam USMC vet and director of Thunder Ranch, Oregon, "training center")

“Society is like a skyscraper: Most people stay on one or two floors, only getting to know people about as rich or poor as themselves. Only the cops go to every floor, from the sub-basements to the penthouse.” – EVE TUSHNET (a writer from Washington D.C. In the WEEKLY STANDARD, July 2012)

“My sense is that everyone hates the police until he needs them – and then still finds a way to hate them.” – DAVID HEATER (himself a cop, from Harbor Springs, Michigan)

“It isn’t the law that keeps the peace — it’s the sheriff that keeps the piece.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“In England the cops yell stop or I’ll yell stop again.” -- ROBIN WILLIAMS 

"I’ve never had a problem with drugs. I’ve had problems with the police." – KEITH RICHARDS

“Some say you can’t top the adrenalin (and the dirty cash) of Narcotics, and all agree that Kidnapping is a million laughs (if murder in America is largely black on black, then kidnapping is largely gang on gang), and Sex Offenses has its followers, and Vice has its votaries, and Intelligence means what it says (Intelligence runs deep, and brings in the deep-sea malefactors), but everyone is quietly aware that Homicide is the daddy. Homicide is the Show.” – MARTIN AMIS

“Anyone can become a police – Jews, blacks, Asians, women – and once you’re there you’re a member of a race called police, which is obliged to hate every other race.” – MARTIN AMIS

“I would like to see our police depoliticised, not beholden to the reflexive jiggery of failed politicians and their deranged obsessions. The fact that the police today seem to spend 90 percent of their time investigating imaginary hate crimes is surely the consequence of their being instructed to do so by (left-wing) politicians who believe that these largely chimeric instances are more important than property theft or stabbing or drug-dealing.” – ROD LIDDLE (in May 2021)

"It's actually very easy not to get shot by the police. I’ve been doing it all my life. Rule #1: Don’t fight with them; you are going to lose. Most people who are killed by police die of stupidity." -- JIM HAWK (An American "heavy construction" businessman. And ex-Marine. August 2020)

"The worst part about getting arrested by a motorcycle cop is having to hug him from behind all the way to the precinct." -- JORDAN STRATTON        (A dude on the Twoot, 30 May 2021)

"It's hard to read the faces of people whose job it is to read other people's faces." -- NELSON DEMILLE 

"Civilians assume, detectives deduce." -- NELSON DEMILLE

"Hunches have hanged more men than fingerprints." -- BRYAN FORBES 

"Criminals tend to feel indignant when cops break the law." --  TRACY KIDDER

“Police brutality means to act as an ordinary prudent person, without a policeman’s self-discipline, would surely act under the stresses of police work.” – JOSEPH WAMBAUGH (the great ex-cop novelist)

“Police see a hundred per cent of criminality. We see noncriminals and real criminals who’re involved in crime. We see witnesses to crimes and victims of crimes and we see them during and immediately after crimes occur. We see the perpetrators during and right after and we see victims sometimes before the crimes occur and we know they’re going to be perpetrators.

You can’t exaggerate the closeness of our dealings with people. We see them when nobody else sees them. When they’re being born and dying and fornicating and drunk. We see people when they’re taking anything of value from other people and when they’re without shame or very much ashamed and we learn secrets that their husbands and wives don’t even know, secrets that they even try to keep from themselves.” – JOSEPH WAMBAUGH (in his 1971 novel “The New Centurions”)

“As a sleuth you are poor. You couldn’t detect a bass drum in a telephone booth.” – P. G. WODEHOUSE

"What do you do if you can't solve crime? For the police in western countries the answer is obvious. You police non-crime. If you can't control the mobs and you can't control the criminals, why not try to control everybody else?" -- DOUGLAS MURRAY     (in April 2024) 

"Police work is a matter of priorities." -- MICHAEL CAINE     (well, yeah... but then again you could say the same thing about life itself... anyway, he unburdened himself of this banality in his 2024 novel, "Deadly Game")

Political Conventions

“A political convention is not a place where you can come away with any trace of faith in human nature.” – MURRAY KEMPTON (an extremely clever, if extremely liberal, political columnist in the 60s and 70s – pal of Bill Fabuckley's....)

“Hosting a political convention is the municipal equivalent of having your teenager tell you that your house has been ‘selected’ to host the high school stoner/marching band/lacrosse end-of-year blowout. While you're on vacation.” – JONATHAN V. LAST

“Political Correctness”

“With 'political correctness' orthodoxy returns. There is only one right thing to do, as specified not by religious revelation or the ancestors but by social activists, celebrities, media elites, and bureaucrats.” – DIANA SCHAUB (A poli-sci prof at Loyola University in Maryland, in Sept. 2010)           

“Political correctness is the handmaiden of terrorism.” – MICHELLE MALKIN

“Economic history is not politically correct. Many on the left therefore struggle with its findings.” -- NIALL FERGUSON (The noted British historian. And let us never forget Maggie Thatcher's “The facts of life are conservative.”)

"The new liberal mantra: Guns don't kill people. Adjectives do." -- MICHELLE MALKIN

“The political correctness—once it starts, it doesn’t stop.” – BEN STEIN

“Political correctness restricts and restrains humor.” – MEL BROOKS (Not a terribly original or witty pronunciamento, but I include it because it is, after all, Mel Brooks)

“To know who rules over you, simply learn the name of whom you are not allowed to criticize." --  VOLTAIRE (Francois-Marie Arouet)

"Blasphemy is not a crime. It is a right." -- DON SURBER (the pugnacious American journalist and columnist. My sort of chap)

“Almost anything can be interpreted as an insult – depending upon the disposition of the person or creature who is perceived to be the victim. It has no objective status.” – DESMOND MORRIS (the famous English zoologist and “ethologist”.)

“Political correctness has produced a moronic inferno of bitterness and spite, in which all are desperate to be transgressed and to gain vengeance for having been transgressed.” – ROD LIDDLE

“It worries me that many things you can say these days are both true and a hate crime. It speaks to me of a society which is trying desperately hard to distance itself from the most pernicious and inconvenient of things – reality.” – ROD LIDDLE

“Words we are not allowed to use any more now include ‘cultural Marxism’. Banning the use of the phrase ‘cultural Marxism’ is about as culturally Marxist as it is possible to get.” – ROD LIDDLE (in Feb. 2020)

 "For too long our institutions have given in to the shrill, relentless clamor from the authoritarian left to the extent that public discourse has been woefully truncated. You can't say that, you can't read that, you can't think that -- a mantra which, tautologically, closes down discussion." -- ROD LIDDLE

“Political Correctness (is) a system of censorship which has settled over the English-speaking world like a dense cloud of phosgene gas.” – PAUL JOHNSON

“It is the beginning of wisdom to call things by their right names.” – CHINESE PROVERB (Presumably, like all “Chinese proverbs”, an “old” one.)

“A culture in which it is difficult if not impossible to tell the truth eventually goes nuts.” – MARK STEYN

“Who are these politically correct gauleiters who are determined to interfere in the most minute details of everyday life, and apparently have the power to do so? By what right and with what authority, do they impose an ideology which, increasingly, has a totalitarian flavor? We used to treat political correctness, an extremist form of secular morality, as a joke, and its activities often reflect humorless Puritanism which is itself risible. But I no longer find the thing funny. PC rules have an increasing habit of getting themselves enshrined in statutes, and enforced with rigor on bewildered offenders. – PAUL JOHNSON

“Free speech today, in the absence of censorship, is as thoroughly policed as it ever was in the days before the rise of television and the internet, perhaps more so. As the government exploits public indifference towards the essential principles of a free society, controversial views are classified as ‘unacceptable’ and ‘inappropriate’ by a host of interest groups.” – DANIEL WOLF

“To clarify means to offend” – MARTIN HEIDEGGER (long before the wretched term, much less the phenomenon, of “political correctness” was invented, but he was proto-“on the case.)

“’Islamophobia’ is one of those medical conditions, like ‘homophobia’, of which the symptom is being accused of it.” – JOHN O’SULLIVAN

“ ‘Political correctness’ is Mickey Mouse Stalinism.” – MONICA MORITZ (a right-wing, surprisingly enough, Belgian TV producer/presenter)

“If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing  incorrent.”  – CONFUCIUS

“You have got to get the name of things right before you can say anything intelligent about them” – CONFUCIUS

"As soon as a view that somehow ranges outside an increasingly narrow orthodoxy is expressed it must be not engaged with, not defeated. Not exposed for the foolish or retrograde view that it surely is: it must be reported so the 'appropriate' authorities can deal with it. This is Stalinist." -- IGNAT SOLZHENITSYN (the exiled writer's son, in 2022. And "foolish or retrograde view that it surely is", Ignat? Maybe not, Ignat....) 

“A journey from ‘odd’ to ‘loony’, via “idiot’” – NICHOLAS BAGNALL (a Brit)

“I really do believe that creating a world free of bad, tasteless, cruel, unkind jokes and a world free of jokes will be one and the same thing, in the final analysis. For once it becomes a reality that we cannot joke about anything – and that day will come if we go on like this – then the chances of people actually punching each other out of sheer frustration will go up, not down.” – MELISSA KITE (in June 2014)

"We live in a post-joke world." -- MELISSA KITE

"I think the problem is that in the post-joke era, people increasingly want you to entertain them by making jokes that are in no way connected to them. However, jokes are like the bottle in spin the bottle. Sooner or later it is going to point to you. If we want humour to survive, we all need to be on the wrong end of a joke every now and then, because someone has to be." -- MELISSA KITE

"Can you quantify the hurt the joke caused you? Do you feel abused? It's best if you feel abused. Then we can give you a Twitter hashtag." -- MELISSA KITE

“Political correctness is soft Stalinism.. That is, the appearance of thought without thinking. This eviscerates the language and kills civilized discourse by separating language from reality.” – JEFFREY HART (Emeritus Professor of English at Dartmouth, and a founding editor of NATIONAL REVIEW)

"You're not protecting blacks or Chinese or Irish if you make their plight un-discussable. Anything that's undiscussable you then leave to prejudice and opinion and ignorance. They are the only gainers when you ban discussions of this sort." – JAMES FLYNN (a leftist 60s hangover-type prof from the University of Otago, in New Zealand)

“People should be punishable for what they do, not for what they say they think.” – MATTHEW PARRIS

“We cannot forbid political correctness, since that would be simply reproducing the disease. But we can ridicule it. We can, by a collaborative effort, go on using language as we should, go on making remarks and expressing thoughts ruled offensive by the censors, and go on showing contempt for their censorious ways.” – ROGER SCRUTON

"Humourlessness is threatening to become America's natural religion. The forces of organised touchiness never rest." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS (Speaking here on the briefly infamous "l'Affaire Imus".  Taki, a filthy rich playboy son of a Greek shipping tycoon, is the long-serving "High Life" columnist on the (UK) SPECTATOR, as well as being the late Wm. F. Buckley Jr.'s friend and neighbor in Gstaad.  Incredibly, he served as NATIONAL REVIEW's "Vietnam Correspondent" in the late 60s (I never saw him!), and more recently I tried unsuccessfully to sell him our apartment on Ave. Foch. He served hard time in Britain for smuggling cocaine {upon arrival at Heathrow and being asked if he had anything to declare, he jokingly said "Yes, there's cocaine in that bag, there." And there was.), and was a youthful pal of and co-conspirator with his fellow playboy Porfirio Rubirosa in Paris. He has represented Greece in various top competitions including the Olympics in sailing, judo, tennis and alpine skiing. He also happens to be anti-Semitic, wrong on Iraq and Afghanistan, and writes for Pat Buchanan's obtuse and isolationist "The American Conservative" – and has his own “paleo-con” rag called TAKIMAG – but he remains an amusing and charming rogue for all that.  Certainly the world could well do with more Takis (and fewer, say, Chuck Schumers)).

“Race and immigration are two things, like sex and money used to be, that people are not allowed to talk about. Well, they can all go to hell.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

“Unless we call a thing what it is, we can neither think about it clearly nor oppose it.”– GEORGE ORWELL

“The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.” – GEORGE ORWELL

"Political correctness is the signature cultural statement of the ruling elites, undermining their moral authority and driving a wedge between them and the working class far more effectively than any right-wing demagogue could hope for." – JON KELLER (Massachusetts journalist and author of “The Bluest State”)

“Half the English language is becoming the ‘N-word’ as far as liberals are concerned. Words are always bad for liberals. Words allow people to understand what liberals are saying.” – ANN COULTER

“A new religion of political correctness daily reaches fresh heights of idiocy, ignoring the fact that a society that willingly retreats from common sense is ultimately doomed.” – BRYAN FORBES (the great Brit actor, writer and director – most notably of the 1961 masterpiece “Whistle Down The Wind”, with Hayley Mills  and Alan Bates, which my enthralled daughters named “The Jesus Movie”.)

“With the arrival recently of this ridiculous thing called political correctness that has turned homosexuality into a cult, the place now is seething with shaven-headed, tough poofs who call themselves gay and who demand special treatment.” – JEFFREY BERNARD (in 1996)

“We have got to get thicker-skinned. If we end up going on being this thin-skinned, we’re going to kill each other. So we need to have the ability to hear unpalatable stuff. What would a ‘respectful’ cartoon look like? The form itself requires disrespect – so you either have the form or  you don’t. I think we’re being extremely wimpish at the level of ideas. People must be protected from prejudice against their person. But people cannot be protected from prejudice against their ideas – because otherwise we’re all done.” – SALMAN RUSHDIE

“Political correctness isn’t literally terroristic; but it does govern through fear. No serious person can deny that the grievance politics of the American left keeps decent people in a constant state of fright – they are afraid  to say the wrong word, utter the wrong thought, offend the wrong constituency.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 “Policing language is one of the most powerful tools for policing thought. Language can work as a kind of gnosis, and one of the chief weapons the cultural left uses is their monopolistic claims on language. They invent a new meaning on their own, and then use that new meaning to out, shame or cancel those who didn’t get the memo.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"You can call a rattlesnake a 'rhythmic reptile' all you want, but you still can't let your kids play with it in the sandbox." -- SHANNEN COFFIN

“One cannot defeat the enemy if one is afraid to identify him.” – FRED IKLE (of the Center For Strategic and Intelligence Studies, in Washington D.C.)

“The lofty idea of ‘the war on racism’ is gradually turning into a hideously false ideology, and this anti-racism will be for the 21st century what Communism was for the 20th century: a source of violence.” -- ALAIN FINKIELKRAUT (the French philosopher, in 2005)

“As a general rule in America, the higher a person’s status, the more liberal their politics.” -- TOBY YOUNG

“Do not suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberty by any pretense of politeness, delicacy or decency.” – JOHN ADAMS

“The blue states are more affluent than the red states – and political correctness is more ubiquitous in New York and Los Angeles than it is in ‘the flyover states’. The reason the media is liberal is because it’s a high-status profession. The same goes for medicine and law. At the very top of American society, expressing a rightwing opinion is virtually a form of sedition. You can count the number of Republican celebrities on one hand.” -- TOBY YOUNG

“Political correctness is the moral dictatorship of idiots – people vicariously offended on behalf of others.” – HUGO RIFKIND

“Political correctness is the increasingly authoritarian form of militant liberalism.” – PAUL JOHNSON

"Political correctness isn't literally terroristic; but it does govern through fear. No serious person can deny that the grievance politics of the American left keeps decent people in a constant state of fright - they are afraid to say the wrong word, utter the wrong thought, offend the wrong constituency." - JONAH GOLDBERG

“If a rattlesnake is in your backyard, calling it a tuba will not erase the threat.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"Political correctness needs to die. Living in a politically correct world means living in a limited, humorless, intellectually stunted world. It needs to stop.  The 'racist' war will finally end when the left no longer benefits from waging it." -- MELISSA CLOUTHIER                                                                                       (the lady in q. is a Dr. and a chiropractrix, as well as being a prolific blogstress.)

“By changing what can be said, you eventually change what is and what can be thought; by changing what is and can be thought, you change the composition of the elite.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.” — THEODORE DALRYMPLE                  (in an interview with Jamie Glazov at “Frontpage”)

"In America we're reluctant to use the word 'war' when it's a real war, but we love using the word 'war' when it's not". -- BRUCE SCHNEIER (The prominent cryptographer, computer security expert, and author, here referring to such things as "cyberwar" and the "war on drugs" on the one hand, and on the other hand our, let's just say, confused and hesitant use of terminology to describe whatever it is we're doing in reaction to the Jihad against us declared by Al Qaeda and its allied representatives of the Religion of Peace.)

“A society in which authority decides what you can hear, think and say will not only be a society lacking in humour, it will be one lacking in humanity.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY (the English social scientist and, in 2010, the director of the “Centre for Social Cohesion”)

“What are those enemies? Boredom. Predictability. Obviousness. Humorlessness. Dullness. Staleness. The demand for boring consensus, of any kind. Most of all that tribe of people who seem to grow in volume if not in number by the year, who cry, ‘You can’t say that.’ Well, bugger them. Here’s to the awkward squad.” -- DOUGLAS MURRAY

" 'Cancel culture' is like a modern day witch trial." --DOUGLAS MURRAY

"There is something almost awe-inspiring in the way in which our age can deny reality, redefine things and try to make everyone agree to the new definition, only then to not go along with it. See also 'woman' (noun)." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY

"The current administration is promoting T-ball nation. With T-ball, everybody gets a hit, everybody gets on base, everybody supposedly wins and everyone goes for ice cream after the game. But life isn't like that." -- DENEEN BORELLI (one of the citizen-ladies who appears in the recent "Mama Grizzly/Tea Party" documentary "Fire From The Heartland")

“This is the state of the contemporary Liberal world – the fear of giving offense has been self-inculcated in a group which must, now, consider literally every word and action, for potential violation of the New Norms.” – DAVID MAMET

“Political correctness, as intolerant a system of thought as the Salem (witch) trials, will simply never accept the truth. In fact, it is a persistent form of untruthfulness, pretending that things are different from what they are.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

“ ‘Code language’ is code language for ‘total bollocks’. ‘Code word’ is a code word for ‘I’m inventing what you really meant to say because the actual quote doesn’t quite do the job for me’.” – MARK STEYN

"In the end you can be politically correct or you can be a great power — but not both." -- MARK STEYN

“If the political culture forbids respectable politicians from raising certain topics, then the electorate will turn to unrespectable ones.” -- MARK STEYN

“The health-and-safety, equality-and-diversity, cellophane-coated culture is spreading its Stalinist tentacles everywhere. Political correctness, being the Frankfurt version of Marxism, cannot tolerate contradiction.” – GERALD WARNER         (a Scottish conservative critic of David Cameron. Oh, and by the way, the “Frankfurt” school is an impenetrable variation of Marxism which is chiefly known to us civilians, if it's known at all, by the existence of the infamous Herbert Marcuse as a devoté..)

"In a land of freedom we are held hostage by the tyranny of political  correctness."-- ROBERT GRIFFIN III       (the then-star quarterback of the Washington Redskins, and although he's black, he's not exactly being greeted the same way as that  other black athlete who came out as a poofter at the same time as he said this. 1 May 2013. I tell you, it's almost worth becoming a  dual Giants-Redskins fan over.... heh, almost, but not quite....)

“Every battle in the war on reality begins with the opening of a new linguistic front. We cannot think because we cannot speak. Having lost the words for things, we lose the things themselves. ” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"For today's politically correct left, protecting Muslims from insult is a higher priority than protecting women from sexual violence." -- JAMES TARANTO

“Because what, after all, is political correctness but speech censorship? That’s all it is.” –  RUSH LIMBAUGH

“After all, the power to redefine words is the power to redefine reality.” – RYAN T. ANDERSON                      (Of the Heritage Foundation)

“I mean, you get — politically correct stuff happens that you don’t want to happen. I all of a sudden became an African — political correctness, African-American. I’m not African.” -- MORGAN FREEMAN           (No you're not, Morg -- you're just another dreary predictable knee-jerk lefty Obamarroid doofus....)

“The abuse of language has got to stop. …We cannot condemn as bigotry everything that we don’t agree with. Words like bigotry have to go. …That’s what you do. You destroy meanings, you anesthetize people, and you turn people off. You turn the mind off. You kill the brain. We cannot have this. We cannot have this abuse of language going on.” – CAMILLE PAGLIA

“Every thought is an -ism and every person an -ist in the insania of political correctness, where it is always winter and never Christmas – sorry, ‘Winterval’.  (Mustn’t be Islamophobic).” – JULIE BURCHILL                    (The chubby English provocatrice, who herself is, or was, some kind of Labourite Trotskyist, but even she is becoming a bit vexed with all this intrusive and impudent insanity….)

“ 'Wellbeing' is one of those nonce words that has been either appropriated or invented by progressives to mean whatever they want it to mean – like 'grooming' or 'community' or 'resilience'.” – ROD LIDDLE (“nonce”, by the way, is Britspeak for “a word coined for a single occasion”. No, actually it’s Britslang for a pervert.)

"But we don't do stigma anymore. It is not considered inclusive." -- ROD LIDDLE

“Who wants to live in a world where the only privacy you have is inside your head? That's what life in East Germany was like. That's why we fought the Cold War, remember? So we'd never have to live in some awful limbo, where you never knew who even among your friends was an informer. And now we're doing it to ourselves.” -- BILL MAHER                                                                                                                                                                (Truly amazing, given the source. In July 2014)

“Political correctness is a list of things were not supposed to notice.” -- STEVE SAILER                                    (A rather more-clever-than-average paleocon journalist – one of the few of that species that I like to read)

"People that are worried about words have never been punched in the face" - ELON MUSK (who grew up in South Africa)

“Intolerance has become a growth industry. The politically correct has become the politically required, and nobody can any longer indulge straight talk, careless or otherwise.” – WESLEY PRUDEN (In THE WASHINGTON TIMES, 27 Sept. 2014)

"The 1950s were horrifyingly conformist. And if you don't agree with this, you will be reported to the Associate Dean for Thoughtcrimes." – DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE (who, with much fanfare and jubilation, moved from Chicago to Texas in Oct. 2014)

"We are careening toward a future where everything will simultaneously be illegal AND mandatory." -- DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE

"Why is college so expensive? Go ask the Deputy Assistant Vice Chancellor for Pronouns. Xer office is next to the Climbing Wall Starbucks." -- DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

"Your speech is violence, my violence is speech" -- DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE

" 'Gender is a social construct' is the polite way to be an anti-evolutionist." -- DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE  

“Never forget, the Speech Police are also the Thought Police. If you can't speak the truth, it becomes impossible to know the truth.” – ROBERT STACY MCCAIN

“We, the American people, are not each others' enemies. The enemies are those people behind the jerking everybody's chains and trying to divide us by age, by race, by income.” – BEN CARSON

“Political correctness is tyranny with manners.” – CHARLTON HESTON

"The most un-American thing you can say is, 'You can't say that'." – GARRISON KEILLOR

"In the old days, bohemians enjoyed trying to ‘épater le bourgeois’--to shock the bourgeoisie. Today the bourgeoisie can't be shocked, but liberals certainly can, and we conservatives can have fun doing so. And maybe some young people are awakened by seeing how easily outraged liberals are by anything that doesn't pay obeisance to the ever-more cloying political correctness that has become the sum and substance of contemporary liberalism." -- BILL KRISTOL

“People must understand that political correctness works like a conspiracy theory; the more vigorously you argue against it, the more its proponents see the need to affirm it. That's because, under their rules, logic and free speech are tools of oppression, at least when used by non-favored groups. They've created this perfectly circular, perfectly sealed universe, packed with bizarre terms and theories that explain why they're always good and their opponents always evil. By definition, reason will not work against this. PC is like a church whose only sacrament is excommunication.” – ROBERT WARGAS (a young Brit conservative journalist, in Feb. 2015)

"Political correctness is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate." – JONATHAN CHAIT (the liberal writing in NEW YORK mag in Feb. '15, thereby touching off a frightful foofaraw on  the part of his lefty pals....)

“In our society, there is almost no greater apostasy than the refusal to keep up.” – LEON WIESELTIER (the long-time editor of THE NEW REPUBLIC, when it was still an honorable, at least, liberal rag)

“Political correctness is like a drug that we just can't stop injecting, even though we know it's going to kill us.” – PAT CONDELL (Irish-born and famously atheist UK writer, public speaker, and comedian)

“We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, scorn and the like toward those who disagree with us.” – VLADIMIR ILLYICH ULIANOV a.k.a. LENIN

“Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.” – JACQUES BARZUN

“Political correctness, for all its notoriety, has not received the full scrutiny it deserves, in part because, like everything else the Marxists touch, it wears a tarnhelm, a magic helmet -- in this case, of kindness, politesse, and sheer righteousness. Busily formulating new lists of what can and cannot be said (lest it offend somebody, somewhere, either now or at some future date) and always in light of the Critical Theory imperative to be perpetually on the attack, political correctness’ commissars resemble no one more than Dickens’ implacable Madame Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities, clicking her knitting needles as heads roll into baskets.” – MICHAEL WALSH  (from his book “The Devil's Pleasure Palace”, an inquiry into leftist “critical theory”)

“The same people who told us 30 years ago that 'marriage is just a stupid piece of paper' now insist that it's a 'human right'. The same people who told us that 'a flag is just a meaningless piece of material' now want certain flags banned and others raised — or else. The same people who say you can't change who you want to f*ck tell us you CAN change the bits you f*ck them with… The same people who used to tell us to 'lighten up' and 'learn to take a joke' now fire people who make them.-- KATY SHAIDLE

“Liberals are obsessed with language and controlling the words people use. If they can control our words, they can control us. They simultaneously promote as many languages as possible in American — other than English — and frantically censor words and speakers. Soon the only words we’ll be allowed to use are: 'I’m offended'. ('Estoy offendido.')”– ANN COULTER

"The longer they go without telling you, it's not a white male." -- ANN COULTER    (16 Feb 2024) 

“It’s very time-consuming to be politically correct.” – DONALD TRUMP

"The central purposes of cinema and TV is to self-replicate the moribund ideology of the latter-day western campus." -- GARETH ROBERTS                                          (An English screen-writer, in July 2023) 

“The rights agenda is a game of scissors-paper-rock.” – MELISSA KITE

“Let’s face it, almost everybody belongs to a special category now, and you’re not allowed to say anything to most people but ‘hello’, ‘good-bye’ and ‘how does that make you feel?’.” – MELISSA KITE

"I've been vaguely aware for some time that the word 'unsafe' carries mystical powers." -- MELISSA KITE (in 20 February 2021)

"Functional liberal societies can tolerate just about anything. But they don't tolerate absurdities -- not forever, and maybe not for long.” – DANIEL FOSTER (In NATIONAL REVIEW, October 2015)

“When we lack the will to see things as they really are, there is nothing so mystifying as the obvious.” – IRVING KRISTOL

“If you see something, say something. Then call a lawyer.” – ANTHONY CUMIA (radio talk show host, NYC, in 2015, after AG Loretta Lynch put out her order to arrest anyone who trash talks Muslims)

“The left wraps itself in political correctness and multiculturalism like a suicide vest.” – SARAH PALIN

“I'm all for people calling themselves what they want, but using the plural pronoun 'they' for one person makes nonsense of the entire language.” – LYNN BARBER (English journalist – SUNDAY TIMES – December '15)

"Nothing paves the way for Political correctness like ignorance, and the farther removed we get from the last generation to receive a proper education, the more ignorant college students become." -- HELEN ANDREWS (from the Centre of Independent Studies, Sydney Aus.)

"The Jihadis are going to come in with AK-47s while we're sitting here arguing about pronouns." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY (the conservative Scotsman, who happens to be a poofter himself, on the fatuity of his fellow poofs in the LGBT "community")

"There are two subjects which get you into most trouble in 21st-century Britain. The first is insinuating that Islam is anything but a religion of brotherly love. The second is questioning whether someone with a penis can be a woman." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY                                                                                                                              (in Feb. 2020)

«The politically correct mindset not only seeks to censor uncongenial speech but wishes to declare an uncongenial individual ineffable—in effect, to render him an unperson. Unlike free speech, political correctness knows no limits. It is the essence of totalitarianism.» – JAMES TARANTO

“We prize civility and reason, but they are insufficient to combat political correctness, which is uncivil and unreasonable and weaponizes its enemies’ adherence to etiquette.” --JAMES TARANTO

“Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.” – G. K. CHESTERTON (Quoted by incoming Italian PM Giorgia Meloni in her election victory speech, in October 2022)

“But p.c. people don't know history. Don't even know that there is any.” – DAVID GELERNTER

“In today's vernacular, 'phobic' means 'not sufficiently enthusiastic about'." – GAVIN McINNES (The English-born Canadian “writer, actor, comedian” and founder of “VICE – Media”)

“The 'Stepford Students' might look like students, dress like students, smell like students. But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform.” – BRENDAN O'NEIL (a SPECTATOR writer)

“To brand opinions you don't like as 'phobic' means damning them as symptoms of a psychiatric disorder. And there is no point debating with irrational and dangerous 'phobics'. Far better to muzzle and quarantine them.” – MICK HUME                                                                                                            (author of the book “Trigger Warning”)

“If political correctness continues to make further inroads in American life, the day may not be far off when we shall all sit around, nothing to talk about, nothing to laugh at, nothing to do but quietly contemplate our own extraordinary virtue.” – JOSEPH EPSTEIN

"People are a bit drunk with power. We've canceled God, we've canceled religion, we've canceled civility, we've canceled the English language. Isn't that the day the music died?" -- DON McLEAN (Mr. "American Pie" himself, in 2022)

“Stalin forced the old Bolsheviks to confess to crimes they never committed, then had them shot. Today, boring-vanilla Americans are forced to atone for crimes committed before they were born.” – DAVID GELERNTER

“You can always tell when a public figure has said something with a ring of truth about it by the abject apology and recantation which arrives a day or so later. By and large, the greater the truth, the more abject the apology.” -- ROD LIDDLE

"This kind of propaganda is present in every area of the curriculum, every day and across every age group, along with a concomitant intolerance of any divergent view. You dare to wonder if any of the kids, given this daily saturation, will emerge with open minds and a vague grasp of the realities of the world. Until then we will be churning out a procession of slack-jawed, credulous halfwits who are simultaneously woke and sleepwalking." -- ROD LIDDLE

 "For too long our institutions have given in to the shrill, relentless clamor from the authoritarian left to the extent that public discourse has been woefully truncated. You can't say that, you can't read that, you can't think that -- a mantra which, tautologically, closes down discussion." -- ROD LIDDLE

“The truth has no purchase, because we are living in a post-truth society. For example, in the transgenderism debate, science and therefore reality doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter to the activists, of course, but that’s to be expected. But it also doesn’t matter to the government, or to our institutions. The reality doesn’t matter; it’s all about how people feel.” -- ROD LIDDLE (in August 2020)

“But a man who attacks political correctness is attacking the holy of holies, the whole basis of governance in Europe, where galloping p.c. is the established religion—and has been effective for half a century at keeping the masses quiet so their rulers can arrange everybody's life properly.” – DAVID GELERNTER

“Trump’s onto something, because secretly everybody’s getting tired of political correctness, kissing up. We’re really in a pussy generation. Everybody’s walking on eggshells. We see people accusing people of being racist and all kinds of stuff. When I grew up, those things weren’t called racist.” -- CLINT EASTWOOD

“Instead of inhabiting a universe where sticks and stones may break our bones but words can never hurt us, we've been ushered into one where the language you use carries more weight than the way you behave.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

“Political Correctness is the armed wing of Cultural Marxism” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

"The impeccably left-liberal New York audience doesn't want jokes that make you laugh, just ones that enable you to applaud the politically correct sentiment. It's a form of bullying, disguised as tolerance. With the subtlest of passive-aggressive menace." -- JAMES DELINGPOLE

“Political Correctness is a way for activist liars to wage an organized war on truth.” – BOSCH FAWSTIN

“Liberalism today no longer stands up for freedom, but for political correctness – which is the opposite of freedom.” – VICTOR ORBAN (the PM of Hungary, in 2016)

"What really bothered me is the whole idea that at a liberal arts college we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion." -- ERIN CHING (A student at Swarthmore college in 2014)

“He would rather be politically correct than biologically so. I detested this. It was a triumph of attitude over fact.” – JON CANTER

“And everybody desperate to diplomatically conform and afraid to call anything by its real name.” – J. P. DONLEAVY

“We're inolved in the totalitarian moronization of a generation with this stuff.” -- MARK STEYN

"As unlimited license comes to a head, citizens become so tender & hypersensitive that slightest hint of authority enrages them." -- CICERO

“The term 'political correctness' originated on the Left as an ironic invocation of Stalinism. The problem is we've lost the irony but kept the Stalinism.” -- WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ (the “literary scholar” in the “Chronicle Of Higher Education”)

“Now here's some serious advice: never make jokes.  Any public figure who makes a joke becomes an instant victim of the great conspiracy of the humourless.” – SIMON BARNES

“It's a sad possibility that things are less liberal than they used to be – in the non-political sense – and that there's been a going backwards.” – RANDY NEWMAN (bemoaning the fact that he probably couldn't get away with his earlier songs anymore, in an August 2017 interview with THE SPECTATOR's Michael Hann)

“We should beware: enforce Political Correctness and there will inevitably be a revolt against it.” – BRENDAN O'NEILL (In the SPECTATOR, August, 2017)

"Political correctness is censorship." -- JANIE JOHNSON

“A caliphate of sniveling morons.” – SOHRAB AHMARI (specifically about the U. of California—Berkeley, in Sept. 2017)

“A West that has heated debates over whether men can have periods has no business telling Belarus or whatever how to govern itself.” – SOHRAB AHMARI

"In a culture where humorless leftist scolds seek to impose their rule upon us normals by sucking every drop of joy out of life, it is the conservative smarts who is the true subversive." -- KURT SCHLICHTER

"Our forces will likely get slammed by the North Koreans, but luckily our troops will go down loudly affirming that some men menstruate." -- KURT SCHLICHTER (on 17 June 2020, reflecting frustration at the pussification of the military in recent years)

“The divisive politics of anti-racism from America, with its demented campus dramas and neuroses about 'safe spaces, 'micro-agressions' and 'cultural appropriation', they make it almost impossible for people of goodwill of all ethnicities to rub along together.” – MUNIRA MIRZA (Deputy-Mayor for Education and Culture under Boris Johnson, in London – here in September, 2017)

“We all have good thoughts and bad thoughts, but nobody ever expresses the bad thoughts. We just think them and don't say them... But the bad thoughts are funny.” – LARRY DAVID (in conversation with Ricky Gervais)

"Hollywood ran out of original thought about three decades ago, and the people noticed and so keep avoiding the theaters. How many times can a good-looking, young, green progressive crusader expose a corporate pollution plot, or battle a deranged band of southern-twangy Neanderthals, South African racists, or Russian tattooed thugs, or a deep-state CIA cabal in sunglasses and shiny suits? How many times can the nth remake of a comic-book hero be justified by updating him into a caped social-justice warrior from L.A.?

The ruling generation in Hollywood is out of creative ideas mostly because it invested in political melodrama rather than human tragedy. It cannot make a Western, not just because Santa Monica’s young men long ago lost the ability to sound or act like Texans in 1880, but because its politics have no patience with the real world of noble people who are often doomed, or flawed individuals who are nevertheless defined by their best rather than worst traits, or well-meaning souls who can cause havoc, or courageous men who fight for bad causes.

Political correctness has become Maoist: All art must serve progressive struggle, defined in Hollywood as good race and gender warriors pitted against bad racists and sexists. Political correctness has become Maoist: All art must serve progressive struggle, defined in Hollywood as good race and gender warriors pitted against bad racists and sexists. The result is monotony and boredom." -- VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

 "In the 1950s, the university had evolved beyond being a bastion of eccentricity, nonconformity, and free expression, as tweedy scholars and old-style elbow-patched liberal academics were displaced by hip voices railing against supposedly clueless straight culture.

America thought it could live with that — even at the price of watering down the curricula with -studies activist courses — because free speech was for everyone, at least in theory.

But tenured radical professors eventually became sixty-something administrative bureaucrats and are now being devoured by the very radical offspring they have sired.

We lament political correctness and Stalinism on campuses, but the real crime is the ignorance that empowers it.

The unspoken fuel that drives so many protests on campus is the self-awareness that so many students simply cannot do traditional college work and desire weaker courses, personal exemptions, and time off. A sense of student inferiority naturally leads to demands for everything but a more comprehensive education. The result of politicizing mediocrity is the classic toxicity of youthful ignorance and arrogance. Twenty-somethings brag about tearing down the statue of Robert E. Lee without a clue what Gettysburg was. Disrupting a conservative lecturer on campus is the current generation’s version of cramming phone booths and swallowing goldfish.

Orwellian administrative language, sanctioned from those who should have known better, masks an anti-democratic reality of which even its adherents are ashamed. “Safe spaces” mean segregation. “Affirmative action” is synonymous with implicit racial quotas. “Theme houses” are race-based apartheid living quarters. “Trigger warnings” are censorship. “Student loans” are paramount to indentured servitude for over a decade. And “diversity” ensures monotony and orthodoxy in thought and expression.

University overseers managed to ensure that the B.A. degree is no longer necessarily proof of education in science, math, language, history, or philosophy. Private employers see elite colleges, at best, not necessarily as places where job applicants were educated or trained, but rather where they were once prescreened by colleges, on the basis of high-school test scores and GPAs. So they hire college graduates by brand names, because earlier, as incoming students, they were once admitted to, rather than graduated from, a good college on some sort of objective basis. Employers write off what followed later as either a wasted four years or irrelevant." -- VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

“Given that any populace can be subdivided into a veritably infinite number of minorities, with equally infinite sensitivities, the perceived bruising of which we only encourage, pretty soon none of us may be allowed to say an ever-loving thing.” – LIONEL SHRIVER

“The students running campuses like re-education camps aren't afraid of being muzzled, because they imagine they will always be the ones doing the muzzling – the ones dictating what words we can use, what books we can read, and what practices we can embrace.” – LIONEL SHRIVER

“Once using the wrong pronoun or stating facts like ‘women don’t have penises’ can get you arrested, your society is no longer free in any meaningful sense.” – LIONEL SHRIVER

“It’s time to give up on the idea that we can legislate niceness. A law against the expression of racist or sexist opinions doesn’t change what goes on in people’s heads; it doesn’t change their hearts. Instead suppression backfires, and makes what we’d like to regard as unacceptable still more virulent.” – LIONEL SHRIVER

“I don’t share such a view, but it should still be possible to claim that homosexuality is a sin against God without ending up in jail.” – LIONEL SHRIVER

"Once upon a time, taboo-breaking entailed saying something incorrect, tasteless or immoral. Nowadays, you horrify an audience by saying something true." -- LIONEL SHRIVER

“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform,but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

“We have become stupidly politically correct, which is the death of comedy.” – MEL BROOKS

"The Left has wielded the Right’s preference for manners as a club against the Right, claiming offense in order to cow them into silence." -- BEN SHAPIRO

"Any suggestion that political correctness amounts to 'Just being polite' is bonkers. Today, it’s a weapon deployed by capricious neurotics from Planet Grievance to ruin perfectly normal people who display normal Earthling behavior such as 'joking'.” -- BEN SHAPIRO

"The goal of our culture now is not the emancipation of the individual from the group, but the permanent definition of the individual by the group. We used to call this bigotry. Now we call it being woke." -- ANDREW SULLIVAN

"What a strain it was, picking your way through stupidity and aggressiveness and pride and hurt!" -- V. S. NAIPAUL 

"Political correctness is fascism masquerading as manners." -- GEORGE CARLIN

"Political correctness is a weapon used to silence people who tell the truth." – AYAAN HIRSI ALI

“We must have the courage to object when they use that term 'radical Islamic terrorism'." -- KAMALA HARRIS

"Any suggestion that political correctness amounts to 'just being polite' is bonkers. Today, it’s a weapon deployed by capricious neurotics from Planet Grievance to ruin perfectly normal people who display normal Earthling behavior such as 'joking'.” --KYLE SMITH

"Almost the entire artistic world -- every field, from abstract sculpture to film to stand-up comedy, has started to mimic the hectoring voice and social goals of progressive politics." -- MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY                                                                                                                                                                               (in NR, May 2018)

 "Only a label is required. The label is the motive. The label is the evidence. The label is the logic. First a racist and now a misogynist. That explains everything. That and the craziness." -- PHILIP ROTH

"The Military has one job: Winning War. Anything else is a distraction and a liability." -- TREY GOWDY

“The serfs are thinking for themselves and their betters don’t like it.” – STEPHEN DAISLEY (a British political journalist, in Sept. 2019)

"It is never enough to suppress free speech because its expression will hurt people's feelings. That is why any attempt to attach sanctions against the use of what are called 'politically incorrect' expressions or to require the use of 'politically correct' forms of speech would be a neo-fascist exercise." -- SIR JOHN LAWS     (a big-deal English High Court judge -- died in 2020, though he said this in 1994) 

“It is increasingly well understood by voters that endless lecturing about racism, sexism, diet and the environment is the main modern means by which elites disdain the commonality.” – CHARLES MOORE

"I find the phrase 'deep dive' useful. As soon as you hear it, you know that the person offering it is not to be trusted. It is one of a growing collection of official words and phrases which mean the opposite of what they state. Others include, 'We welcome the report', 'We take allegations of x very seriously', 'Your call is important to us', 'We've been very clear', and 'diversity'." -- CHARLES MOORE

“Woke stories don’t last because they aren’t true.” – ANDREW KLAVAN

“Humorists have been scared out of the business by the touchiness now prevailing in every section of the community. Wherever you look, on every shoulder there is a chip, in every eye a cold glitter warning you, if you know what is good for you, not to start anything.” --P. G. WODEHOUSE (in 1956)

"All talk outside the family was boring, because no one could say what came naturally." -- MARTIN AMIS

“Fascism, and the associated genocide, arose because a climate developed in Germany in which it was held that all intellectual activity conform with an accepted, approved ideology.” – MALCOLM BRADBURY

"For the first time in American history, American history is no longer allowed in America." -- KAMBREE KAWAHINE KOA (on 16 July 2020, on the twoot)

"Historians of the future will have a hard time figuring out how so many groups of organised strident jackasses succeeded in leading us around the nose and morally intimidating the majority into silence." -- THOMAS SOWELL

 "I think one of the worst inventions of our century is political correctness. It has forced a generation of men to keep their muscularity under wraps, made them too timid to admit their true views about the world." -- WILBUR SMITH

"We laugh too easily today. Laughter used to be like virtue. It wasn't something you were willing to give away on a first date. And yet, simultaneous with this great homogenising of laughter, comes the latest-wave of offense-taking, washing away the transgressive constituent from comedy which is often as not is the best part of it. Which makes the world half as funny as it was. And soon not funny at all." -- HOWARD JACOBSON (the humorous English novelist – in July 2020)

"As far as I can see, cancel culture is mercy's antithesis. Political correctness has grown to become the unhappiest religion in the world. It has become literally bad religion run amok." -- NICK CAVE                     (the Australian rock singer, in Dec. 2020)

“The Pentagon is now the Yale faculty lounge but with cruise missiles.” – TUCKER CARLSON (On 26 March 2021)

“This is a period of self-loathing: we teach our children to hate America. So having someone like Trump who’s unreservedly, unabashedly pro-American, is very very important. Political correctness is a prohibition on defending America. If you say things like ‘American exceptionalism,’ that's taboo, so when he was standing up against political correctness he was standing up for America.” -- TOM KLINGENSTEIN (In September 2022)

Political Movements

"If your political movement requires hiding your face, it's probably not a good political movement." -- MICHAEL  IAN BLACK (Some guy on the Twoot who I've never heard of but who apparently has some 1.3 million -- I say again, 1.3 million -- followers. I think that qualifies him as a religious leader in his own right....)

“Political Science”

“We have the enormous power of bullshit, using bullshit in the political science sense, as a technical term meaning ‘political science’.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

Political Will                                                                                                                                                      

“Most of the time, the law is just fine as it is. The problem is lack of will to enforce it.” – ANDY MCCARTHY

Politicians                                                                                                                                                                

“Men in public life are responsible for more than their public words and actions: their dinners, beds, marriages, amusements and interests are all objects of curiosity. Since people think highly of government and authority, you must be entirely free of eccentricity or aberration.” – PLUTARCH                           (jeez, he would’ve loved Bubba Clinton....)

“Running a country is so difficult, one has to be rather limited to be convinced one would be up to the task.” – ALAIN DE BOTTON

“The truth about modern politics is that almost all its main practitioners have attained their current positions only by devoting their entire adult lives to it. No war or hardship or business success, no experience of a profession or a farm or a factory has touched them. When they tell their 'story' they only expose how little of it there really is. The politicians' preoccupation with 'narrative' today derives from guilt at the fact that there isn't one.” – CHARLES MOORE

“Nobody you liked at school ever becomes a politician.” – SIMON BRETT

"Get thee glass eyes; And, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not." -- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (in "King Lear")
 

"Politicians will always disappoint you." -- WILLIAM RUSHER

"Asking what political candidates have accomplished is dumb. They're there to protect rights, not do stuff. I don't want them doing stuff." -- BEN SHAPIRO                                                                                                                

“Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.” -- HENRY KISSINGER 

“We’ve been conditioned to think that only politicians can solve our problems. But at some point, maybe we will wake up and recognize that it was politicians who created our problems.” -- BEN CARSON

"Politicians are afraid of everything they don't understand, and they don't understand anything." -- NELSON DEMILLE

 "A people that elect corrupt politicians are not victims, they're accomplices." -- GEORGE ORWELL

"Everyone knows politicians are not real people." -- NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE (in his excellent 1993 novel, "The High Flyer")

"Politicians cannot create prosperity; they can only create the circumstances in which ideas have sex." -- MATT RIDLEY (a creative take on "sexy ideas") 

"A true politician's first job is justifying his own position." — ROBIN WHITE (author of the thriller "Siberian Light")

“In politics the real ogres don’t usually look much like ogres.” -- MATTHEW PARRIS

Politics

“When all is said, the floating vote lives up to its name.  It floats with the tide; and whoever would influence it must first influence the tide.” – BONAR LAW (the quaintly-named Mr. Law was briefly British (Conservative) Prime Minister in the early part of The 20th Century.  Look it up, if you want dates, lazy bums.)

“In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.” – NAPOLEON

“Politics ought to be adjusted not to human reasonings but to human nature, of which reason is but a part and by no means the greatest part.” -- EDMUND BURKE

“In moments of crisis, people with no politics tend to develop the worst possible politics.” – LEON TROTSKY

“Can the American people be bought with their own money?” —HERBERT HOOVER                                                     ( n a speech in Philadelphia on May 14, 1936)

 “Humans should not be interested in politics. You only get interested in politics in order to stop the other people who are interested in politics from taking your money or destroying your life.” – GREG GUTFELD (being asked here if “he was always interested in politics”, in June 2006.)

“If it’s purity and impotence you want, join a convent.” – JOHN REID (British “New”-Labour Home Secretary (chief cop) in May 2006)

“Out of politicians’ dreams, ordinary people are prone to awake to living nightmare.” – DAVID PRYCE-JONES

"If people want a sense of purpose they should get it from their archbishop. They should certainly not get it from their politicians." -- HAROLD MACMILLAN (Good man. Despite being parodied by that musical genius but political pygmy, John Lennon, as “Harrassed Macmillions).

“In politics, there is no barrier to entry whatsoever. So any idiot can get involved in politics, and most idiots do.” – PHIL MADSEN (of Ross Perot’s “Reform Party” – and boy, he oughtta know…)

“Being the least objectionable candidate to the most people is usually how candidates win in America.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“There are no policy solutions, only policy trade-offs.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"Politics isn’t life — or, at least, it shouldn’t be. The whole point of being a conservative and — I would argue — an American is to see politics as only a fraction of one’s life.” -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“Bribe only those who will stay bribed.” – RUDOLPH GIULIANI

“If you agree with me on nine out of 12 issues, vote for me. If you agree with me on 12 out of 12 issues, see a psychiatrist.” – ED KOCH

"Politics is the systematic organization of hatreds." -- HENRY ADAMS

"Politics is self-interest disguised by cant." -- WILLIAM BOYD ("Cant", by the way, is "hypocritical and sanctimonious talk")
 

“Pursuing knowledge for the sake of knowledge is not a political concept or politicians would know a lot more.” –  P. J. O'ROURKE

“Robert Conquest's Three Laws of Politics:

1 Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

2 Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

3 The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.” -- ROBERT CONQUEST (his 2nd law is consciously or unconsciously JOHN O’SULLIVAN’s famous “O’SULLIVAN’S LAW”)

“Politics is the conspiracy of the unproductive but organized against the productive but unorganized.” – JOE SOBRAN

“Most political  disputes boil down to a contest between the party of hope and the party of memory.” – RALPH WALDO EMERSON (Precisely. And, as our current predicament shows, when the idiot party of hope holds sway, things quickly become hopeless.)

“A free and rational political order is one in which citizens don’t need to bother much about politics.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

“It’s very difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” – UPTON SINCLAIR                          (The early 20th century American socialist writer, author of “The Jungle”, whose words here I heard quoted by the splendid Brit politico Daniel Hannan, who is most decidedly not a socialist.)

“We must reestablish the primacy of politics over the markets.” – ANGELA MERKEL (In December 2011, and there you have it sports fans – the Problem of the Age in a Teutonic Nutshell)

"I always find that when anyone says 'You know, I'm not interested in politics', it means they're really right-wing at heart." -- POLLY TOYNBEE (The grande dame of London left-wingery, and her chillingly revealing comment reminds me of  nothing so much as what one of her predecessor soul-mates, Leon Trotsky, once famously said, to  wit, "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.")

"Decent people should ignore politics -- if only they could be confident that politics would ignore them." -- WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, Jr. (I fully concur -- in fact, if the Left didn't exist, I'd happily not give a damn about politics for the rest of my days. Hmmmm – maybe the old Toynbee bat, above, may be onto something.... By the  way, I just read that when Bill Fabuckley used to sail off the coast of Maine, he'd occasionally have a hankering for fresh lobster, and when this fancy struck him he'd sidle up to some Mainiac fisherman's lobster pot, pull it up, help himself to a lobster.... and leave a couple of bottles of  Johnnie Walker Black Label scotch whisky in its place. Cool.)

"There is zero relation between business success and political judgment." -- WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR. 

“Most of the people who go into politics should never be allowed near the stuff.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY

"No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve your problems. They are trying to solve their own problems — of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind." – THOMAS SOWELL

"Life has many good things. The problem is that most of these good things can be gotten only by sacrificing other good things. We all recognize this in our daily lives. It is only in politics that this simple, common sense fact is routinely ignored." -- THOMAS SOWELL

"The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics." -- THOMAS SOWELL

"In politics nothing happens by accident, if it happens you can bet it was planned that way." – FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT ( “Franklin D. Roosevelt” is a station on the Paris Metro...)

“No politician should ever let himself be photographed in a bathing suit.” – ADOLF HITLER (when I first encountered this quote, I thought I’d be getting a lot of use out of it – but it turns out I haven’t, so much....)

“No man should be in politics unless he would honestly rather not be there.” – HENRY ADAMS                     (In a letter to his friend, the SecState Henry Cabot Lodge)

“An inexorable law of politics: the larger the document, the weaker the content.” – GERALD WARNER (The Scottish columnist, author, broadcaster and political adviser)

"When I was a kid and my parents started talking about politics, I'd run to my room and put on the Rolling Stones as loud as I could. So when I see all these rock stars up there talking politics, it makes me sick. If you're listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you're a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we're morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading the Washington Journal." – ALICE COOPER (Alice – real name Vincent Furnier – was always sound politically.)

“Politics should take up maybe a tenth corner of a good citizen's mind. The rest should be philosophy, friendship, romance, family, culture and fun.” – DAVID BROOKS

“Politics is downstream from culture. Way downstream.” – ANDREW BREITBART

"A politician divides mankind into two classes: tools and enemies." – FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

“The problem with political obsessives is that they instinctively judge ideas not according to their effectiveness but by the extent to which they annoy their opponents. A policy is judged not by how well it works, but by the degree to which it reduces the contentment of those social groups whose status you most want to see fall in relation to one's own.” -- RORY SUTHERLAND

“Politics is the organization of our distaste.” -- GEORGE WILL (in other words, we don't vote to make stuff happen so much as to prevent the lunatics on the other side from making their stuff happen. )

“Enoch Powell said that a politician complaining about the media is like a sailor complaining about the sea. But perhaps it is allowable even for sailors to get seasick from time to time.” -- WILLIAM WALDEGRAVE (A senior British Conservative government minister in the Thatcher years)

“The politics of reality is the certain knowledge that, over the course of time and under the weight of experience, ideological abstraction will yield ultimately to either the obdurate facts of public finance or the timeless imperatives of the human spirit.” – NEAL B. FREEMAN (the old NATIONAL REVIEW war-horse, on his old boss' Bill Buckley 1965 NYC Mayoral run, of which he was the campaign manager.)  

“But Congress should not have to pass a bill to make you happy. Neither should your faith be tethered to a person who is elected every four years.” -- DAVID HARSANYI (The escellent Canadian bloke who is a senior editor of THE FEDERALIST, in 2015)

"So if we lie to the government it's a felony, but if they lie to us it's politics." – BILL MURRAY

“Politics isn't about what is, it's about what it seems to be.” -- RUSH LIMBAUGH

“I've made a lifelong study of leadership and come to realize that success in politics requires sacrifice. Preferably by others, and sometimes of others, Hey ho.” -- MICHAEL DOBBS (The Conservative Brit politician and author of “House Of Cards”)

"All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.” – GEORGE ORWELL

“There is no such thing as 'keeping out of Politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasion, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia." --  GEORGE ORWELL

"Politics is like garlic. It gets all over everything." -- SARAH HOYT      (of the INSTAPUNDIT blog)                                                                   

"There is such a thing in politics as killing a man too dead." -- MARTIN VAN BUREN

"All politics is, at some level, a vocabulary contest." -- IAN TUTTLE

"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable." -- JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH (the leftist economist, but a good friend of Bill Buckley's, and he's 100% right, here.)

"Politics is like roller skating. You go partly where you want to go, and partly where the damned things take you." -- HENRY FOUNTAIN ASHURST (an early Democrat senator from Arizona)

"The choice in politics isn't usually between black and white. It's between two horrible shades of gray." -- PETER THORNEYCROFT (a one-time British Conservative Chancellor Of The Exchequer)

“Men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy, and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion.” -- MICHAEL OAKESHOTT (The great English political philosopher, 1901-1990)

"Politics isn't ‘war by other means’, politics is war." -- LYNDON B. JOHNSON

“Now here's some serious advice: never make jokes.  Any public figure who makes a joke becomes an instant victim of the great conspiracy of the humourless.” – SIMON BARNES

“The worship of politicians is the pathology of statists.” – JACK JOLIS

“Politics isn't where a properly-constituted person should be looking for moral instruction. We have parents and religious institutions for that.” – JACK JOLIS

"The fact that politics, (and particularly Leftist politics), is boring is the only thing that has (so far) saved America from its final and terminal takeover by the Cultural Marxists." -- JACK JOLIS      (In Sept. 2024) 

"In the old left-versus-right world, both sides essentially accepted that the other would win power occasionally. But now we have a centrist establishment in Europe that does not really accept the right of its challengers to come to power. And when they do, it casts them as being illegitimate, or extremists, and seeks to use supranational legal and political powers to constrain or oust them." -- JOHN O'SULLIVAN (In February 2018)

" 'Politics' is just what happens in any participatory process where people disagree." – JAY COST

“The fundamental problem of politics is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness." – HENRY KISSINGER (I'm not entirely sure what this means, but it certainly sounds nice and portentous....)

“It is now known that men enter local politics solely as a result of being unhappily married.” – C. NORTHCOTE PARKINSON (the author of the famous book “Parkinson’s Law”)

“More than 40 years of close observation of political life have convinced me that unhappiness, personal frustration or emotional imbalance are among the principal stimuli to a career in politics. Politics as a career disproportionately attracts people who are a bit crazy, troubled or lost.” – MATTHEW PARRIS (not least him – the Conservative “wet”, homosexual, Member of Parliament, turned columnist)

“Perhaps the two most dangerous words in all of politics are ‘Do something!’ They are also, alas, among the most common.” – CHARLES C.W. COOKE

 “Left to my own devices, I would likely play music, or watch sports, or drink wine, or tinker with golf carts or computers or the plumbing system inside my house. But, in modern America, I am rarely left to my own devices” -- CHARLES C.W. COOKE

"In politics, stealing is trouble but pussy is lethal." -- CARL HIAASEN (cc: La Cosa Clinton)

 "Americans have largely accepted a view of history in which conservation and limitation are unacceptable, if only because they are boring." -- GREG WEINER (visiting scholar at AEI, writing in NR, in Oct. 2019)

"Politics is what everyone who can does." -- RICHARD BROOKHISER

"There is no great historical evil without a compensating historical progress." -- FRIEDRICH ENGELS                          (This is the original of the Democrat Rahm Emmanuel's "Never let a crisis go to waste.")

"People who want to push you into a state of permanent political mobilization do not have your own happiness at heart.” -- WALTER OLSON                      (the "libertarian scholar")

"In some places being apolitical is the most extreme political statement you can make." -- MARK HELPRIN 

"Politics is driven by evens, it is not primarily driven by reason." -- JAMES W. PHILLIPS (A one-time British advisor to the Conservative Prime Ministers on science and technology)

“Politics is not a science: it is a matter of persuasion.” – PETER JONES (The UK SPECTATOR’s resident “classicist”)

 “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies”.  - GROUCHO MARX

“Fear inspires every political decision.” – PROF. JOHN GREENWAY (the late “gonzo anthropologist” from Colorado)

"Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided — but by blood and iron."  – OTTO VON BISMARK (This was his famous 1862 “Blut und Eisen” speech.)

"I’m sorry I’m just unleashing, but I can’t fuck with people who aren’t political anymore. You live in the United States of America. You have to be political. It’s too dire. Politics are killing people,” -- JENNIFER LAWRENCE (having a cow over the abortion business in September 2022 and complaining about have nightmares of Tucker Carlson. Poor dear.)

"We don't disagree --we just hate each other." -- HANNO SAUER     (the Dutch philosophy professor-author of "The Invention Of Good And Evil")  

Politics and Culture

«Politics can't fix our culture, but politics can lie to us long enough to keep us from focusing on the cultural issues in our own lives.» – BEN SASSE (Republican Senator from Nebraska, when he was still a candidate, in January 2014)

Politics (and Money)

"If you want to end the influence of money on politics, end the influence of politics on money." -- DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE (now there's a thought....)

“Bribe only those who will stay bribed.” – RUDOLPH GIULIANI

"You can't get rich in politics unless you're a crook" – HARRY TRUMAN

Politics (and Music)

"When I was a kid and my parents started talking about politics, I'd run to my room and put on the Rolling Stones as loud as I could. So when I see all these rock stars up there talking politics, it makes me sick. If you're listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you're a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we're morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading the Washington Journal." – ALICE COOPER

“Let me write the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.” – DANIEL O’CONNELL                 (the “Irish liberator”)

Polk, Pres. James K.

“Historians still fiercely debate whether James K. Polk is our most underappreciated president, but I’ll say this: He sure seems to be our most politically incorrect one.” – EDWARD ACHORN (The deputy editorial pages editor of the “Providence Journal”, in 2009. As for me, I’ve alway liked Polk – he’s my fave Pres., along with Reagan. And Trump.)

Polo

"Like adultery, polo is not sport for old men." -- BRYAN FORBES (What IS a sport for old men? Parallel-parking? Picking something up off the floor? Throwing things at the TV or radio?)

Pomposity

“The pomposity of a book is usually proportionate to the ugliness of its jacket.” – LINSEY McGOEY           (in the UK SPECTATOR in November 2007)

“Pomposity shorn of its inherent humor is mere sanctimony.” – JACK JOLIS

"However high the chair you sit in, you still sit only upon your own arse." -- MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE (1533-1592)

 “Pontification is not in and of itself a bad thing. But for it not to be off-putting, there needs to be at least a hint of a suspicion that the pontificator is slyly, engagingly aware of his own fallibility and absurdity.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

Popes (+ Pope Francis)                                                                                             

“Pope Francis is on summer vacation right now and apparently he's been spotted driving around in a Ford Focus. So I guess he takes that vow of celibacy very seriously.” – JIMMY FALLON

"It is the communists who think like Christians." -- POPE FRANCIS (in November 2016, and a bigger perishing ass it would be hard to find than this pernicious Peronist “liberation” priest)

"The fact of the matter is he (the Pope) has no business declaring himself infallible on anything. It's totally preposterous and presumptuous. It's the most legitimate criticism Protestants have of the Church." -- ROY CAMERON (my Twoot friend "Roy Cam" who's a Catholic himself and has studied this stuff extensively. He said this in March 2023) 

Popularity                                                                                                                         

“My ambition nowadays is to please some of the people some of the time.” -- TONY BLAIR                                (in Jan 2007, when he was in a bit of a political pickle. This is what you get when you combine “grace under fire” with “a stiff upper lip”.)

“There are more Americans who could identify Kim Kardashian's ass on sight than a Caravaggio. Popularity isn't all.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“People say Putin's the most popular guy in Russia. I say 'Yeah, I'd be popular too if I owned NBC'.” – GEORGE W. BUSH

"You're not truly popular until you're hated." -- LLOYD EVANS    (I'm not sure if this is true -- or even what it means -- but it sure sounds cool....) 

Population (“Over-Population”)                                                                                   

“There are far too many people going on about over-population.” – NICK NEWMAN                                                (all-round English funnyman, writer and cartoonist)

“Since Obama took office, it's been fashionable to quote Mrs. Thatcher's great line: 'The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money.'  But we're way beyond that. That's a droll quip when you're on mid-20th-century European fertility rates, but we've advanced to the next stage: We've run out of other people, period.” – MARK STEYN

“Conservatives see people as assets, and progressives see people as liabilities.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Just as immigration begets immigration, population begets population.” -- CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL 

“We are not threatened by there being too many people. We are threatened by people who say there are too many people.” – ROBERT ZUBRIN (in Sept. 2015)

 "The human predicament is not one wherein there is a production department in one place, engaged in a race to provide enough food to multiplying billions of useless eaters somewhere else. The human race is not on the dole. The human race feeds itself, and is doing so better and better all the time, as its forces increase." -- ROBERT ZUBRIN (the Pres. of Pioneer Energy, a "senior fellow" with the Center for Security Policy, and the author of "Energy Victory" and “Merchants Of Despair”.)

“For decades an ugly Malthusian compulsion has infected the Left, leading it to think we should measure the value of life by its impact on the environment or its productivity. The implication is stupefying, anti-humanist, and immoral.” – DAVID HARSANYI            (In NR in October 2014)

“When someone tells me the world is overpopulated, I demand they name names.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

"There's just enough of me, but way too much of you." --  P. J. O'ROURKE 

“Demography is the key factor. If you are not able to maintain yourself biologically, how do you expect to maintain yourself economically, politically, and militarily? It's impossible. The answer of letting people from other countries in – that could be an economic solution, but it's not a solution of your real sickness, that you are not able to maintain your own civilization.” – VICTOR ORBAN (the “populist-rightist” PM of Hungary, in 2016)

"The future will be about finding a way to reduce the population. Of course we will not be able to execute people or build camps.We get rid of them by making them believe it is for their own good. We will find or cause something, a pandemic targeting certain people, a real economic crisis or not, a virus affecting the old or the elderly, it doesn't matter, the weak and the fearful will succumb to it. The stupid will believe in it and ask to be treated. We will have taken care of having panned the treatment, a treatment that will be the solution. The selection of idiots will therefore be done by itself: they will go to the slaughterhouse alone." -- JACQUES ATTALI ("Of course". Monsieur Attalli is a major Frogue egghead, and was a senior adviser to Socialist President Mitterand. And these chilling words appear in his 1996 collection, "Verbatim, 1981-1983".) 

“Populism”

“All populists may not be barbarians (although they usually are), but all barbarians have populist tendencies.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“It seems silly to disagree with the people when they’re right simply because they’re the people.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“The great emotional appeal of populism is not that it promises a better tomorrow. It’s almost exactly the opposite. Populism is powerful because it is a lament against change, and expression of grief at the rapidity with which old ways are being trampled by the rush toward the new.” – JOHN PODHORETZ

"Our elites think life is a talk show. The public thinks life is a reality show." -- BILL KRISTOL

"The problem for people complaining about 'populism' is that as long as systems are rigged, especially by central banks and for donors to politicians, then you will have populist revolts. Political classes should want to clean up their mess lest what comes next." -- GRAY CONNOLLY (an Australian lawyer -- an excellent worldly fellow,)

“That's the thing about populists – they're popular.” – FREDDY GRAY (deputy editor at the UK SPECTATOR)

"The mark of a populist isn’t his net worth but his relationship to the establishment, his rejection of the ideologies, fashions, clichés, and manners of the political and social and cultural elite, his attitude toward the capacities of ordinary people to manage their daily affairs." -- MATTHEW CONTINETTI

“ 'Populism' is a scare word meant to delegitimize rebellions against political establishments and mainstream elites. It draws together under the same big, scary tent parties and causes that have little in common otherwise. There is no 'populist' ideology that unites these various dissidents the way Marxist ideology united international socialists for more than a century." -- JOHN O'SULLIVAN

"One definition of populism, indeed, is that it is the democratic response to bureaucratic rules (and rule)." -- JOHN O"SULLIVAN

"Socialists like equality right up to the point where their political enemies get it. Then it becomes far-right populism and a danger to democracy." -- ALICE SMITH (a woman on the Twoot who claims to be Adam Smith's great-great-great-grand-daughter. Me, I'm skeptical... but, hell, why not?) 

“The cultural signals from the powerful are almost unthinkingly hostile to majority populations.” – CHARLES MOORE

“Populism is an illiberal democratic response to undemocratic liberalism.” – CAS MUDDE (A Dutch political scientist, and with a name like that, you just knew he had to be Dutch)

“The great undiscussed problem of modern democracy is that liberalism without democracy is the system of government towards which the West has been moving for a generation or more.” – JOHN O'SULLIVAN (in December 2016)

"If the point of a coalition is to win, so that its supporters could rule, pre-populist movement conservatism had done a very poor job for decades." -- HENRY OLSEN       (a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center; author of "The Working-Class Republican". In NR, January 2018)

"The reason populist candidates do electorally is they don't play by media rules. When the rules are stacked against you, that's the only way to play." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

“Populism is on the rise quite simply because liberalism has become intolerable.” -- PIERS MORGAN                                                                           (in an interview with Ben Shapiro, in August 2019)

"Any fool can write learned language. The vernacular is the real test." -- C.S. LEWIS

"Populism is a disaffection with a liberal program which has been foisted on populations who did not consciously vote for it and who, having gradually awakened, will not vote for it any longer." -- ROD LIDDLE

"As far as the left is concerned, Populism (is) a nasty, right-wing, male thing." -- ROD LIDDLE

Pornography (& Child Pornography)

"Some people who possess child porn are in this for either the collection, or are people who are loners and find status in their participation in the community." -- (JUDGE) KETANJI BROWN-JACKSON (who, God help us, by the time you're reading this, is sitting, permanently on our Supreme Court)

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description 'hard-core pornography', and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it," -- JUSTICE POTTER STEWART (in 1964 -- and this quote was a household saying back in 1964, but that was a long time ago, which is why I include it here.)

Portugal

“The Portuguese language is impossible: whatever you think -- is wrong.” – JANE JOLIS (She memorably told me this via Skype, in April 2015, from some little town in Portugal)

“Within minutes of entering an ex-Portuguese colony, it always strikes me that the Portuguese seemed more interested in achieving a certain quality of life than in building empires.” – PETER MOORE (The Australian travel writer)

Possessions

“Fear drives us to take possession of too much.” – JEAN-CHRISTOPHE RUFIN                (French author was here talking about packing for a pilgrimage, but it applies to “stuff” in general)

"It was not until I got married that I needed anything... I realized that if there were no women, there would be no economy." – PAUL JOLIS

"You learn to enjoy not what you have, but what you remember." -- ALBERTO MANGUEL (the Argentine-Canadian literary wallah) 

"The second half of life is a long process of getting rid of things." -- F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

"You need to be possessive of the things you don't possess. But once you possess them you can afford not to be possessive any more." -- ROBERT LITTELL

Possible/Impossible

"Politics allows people to vote for the impossible, which may be one reason why politicians are often more popular than economists, who keep reminding people that there is no free lunch and that there are no 'solutions' but only trade-offs." -- THOMAS SOWELL

“Every noble work is at first impossible." -- THOMAS CARLYLE

Posterity

"It's easy enough to die if the things you care about are going to survive." -- GEORGE ORWELL    (in his 1939 novel "Coming Up For Air")

Post Office, (The US)

“If there were not already a Post Office, nobody would bother to invent it. If you were evaluating it as a business, you'd probably calculate that its real estate was worth more than all of its business operations combined.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Can we stop calling e-mail ‘mail?’ Is there any real relationship between e-mail and the postal system? One is this hyperkinetic, super digital, hyper-speed form of communication. The other is this dazed and confused distant branch of the Cub Scouts. They cover the streets in embarrassing shorts and these jackets with meaningless patches and victory medals.” – JERRY SEINFELD

Poverty

“Poverty is no disgrace to a man, but it is confoundedly inconvenient.” – SYDNEY SMITH (English cleric and wit, 1771-1845)

“In a war against hunger, what do you do? Shoot the lunch?” – P. J. O’ROURKE

“These days, the culture of the poor – and not just the poor – consists primarily of looking at pictures of people who have suddenly been dragged into a world of extreme luxury. These days, almost everybody feels poor, even if they’re not. So of course it’s not surprising that lots of people seek oblivion.” – WILLIAM LEITH (an English writer in October 2007)

“If you want to preserve heritage, you must keep poverty.” --  LAURENT A. RAMPON (the French former chief architect and director of the “Cultural Preservation Office” in Luang Prabang, Communist Laos, and a more disgusting statement you will look hard to find.)

“People ask, ‘Why is there poverty in the world?’ It’s a silly question. Poverty is the default human condition. It is the factory preset of this mortal coil. As individuals and as a species, we are born naked and penniless, bereft of skills or possessions. Likewise, in his civilizational infancy man was poor, in every sense. He lived in ignorance, filth, hunger, and pain, and he died very young, either by violence or disease. The interesting question isn’t ‘Why is there poverty?’ It’s ‘Why is there wealth?’ Or: ‘Why is there prosperity here but not there?’” – JONAH GOLDBERG (the tragedy is that this even has to be said, much less repeated, ad nauseam, for it to sink in…)

“The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.” - WILLEM DE KOONING (the famous artiste)

“Today's 'poverty line' measures inequality, not want. It is set at 60 per cent of average income. If everyone saw his income quadruple tomorrow, the poverty rate would not budge.” – CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL (He was referring to Germany, here, in 2011, but the same principle of measuring “poverty” applies in the US)

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as ‘bad luck.’” -- ROBERT A. HEINLEIN (The great American sci-fi author, and this is in honor of His Highness Comrade-Commissar Barack Obeyme who proved he understands economics about as well as he can throw a baseball, when he announced: "We had reversed the recession, avoided a depression, gotten the economy moving again, but over the last six months we’ve had a run of bad luck.” Right. You ineffable dork. The economy was "moving again" 6 months ago? Or at any point in your interregnum? You malignant peabrain -- forget economics, try a smidgeon of reality, dude....)

"Poverty in Egypt, or anywhere else, is not very difficult to explain. There are three basic causes: People are poor because they cannot produce anything highly valued by others. They can produce things highly valued by others but are hampered or prevented from doing so. Or, they volunteer to be poor." — WALTER E. WILLIAMS (the eminent black economics professor at George Mason University, and sometime replacement for Rush Limbaugh on his radio program.)

“The 'poor' are to Liberalism roughly what the 'Proletariat' is to Communism – a formalistic device for legitimating the assumption of power.” -- JOSEPH SOBRAN

“America is one of the best places in all the world to be poor.” – JAY NORDLINGER

"You can still stay damn poor owning your own land." -- J. P. DONLEAVY (takes some doing, but if anybody could manage this... he could.)

“The most troubling aspect of social policy toward the poor is not how much it costs, but what it has bought.” -- CHARLES MURRAY

"It is one thing to be against poverty; it is something else to be against inequality. One could end poverty and still have plenty of inequality; one could end inequality by impoverishing everyone." -- ROGER CLEGG (Clegg is the boss of something called The Center For Equal Opportunity, and he served in the Departments of Justice of Reagan and Papa Bush. But I'm not sure he's completely right about ever "ending" poverty -- in a land where everyone has 2 million devalued buck$, the man with only 1 million is "poor")

“If we really wanted to end poverty, we'd tax it.” – SCOTT WILSON (a brilliant ex-American soldier and the only wiser commenter to NR’s “The Corner” than me.)

“I am for doing good to the poor. But I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. I observed that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.” – BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

"Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over (sic)  humanity,  nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well fed." -- HERMAN MELVILLE

«Communists really love poor people. That’s why they created so many of them.» – JAMES TARANTO

“The (Anglican) bishops could never quite make up their mind about poverty. They said it was dreadful when Thatcher 'condemned' people to it, but then got even angrier when under her, most of them got much richer.” – CHARLES MOORE

"Being poor is not having too little, it is wanting more." -- SENECA (The Roman writer and adviser to the Emperor Nero -- who ended up forcing Seneca to commit suicide.)

“There is no disgrace in the admission of poverty, but rather in the failure to take active measures to escape it.” – PERICLES (part of his famous Funeral Oration in 430 B.C.)

“Poverty these days means whatever the statisticians in Washington decide they want it to mean.” – THOMAS SOWELL (in September 2015)

"You know who has far less poverty than the Swedes, Norwegians and Dutch? Swedes, Norwegians and Dutch in the United States." -- DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE

 "Being poor sucks, and no regulation is going to change that." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"Socialism's answer to poverty is the equivalent of helping wheelchair users by cutting everyone's legs off." -- KONSTANTIN KASIN (in his "an Immigrant's Love Letter To The West")

“The single biggest cause of poverty since 1970 has been the dissolution of both the nuclear (and for that matter extended) family. It is a heart-breaking, self-inflicted wound, but no liberal will so much as mention it as a causal factor in poverty, still less accept – as every single longitudinal study has shown – that single parenthood means egregious outcomes for the kids, in terms of mental health, employment, drug use, criminality, earning power. Indeed, we are still enjoined not to stigmatize single mothers. OK, we should not do so. But we should make it clear that single parenthood is not a desirable outcome, for the mums, for the kids, for the families.” – ROD LIDDLE (in March, 2021)

"There are two things you should know about the poor: They tend to smell, and they are ungrateful." -- DOROTHY DAY (1897-1980, an American leftist woman who's described  online as a "journalist, social activist and anarchist who, after a bohemian  youth, became a Catholic without abandoning her social and anarchist activism."  Big woop.)

Power

“Only power can check power… But the worship of power is not fully separable from cowardice.” – JAMES BURNHAM (from his book THE MACHIAVELLIANS)

“I found the crown of France in the gutter and picked it up on the tip of my sword.” – NAPOLEON BONAPARTE (not sure that “Power” is the perfect place for this, but it was too cool to leave out…)

“The state need not own what it wants to control.” – NICHOLAS RIDLEY (one of Maggie Thatcher’s cooler – and more Machiavellian – ministers)

“No one believes in the wisdom of government, but they do believe it has a certain brute power.” – PEGGY NOONAN

“Natural leaders don’t have any will to power.” – GEOFFREY HOUSEHOLD (the English thriller-writer)

“You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power – he's free again.” – ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN

“Power corrupts, but lack of power corrupts absolutely.” – ADLAI STEVENSON (The egghead liberal Senator from Illinois who twice lost to Ike, reputed, largely by his liberal supporters, to have been “witty” – a trait which always escaped me until I ran into this.....)

“Success comes more easily for the one who promises power than for the one who offers only truth. People have only a circumscribed interest in truth. But their interest in power is insatiable.” – ROGER SCRUTON (the late Brit author and visiting AEI scholar, in August 2011)

“Those who have least power in the decline of a State, are priests, soldiers, the mothers of many children, the lovers of one woman, and saints.” -- HILAIRE BELLOC (in 1911)

“Somebody must have power in the state, and it is idle and academic to debate whether those who have power should or should not also have wealth, since they will, in fact, take it. Either you all people to have power because they are rich, or they become rich through the possession of power. It does to make much difference in practice. Therefore all the common talk about the new equality and the abolition of privilege did not seem to have much meaning. That talk was usually to be heard from the lips of the left-wing writers and politicians who were at the very moment of uttering it busy with establishing new privileges for themselves and their children.” – CHRISTOPHER HOLLIS (in his “Death of a Gentleman”, 1937)

“The Left worships power, because it feels that power can be used to Do Good, and Absolute Power, could it only be achieved, because it could eradicate evil. The record of all human history does not suffice to eradicate this delusion; neither will the threat of death nor of our country's dissolution.” -- DAVID MAMET

"If you want to get away with wielding true malevolent power, be boring. Journalists hate writing about boring people.” -- JON RONSON (young, er, cutting edge English journalist from Manchester)

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” – MILOS KUNDERA

“Great men are almost always bad men. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.” – LORD ACTON       (the “power corrupts” guy”)

“The love of Liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.” – WILLIAM HAZLITT (English author, 1778-1830)

"No one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end." -- GEORGE ORWELL

“Being powerful is like being a lady; if you have to tell people you are, you aren't.” – MARGARET THATCHER

"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." – ABRAHAM LINCOLN

"They say that knowledge is power. Power is power. People say differently don't understand power. Or knowledge. Knowledge is what gets you killed." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“It is the one thing men want. Not knowledge, not virtue, but power.” – ANTHONY BURGESS

“The politician who accepts power reluctantly and uses it sparingly is to be found only in Greek myths and in Shakespeare.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

“Casting power aside without regrets is unheard of in real life.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

"There is no truth, only power" -- ANTONIO GRAMSCI (the Italian communist boss who bestowed upon the grateful world the whole "march through the institutions" delight.)  

“It is not that power corrupts, but that power is a magnet to the corruptible.” – FRANK HERBERT

"Politicians always find it easier to take on new powers than to give such powers up." – BORIS JOHNSON

“Power is neither male nor female.” – KATHARINE GRAHAM                (the old Generalissima of THE WASHINGTON POST)

"The difference between the abuse of power and the use of power continues to dance around the fine line of semantics and chance." -- E. HOWARD HUNT

“The illusion of power was better than none at all.” – LAWRENCE JAMES (referring to the decline of the British Empire)

“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false face for the urge to rule it.” - H. L. MENCKEN

"Nearly all men can stand adversity. But if you want to test a man's character, give him power." -- ABRAHAM LINCOLN

“Nothing in the entire human experience is more addictive than the exercise of power over others." -- JACK JOLIS       

Power, “Soft”

“Soft power cannot work without hard power to back it up.” – CHARLES POWELL (the ex-policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher)

“Moral force without a man-of-war was moral farce.” – NIGEL BARLEY

 (an English anthropologist and author of the very funny novel “The Coast”)

Pragmatism/Practicality

“In an imperfect world men bent on doing good – and who have responsibility for the welfare of a great many others – must know occasionally how to be bad, and to savor it.” – NICOLO MACHIAVELLI (this, O beloveds, is why we have the adjective “Machiavellian”.)

“I wish to be useful, and every kind of service necessary to the public good becomes honorable by being necessary.” – NATHAN HALE (the inscription written inside a book Ronald Reagan gave to his friend, CIA Director Bill Casey).

"There is no such thing as a Western thing or an Eastern thing: If it works, everyone wants it." -- HERNANDO DE SOTO

"Pragmatism (conventionally defined) about means is generally fine, within limits of course. But pragmatism about ends isn’t pragmatism at all, it’s Nietzschean nihilism." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

 “Give me an asshole who can play.” – BUDDY RICH                                                                                                               (The star jazz drummer who apparently didn’t give a damn about the “moral character” of the people in his band)

“We want to make poverty more rare. They want to make poverty more comfortable.” – VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE (1 March 2019)

"The progressive view is that the organs of government (and by extension the class of people who dominate them) must set as their task the promulgation of rules about how we should live and how we should desire to live, and that those rules can be tailored or revised in practically any way that is dictated by pragmatism. Setting aside that what they call pragmatism is always and everywhere a mask for ideology." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“I’ve gone through life on the assumption that the best available will have to suffice.” – WILLIAM HOOD (a former American counterintelligence officer, and spy writer)

"You don't have to believe in the trolley company to let it take you where you want to go." -- LEON TROTSKY 

“Practicality is kinder than sympathy.” – STEPHEN FRY

Praise

"Praise that you squeeze out of people is worth about ten cents on the dollar." -- JOHN UPDIKE

Prayer

“If god is perfect, then requesting any change in the status quo, which is one of the main aspects of prayer, must be a kind of blasphemy. If, on the other hand, everything is pre-ordained from on high, prayer is futile and flies in the face of god's will.” – CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS (Hitch went out of his way not to capitalize God. As for me, I sort of sympathize with him, but think it's even simpler than all that – it just seems to me that any God who requires all this worship isn't any sort of worthy deity in the first place....)

 “There are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers.” -- ST. TERESA OF ÁVILA (1525-1582)

“Prayer itself takes faith, Father; and I’m not sure I ever had it; I don’t think I even want it. It’s like singing, flying, dancing or writing poetry; some do and some don’t; some can and some can’t.” – WILLIAM WHARTON

“Don’t pray for victory. Pray to do the best you can.” – GEN. GEORGE S. PATTON, JR. (to his troops. Patton was a big believer in prayer – he famously commissioned one to stop the rain during the Battle of the Bulge... and it worked.)

Prediction (Forecasting)

“Forecasters tell you little about the future and a lot about the forecaster.” – WARREN BUFFETT

“Using statistics is like driving a car down a road with the windshield blacked out, guided only by your rear-view mirror. Science cannot predict the future, which is why we are fortunate to have such omniscient politicians.” – RICHARD FERNANDEZ (In PJMedia)

“One day, you'll wake up and you will not recognize your country anymore.” – GLENN BECK

"The fact that we can predict eclipses of the sun and moon does not mean we can predict revolutions." -- KARL POPPER (this seems so self-evident, I almost left it out...)

"There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get significant market share. No chance." -- STEVE BALLMER (Microsoft CEO... in 2007)

"By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the internet's impact on the economy will have been no greater than the fax machine's." -- PAUL KRUGMAN (the Nobel Prize-winning genius, hah hah I don't think... in 1998)

"Declines in the stock market have correctly predicted nine of the past five recessions." -- PAUL SAMUELSON

"What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass." -- WILLIAM LAMB, 2nd VISCOUNT MELBOURNE (British Whig Prime Minister, 1835-1841, and fast becoming one of my favorite historical statesmen. In these few words he pretty much sums up the entire history of the political Left -- even before it happened.)

Pre-emption

“It is better to use force when you should rather than when you must; last resort means no other, and by that time the level of force and the risk involved may have multiplied many times over.” – GEORGE SCHULTZ (who was both Reagan's Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of State)

"The American people and are viscerally opposed to the idea of pre-emptive war. In the absence of a threat, pre-emptive war looks to them very much like naked aggression." -- NEAL B. FREEMAN (in June 2006. And I -- or my, ahem, good pal Jack Jolis -- addressed this very vexed matter in a, if I say so myself, excellent 14 January 2014 article in NATIONAL REVIEW titled "Preemption:Thankless Wisdom" -- that you should all immediately find on the dread Google....) 

“The choice confronting Americans is whether to remain the kind of country that will act before its back is against the wall, or whether it will accept whatever kind of security environment emerges in the absence of American leadership. The advantage of being proactive is that the United States can respond to threats before they achieve maximum lethality. The disadvantage is that Americans will never know, even in hindsight, whether a war was truly necessary.” – DAVID ADESNIK                           (of the AEI, in THE WEEKLY STANDARD in August 2014)

“If you say something in advance – if you describe a problem as it arises, people always turn on you because they don't want to hear about it. But when it's too late to do anything, they will then turn around and say that you were right. That's human nature.” – ROGER SCRUTON

“You can’t defend against what our enemies might do without studying what they believe.” – ANDREW J. McCARTHY

"With a crime of this sort (treason), unless you take measures against it being committed, it is too late -- appealing to the law achieves nothing, because once the city has been captured, the victims are left with nothing." -- CATO THE YOUNGER (95-46 BC, real name: Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis)

 "It is always better to be safe and ridiculed than vulnerable and praised." -- VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

"There's a phenomenological problem which is that benefits are invisible." -- RORY SUTHERLAND (this is THE problem -- if it is a problem -- with intelligence/espionage. In fact, one of the psychological tests they give you when you're joining the Agency's Clandestine Service is whether you can work... without getting credit for it.)

“Moral force without a man-of-war was moral farce.” – NIGEL BARLEY (an English anthropologist and author of the very funny novel “The Coast”)

Prejudice

“Prejudice can be a means whereby a man makes virtue his habit.” – EDMUND BURKE

« Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. » -- EDMUND BURKE

“One of the risks of increased exposure to blacks is that it has placed whites in a position to discover which of their preconceived views are true.” – DINESH D’SOUZA

“Challenges are what they are. They don’t organize themselves around our pieties. If a problem has a race/ethnicity/national-origin element, the solution has to account for it.” – ANDREW C. MCCARTHY

"Let me assure readers I am totally without prejudice. I do not prejudge. I have formed my dislikes on the basis of long experience." -- PAUL JOHNSON (in 2004. The dude abides.)

"I don't have a prejudiced bone in my body. I would shoot you as quick as I would shoot any white man." – JOHN WAYNE

“Most of what is pejoratively labeled as ‘prejudice’ should, in my opinion, more properly – and more accurately -- be called ‘postjudice’.” – JACK JOLIS

" ‘Prejudice’ just means ‘pre-judgement- (which is sometimes necessary but rarely wise) -- I must prefer postjudice.” — JACK JOLIS

“Prejudice is free but discrimination has costs.” – THOMAS SOWELL

"If we were to wake up some morning and find that everyone was the same race, creed and color, we would find some other cause for prejudice by noon" – GEORGE D. AIKEN (George Aiken was a squishy Republican senator from Vermont (back in the days when Vermont was still a recognizably American state), who was a big dove regarding our strenuous efforts in Vietnam, Republic of and was generally about as useful as tits on a bull, but he did say one hilariously memorable thing: When we were in the process of developing our first stealth bomber, he said: "Why don't we not build the thing, announce we did, and save ourselves a couple of billion bucks?")

“Everyone is prejudiced, but racism is actually pretty rare.” – WILL SMITH (the  thesp)

“There's a difference between being prejudiced and being a connoisseur, or archivist, of prejudice but it's an uncomfortable line to draw.” – LLOYD EVANS

“Prejudice against those who are different is part of humanity’s basic programming, not an intellectual invention.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“I think one man is just as good as another so long as he’s honest and decent and not a ni**er or a Chinaman. Uncle Wills says that the Lord made a white man from dust, a ni**er from mud and then threw what was left and it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do I.” -- HARRY S TRUMAN (in 1911, when he was 27 years old, in a letter to Bess, his bride-to-be. And it was me what added the asteri*k*s.)

“Though the Indians are often sharply critical of Americans and Europeans for our racial prejudices, they are the most color-conscious people I’ve ever met. The caste system is attuned to skin-tone. Indian newspapers still carry a lot of advertising by young men and women looking for prospective spouses. Skin tone is one of the first attributes mentioned.” – DUANE “DEWEY” CLARRIDGE (the CIA honcho who was, among much else, “responsible” for India for awhile)

Preparation

"There are certain peope for whose arrivalonewould like to be prepared -- Hitler, your mother-in-law, yourself when you're high and suddenly confronted by a mirror." -- JESSI JEZEWSKA STEVENS     (in her 2024 collection of stories called "Ghost Pains")

Present, The

"The intrigues and cock-ups of the past are far easier to believe by looking around at the present." -- ALLAN MALLINSON (author and retired British Army officer)

“Presentism”
"Presentism is judging everyone from the past by the standards of the present. It's like getting mad at yourself now, for not knowing what you know now -- when you were ten." -- BILL MAHER

Presidency, (The U.S.)

“He shouldn't form too high an opinion of himself. For instance, he should recognize that America is a great deal that has nothing to do with the presidency — millions of men, women and children who deserve the opportunity to dream their dreams without any reference at all to the man who occupies the White House. The best-run country in the world is Switzerland. And I have often amused myself while there by asking casually what is the name of the president of Switzerland. Inevitably, there is an embarrassed silence — no one can remember his name.” – WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

“All day long the right hon. Lord of us all sits listening solemnly to bores and quacks… It takes four days’ hard work to concoct a speech without a sensible word in it. Next day a dam must be opened somewhere… The Presidential automobile runs over a dog. It rains….” – H. L. MENCKEN

“Anyone who will do what you have to do to become president shouldn’t be allowed to be president.” – DAVID BRODER

"Electing someone as our President who is purely ego driven is a mistake we cannot afford." – ALEC BALDWIN                                                                                (the point of this otherwise rather anodyne quote is that the ineffable Mr. Baldwin is one of the greatest egomaniacs the human race has ever been lumbered with.)

“The Presidency is not a bed of roses.” – JAMES K. POLK (Our greatest ever 1-term president. Well, until Trump came along, that is....)

“Liberal presidents tend to want to change America while conservative presidents tend to talk about the need to change the government.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“He'll sit here and he'll say 'Do this! Do that!' And nothing will happen. Poor Ike – it won't be a bit like the Army. He'll find it very frustrating.” – HARRY S TRUMAN                                                                                                                (His advice to incoming Pres. Eisenhower)

"That's the good thing about being president, I can do whatever I want." – BARACK OBAMA                                        (He actually said this – on 11 Feb. '14)

"If I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in, a front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff, and then I could sort of deliver the lines, but somebody else was doing all the talking and ceremony, I'd be fine with that." -- BARACK OBAMA (to his fellow leftist Stéfane Colbaire)

"The broker America gets, the longer its presidential motorcade gets. If you don't got it, flaunt it, baby!" – MARK STEYN

“We need a president who is part warrior, part frontier sheriff, part street fighter, part bully, part diplomat and the stubbornest s.o.b. in town.” – CHARLIE DANIELS                                                                                         (The late singing star, in Dec. 2015)

"Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There's nothing to do but stand there and take it." -- LYNDON B. JOHNSON

“Of all the forty-odd (sic) presidents, handsome Warren Harding was in a sense the noblest, for only he, upon being notified that he had done a bad job, had the grace to die of a broken heart.” -- JOHN UPDIKE                                 (writing in 1992)

“Truth isn’t what we want from Presidents. We have historians for that.” -- JOHN UPDIKE

“Now, as soon as a president is reelected he is called a lame duck, his opposition starts talking about impeachment, and pollsters keep asking us if we hate him.” -- FLORENCE KING                                           (in... 2007!)

“The modern American presidency is the love child of Caesar Augustus and P. T. Barnum.” -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“If American democracy is Lord of the Flies as presented by C-SPAN, then the presidency is the conch — the power to dominate the conversation, the power to convene, a symbol of legitimacy. While one tribe glories in possession of that bauble, the other cannot bear being deprived of it.” -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON  

"The white House is an environment that magnifies character flaws." -- RONALD KESSLER (in his 1995 "Inside The White House")

"There is an unreality to the White House that does make you think you are above the law."  -- JAMES R. JONES (Lyndon Johnson's Assistant Chief of Staff)

"The Constitution provides for every accidental contingency in the executive office -- except a vacancy in the mind of the president." -- SEN. JOHN SHERMAN (of Ohio, the brother of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman and the author of the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act)

“You have no idea how depressing and fatiguing it is to live in the same house where you work." — PRES. CHESTER A. ARTHUR (who lived and worked in the White House 1881-1885)

Presley, Elvis:                                                                                                            

”I hold no grudges. Elvis didn’t steal any music from anyone. He just had his own interpretation of the music he’d grown up on, same was true for me, the same true for everyone. I think Elvis had integrity. In fact, more than anyone, he was the guy who kicked the revolution into high gear. What most people don’t know is that this boy was serious about what he was doing, he was carried away by it. When I was in Memphis with my band, he used to stand in the wings and watch us perform. To me they didn’t make a mistake when they called him the King.” – B. B. KING

“Before Elvis there was nothing.” – JOHN LENNON

“Hearing Elvis for the first time was like busting out of jail.” – BOB DYLAN

Press,(The)

“Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.” –  ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN (at his famous 1978 Harvard commencement address… and things ain’t gotten any better in the 21st, baby, thass for shit sure…)

“American newspapers are invariably grey, at best worthy and more often than not unreadable, packed with proselytizing liberal opinion written in laboured prose. American journalists take themselves far more seriously than their Fleet Street counterparts and for the most part have surrendered to the forces of political correctness.” – RICHARD LITTLEJOHN (Brit “Hack” journalist, voted Britain’s “Newspaper Columnist of the Year” in 1997 and also an author. England’s Steve Dunleavy…)

“Sometime what you read in the mainstream press is actually true – sometimes the weather, and frequently the date.” – FRED GRANDY (WMAL Washington D.C. radio talk show host, and ex-Republican congressman from Iowa. Before which he played “Gofer” in the ‘70s sitcom “The Love Boat”. He’s a damn good guy – got fired by WMAL for saying something they considered to be “Islamophobic”.)

“It takes a lot of dead Chinese to make the front page.” – MICHAEL FRAYN (English playwright and author)

“Editorial writers as the people who come down from the hill after the battle to shoot the wounded." – MURRAY KEMPTON (The long-time Editor of the New York Post pre-Murdoch, when it was a liberal paper. Cool quote, though, and he was a pal of Bill Buckley, so he must have been one of those rare OK liberals….)

“I didn’t realize what a son of bitch I am until I read the newspapers about me.” – BARRY GOLDWATER (after the 1964 election)

"I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are. If I killed them all there would be news from Hell before breakfast." - GEN. WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN                                                                                          (the Union General who drank and smoked almost as much as Grant and who starred in “Gone    With The Wind” and who was named after the famous tank.)

“It appears we have appointed our worst generals to command forces, and our most gifted and brilliant to edit newspapers! In fact, I discovered by reading newspapers that these editor/geniuses plainly saw all my strategic defects from the start, yet failed to inform me until it was too late. Accordingly, I'm readily willing to yield my command to these obviously superior intellects, and I'll, in turn, do my best for the cause by writing editorials - after the fact.” – ROBERT E. LEE                (in 1863. And, see above.)

“America has always been an assertocracy, where anybody with enough chutzpah and cojones can con the press into believing damn near anything.” – STEVE SAILER

“A foreign correspondent without supreme self-importance is rather like a politician without vanity.” – JUSTIN MAROZZI (an English writer in October 2007)

“People believe what they read in the papers until it’s about something they know.” – SIMON HOGGART (The English columnist, author and journalist, and boy, is this true, or what?!)

“One big thing about reporters: they might be alcoholic malcontents, frustrated screenwriters, snarky Harvard boys afraid of inanimate objects, and hallucinating politicians-in-waiting, but there was one thing they never wanted to be, and that was reporters.” – MICHAEL WALSH (the thriller writer)

“Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading the newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.” – BEN HECHT

“Without its tabloid newspapers, Britain would be France.” – TOBY YOUNG

“The institutionalization of the press as extraparliamentary opposition has turned it into the fourth branch of government. In some ways, it is the most powerful because, unlike the other three, it is constitutionally unregulated.” – CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

“Again and again I am covered by reporters who have literally no idea what I am talking about.” – NEWT GINGRICH (when he was still a congressman from Georgia, and Speaker of the House, 1995-1999)

“The press loves reading about the press – it's the one thing we really understand and know about.” – HUGO RIFKIND (Scottish journalist)

“In medieval Times, man had the Rack. Today we have the Press.” – OSCAR WILDE

“The government admits that it is a government. The press pretends that it is not.” – MARK HELPRIN

"The point is that many in the press are every bit as corrupt as conservatives have accused them of being. The good news is, it’s almost over. The broadcast networks, the big daily newspapers, the newsweeklies — they’re done. It’s only a matter of time, and everyone who works there knows it.” – TUCKER CARLSON

"The people believe what the press (media) tells them they believe." -- GEORGE ORWELL

"To rinse the gutters of public life you need a gutter press." -- BORIS JOHNSON (when he was still the Conservative Mayor of London, and before that the ex-editor of the {UK}  SPECTATOR)

"If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you're misinformed." -- DENZEL WASHINGTON

«This country started on its long decline the day newspapers began expecting reporters to have college degrees.» – RICK SHAEFER (a letter-writer from Kent, Washington state, to NR, in August 2017)

«And above all, the press, not elected by anyone, acts high-handedly and has amassed more power than the legistlative, executive, or judicial power. And in this free press itself, it is not true freedom of opinion that dominates, but the dictates of the political fashion of the moment, which lead to a surprising uniformity of opinion that dominates, but the dictates of the political fashion of the moment, which lead to a suurprising uniformity of opinion.» – ALEKSANDER SOLZHENITSYN

"The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits -- a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to  curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage." -- HUNTER S. THOMPSON (in "Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas")

"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." -- THOMAS JEFFERSON

"But the newspapers. What words can convey my sorrow at their transmutation into organs of state propaganda? Worse than that, they have become unashamed merchants of hatred and panic." -- DAVID MAMET

“I’m afraid the Fourth Estate has become a Fifth Column.” — CARL GOTTLIEB (my X-pal, the ex-newspaperman, in Sept 2024)

Pressure

“Pressure is something you feel when you don't know what the hell you're doing.” – PEYTON MANNING

Pretense

“It’s very tiring having to pretend you like something.” – ALAN JUDD

Pretentiousness

“I just heard a woman order ‘a dusting of quinoa’ and I joined the NRA” – ALISON FORNS                           (The American stand-up comedienne)

”My accountants can't understand how it costs so much to look so cheap." – DOLLY PARTON

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” – KURT VONNEGUT  (in “Mother Night”)

 "High-end wine, there's a huge amount of bullshit around it. Wine tastes better if you tell people it's expensive." -- RORY SUTHERLAND (I know this first-hand to be true. When I was social chairman of my chapter of ΑΔΦ, brothers would show off in front of their dates and complain about all the cheap booze that I'd buy -- which I in fact did, to make ends meet. But then an older brother gave me a useful tip -- I bought one-each bottles of really expensive stuff, and kept re-filling the empties thereafter with the same old rotgut -- and those same pretentious guys started ostentatiously complimenting me for "FINALLY buying the good stuff!")

Prices and Price-Fixing

“And, by the way, why is price-fixing a public service when the government does it and a great big crime when Wall Street CEOs get together on a golf course?” – P. J. O'ROURKE

“The price of free stuff ends up being terribly high.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"Things are only expensive or cheap by contrast with some preconceived expectation." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

Pride

“Pride and hauteur were my predominant failings, but they had the good effect of keeping me out of bad company.” – LOUISA JOHNSON ADAMS (John Quincy’s future wife, in 1795, when she was still 20 years old, commenting on the contemporary social scene in London, where her father was US Ambassador.)

“You can always rely that another man’s pride will do much of your work for you.” – STEPHEN FRY (very true. A corollary to this is “flattery”, which I’ve often used tactically to get someone to do    what I want him or her to do.)

"Memory says I did this. Pride says I could not have. Pride wins." -- FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

"Pride's a queer thing. It puffs a small man up but that's nothing to a big man who's afraid of looking small." -- GRAHAM SWIFT 

"Memory says yes. Pride says no. Memory yields." -- FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

"Pride (the good old pre-homosexual kind) is just the happy face of... peer-pressure." -- JACK JOLIS

Princeton University

“A large college, held in much repute by the neighboring states. From the appearance of the students, however, and the course of studies they seem to be engaged in, like all the other American colleges I ever saw, it better deserves the title of a grammar school, than a college.” – ISAAC WELD (in his “Travels Through The States Of North America, 1795-1797”)

Principle

“Gentlemen, those are my principles. And if you don’t like them, I have others.” – BARNEY BARNATO (Attributed to many others, but actually said by this chap, who was a Jewish Londoner who was   Cecil Rhodes’  rival and then partner, co-founder of DeBeers and the Anglo-American Corporation, which became South Africa’s biggest company. At one of their board meetings, presumably…)

“I could as well follow principles in crafting a foreign policy as walk through a dense forest with a 4-meter  pole between my teeth.”  – OTTO VON BISMARK

“The problem with a principled approach is that the principles are always less clear than they seem.” – JOHN O’SULLIVAN (the Brit ex-Editor of NATIONAL REVIEW)

“Anyone can support me when I am right. What I need are people who will support me when I am wrong.” – BENJAMIN DISRAELI

“We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.” – JULIA COLEMAN  (one of, believe it or not, Jimmy Carter’s old school teachers, down in Plains, Georgia)

"Principles are dangerous things — whiskey is for drinking, water and principles are for fighting over." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“The Democrats don’t believe in our founding principles. And the Republicans don’t believe in defending our founding principles.” – MARK LEVIN

"Principles are like prayer -- admirable, but awkward at a party." – JULIAN FELLOWES (spoken by THE COUNTESS OF GRANTHAM as played by MAGGIE SMITH in "Downton Abbey" – cast members who were once reportedly most convivial guests of my brother James in his hostelry in Noo Yawk.)

"Because 'stand by your principles while you get killed' isn't a winning message." -- DREW McCOY

"Principle is OK up to a certain point, but principle doesn't do any good if you lose." -- DICK CHENEY (His weird and wayward daughter notwithstanding, I still have a soft spot for ol' Dick -- after all, anyone who can invite Dick Durbin to go fuck himself can't be all bad.)

“A principle isn’t a principle until it costs you money.” – RICK SAREEN (a letter-writer to the UK SPECTATOR, 10 August 2019)

"I have always supported measures and principles and not men. I have acted fearless and independent and I never will regret my course. I would rather be politically buried than to be hypocritically immortalized."-- DAVY CROCKETT                                                                                                                                                     (1786-1836)

Priorities, (“Priorities”)

"Let me explain the government to you. There’s God, then there’s the president and then there’s my father.” —  JACK ROBERTS (6-year-old son of Chief Justice John Roberts, overheard speaking to one of his young peers on the last day of summer camp)

"I speak Spanish to God, Italian to Women, French to Men, and German to my Horse." – CHARLE V                          (of the Holy Roman Empire which, as we all know – not least for having been repeatedly told it by my ol’  Unca Frankie – was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire)

"Everything that can be counted is, almost by definition, what doesn't matter. Nothing of value can be measured, so it's not valued." -- ALAN JUDD

"At the Federal level I am a Libertarian. At the state level, I am a Republican. At the town level, I am a Democrat. In my family I am a Socialist. And with my dog I am a Marxist – from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." -- VINCENT GRAHAM (I don't know any more about this guy than that he's an American, and this was quoted in Nassim Taleb's book "Skin In The Game".)

"I believe in God and the whole business but I love women best, music and science next, whiskey next, God fourth, and my fellow man hardly at all." -- WALKER PERCY                                                                                  (in his fabulous LOVE IN THE RUINS)

Prison

“(Prison) was so cool. I love people, and it was a primal crew. The only thing that keeps them going is fighting for salt and making dice out of soap.” – MICHELLE RODRIGUEZ (apparently an American “actress” who got briefly bunged up for DUI.)

“I have a really interesting political point of view, and it’s not always something I say too loud at dinner tables here, but you can’t go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal. You can’t. I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone else, but it was very, very, very educational for me and has informed my proclivities and politics every since.” --ROBERT DOWNEY (the ex-liberal actor, in 2008 – and this contradicts the often-repeated cliché that “A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, and a liberal is a conservative who's been in prison”.)

“A liberal’s paradise would be a place where everybody has guaranteed employment, free comprehensive healthcare, free education, free food, free housing, free clothing, free utilities, and only law enforcement has guns. And believe it or not, such a place does indeed already exist: It's called Prison." – SHERIFF JOE ARPAIO (when he was  Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona)

«In prisons, men see clearly their companions' latent merits. We can do without anything so long as we have other people." – ERNST JUNGER (WWI hero, and author)

"No ex-con is ever an ex-ex-con." -- DAVID MITCHELL (the novelist, not the comic actor)

"You run outta white people when you go to Riker's Island." -- CURTIS SLIWA   (the ubiquitous Noo Yawk talk radio guy, and the sadly unsuccessful candidate for Mayor -- on 29 Dec. 2023)

"Most prisoners are ideologues. There is nothing else to do." -- WALKER PERCY

"Prison does wonders for megalomania." -- WALKER PERCY    (at the risk of stating the obvious, he means killing megalomania....)

«The worst thing that could happen to a prisoner is for him to fall in love with his prison.» – KINGSLEY AMIS

Prisoners of War (POWs)

"A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him." — WINSTON CHURCHILL 

Privacy                                                                                                                                  

“The right to be left alone – the most comprehensive of our rights, and the right most valued by civilized men. To protect that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment.” –  JUSTICE LOUIS D. BRANDEIS                                                                                                                                      (in Olmstead vs. US, 1928)

“Complaining that someone’s take notice of what you’ve posted is like a flasher complaining to the police about voyeurs. Over-privileged western half-wits being upset by pronouns, fussing over Facebook snooping is a real insult to the billions of people around the world who really are monitored and manipulated. They want the freedom we have and all we can do is fume over breaches of our pathetic privacy, as if we’re Mariah Carey surprised in the bath. Here’s a handy hint: if you don’t want attention for doing nothing, why not get off Facebook and do something that you’ll enjoy getting attention for?” --JULIE BURCHILL (in September 23019)

"We see but one aspect of our neighbor, as we see but one side of the moon. We all come down to dinner, but each has a room to himself." -- WALTER BAGEHOT

“Take the collapse of the ideas of privacy and public language brought about by technology. Throughout all of human history up until today the idea that you might say one thing in private and another in public was stored wisdom. It could lead to double-speak, for sure. Hypocrisy, certainly. But it was also recognised to have a utility people – including politicians – needed to try out thoughts and ideas. No longer.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY

“Privilege”

"Privilege" is basically a secular Original Sin: you're born with it and must atone for it.” – AMINA WASHINGTON (an interesting Washington D.C. Black chick, on the Twoot, in April 2015)

“I check my privilege all the time, to make sure that it's still there.” – TIM STANLEY (young English conservative hot-shot, editorial writer for THE TELEGRAPH, in Jan. 2017)

“The only ‘privilege’ in America is ‘leftist privilege’. And that’s been the case since – at least – 1960.” – JACK JOLIS

"Privilege derives when somebody somewhere somehow accomplishes something others cannot, and his descendants benefit from what he did. The ones most opposed to privilege are those who have never succeeded in doing anything constructive or beneficial to others in their lives, and pass down nothing but grief and very bad posture." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

"Privilege today seems to be the worst thing you can have. I would like to take a moment to defend it. My point is, we’re embarrassed about things we should be proud of and proud of things we should be embarrassed about." -- JERRY SEINFELD     (At Duke University in May 2024, when they were giving him an honorary degree)

"Privilege is good and healthy, and has given the world most of what we take for granted." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

Prizes

“France now has, annually, 4,000 literary prizes and no literature.” – PAUL JOHNSON (in Dec. 2005)

“Like prophets and fire drills, the more awards there are the more they get ignored.” – LLOYD EVANS

“The more awards we have the more artists will be seen as a bunch of self-important light-weights who are interested only in ephemeral publicity, free champagne and the acclaim of other people who are interested only in ephemeral publicity and free champagne.” – LLOYD EVANS

“Those canny Americans have devised an infallible tool for finding plays of exceptional lousiness and alerting the world to their horrors. It's called the Pulitzer Prize.” – LLOYD EVANS

“The Pulitzer (Prize) began as an arts award but has evolved into a highly effective early warning system.” – LLOYD EVANS

“The Pulitzer (Prize), for example, which seems to be reserved exclusively for fashionable bores.” – LLOYD EVANS

“As a nation, we just don't sufficiently honor our movie and TV actors. One awards show is not enough. If only we had a few more.” – MARK KNOLLER (CBS New White House correspondent, in Jan. 2011)

“Crap. I thought ‘Golden Globes’ was a strip club.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

“Hollywood needs the Oscars. It's the one time a year that stars can stop being humble and pat themselves on the back.” – CRAIG FERGUSON

“If I win the Nobel Peace Prize, you will know I have failed.” – TONY BLAIR                                                     (to his friend George W. Bush)

“Awards shows are funerals for living people.” – HUGH HEWITT

“Any red-blooded Westerner should think twice before accepting a Nobel award, precisely because to do so is to lend the recipient’s prestige not merely to the idiosyncratic criteria the Committee uses, but to its political relativism.” – WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.

“Have you noticed how nearly everyone in the media has won an award? Is there even such a thing as a documentary-maker who isn’t ‘award-winning’? Most journalists my age have picked up some sort of bauble.” – DAMIAN THOMPSON         (An Associate Editor of the UK SPECTATOR and the Editor-in-Chief of THE CATHOLIC HERALD – he was 47 when he wrote this, in May 2019)

«Nabokov, on the other hand, never won anything – which tells you everything you need to know about literary prizes.» – PHILIP HENSHER

"If you win, come up, accept your little award tonight, come up, accept it, thank your agent and your God, and fuck off. No one cares about your views on politics or culture." -- RICKY GERVAIS (5 Jan. '20, as the emcee of the Golden Globes Award in Hollywood)

«When I lived in America in the mid-1990s, the Academy Awards were described as ‘the gay Super Bowl’ which, although it sounded flippant, acknowledged their cultural significance.» – TOBY YOUNG

“The thing about prizes is that they are very nice when you win and they don’t matter when you don’t.” – SALMAN RUSHDIE

"Awards ceremonies are for liberals what the 4th of July is for conservatives." -- RUSH LIMBAUGH

"Michelle Obama won a Grammy for recording an audiobook. So we are all clear, here, she won the highest music award there is for recording herself reading a book that was written by a ghostwriter. This is how meaningless and worthless awards have become." -- TYLER ZED      (real name Desmond Janousek -- A "YouTube star")

Problems (Problems-Solutions)

“When you’ve got no options, you’ve got no problem.” – JAMES BURNHAM

“I am a great believer in the idea that, in politics, if you do not look at a problem, it eventually goes away.” – FRANK JOHNSON (now THERE’S a sensible chap for you… where can I vote for him? – seriously…. Actually, he was Editor of the UK SPECTATOR from 1995 to 1999))

“There are no policy solutions, only policy trade-offs.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“Problems that have no solution aren’t problems: They’re life.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“One of the structural problems of democracies (though having written that, I doubt non-democracies are any better) is that a lot of problems, especially problems that are connected to sensitive or taboo topics, are allowed to grow quietly until they become unmanageably large, the scattered few people drawing attention to them being denounced for political incorrectness. Then the dimwit pols all "wake up one day," panic, and do something sensationally dumb” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE.

“When you’re going through hell, keep going.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

“There are no solutions to problems.” – THOMAS SOWELL (He’s right – you don’t solve problems, you manage them.)

“Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ‘em,

And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.” -- JONATHAN SWIFT

“There is no problem so severe that it cannot be exacerbated by someone trying to solve it once and for all.” -- CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL (Author of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe”.)

“An undefined problem has an infinite number of solutions.” – ROBERT A. HUMPHREY

“When difficulties become too numerous, they start canceling each other out. You've got to go to a party that you don't really want to go to, but then you sprain your ankle.” – WILLIAM A. RUSHER (the long-serving publisher of NATIONAL REVIEW)

“The only worse thing than having a problem is not knowing you have a problem. And even worse than not knowing you have a problem is knowing you have a problem, but being unwilling to accept responsibility for doing anything about it.” – CHARLES CRAWFORD                                            (former British ambassador to various Mittle-Europische countries….)

"The problems were like crows, cowardly and unimportant when alone, but bold and terrible in their thousands." --MARK HELPRIN

"When you see 10 troubles rolling down the road, if you don't do anything, 9 of them will roll into a ditch before they get to you." - CALVIN COOLIDGE

“Absent in the contemporary Liberal worldview is the understanding that things go wrong.” – DAVID MAMET

“There are no solutions, only trade-offs.” — THOMAS SOWELL

“No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems — of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.” – THOMAS SOWELL

“She'd never had a problem that wasn't fashionable.” – DONALD WESTLAKE

“Our initial solution was to go to a bar and wait for the real solution to appear.” – MARTYN BURKE            (the Canadian thriller writer, author of “The Commissar's Report”)

“Send lawyers, guns and money – the shit has hit the fan.” – WARREN ZEVON (this is a rare violation of my rule against including song lyrics in this compendium, but this is just too good an epigram to resist....)

"Don't tell your problems to people: eighty percent don't care, and the other twenty percent are glad you have them." -- LOU HOLTZ (the legendary, so I'm told, head football coach at, in chronological order, The College of William and Mary, North Carolina State University, the University of Arkansas, the University of Minnesota, Notre Dame, and the University of South Carolina. He also was the head coach of the NY Jets in 1976. And finally, I am completely unsurprised to learn that he is, apparently quite prominently, a Republican.)

TOMMY LASORDA – long-time, legendary Manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, is credited with saying the exact same thing as the above. And just because he managed the hated Dodgers, I’m prepared to believe that he stole it from LOU HOLTZ.

“There are simple answers. There are just no easy ones.” – RONALD REAGAN

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” -- H. L. MENCKEN

"Maybe one reason so many people have so many problems is that there are so many other people with so many solutions." -- MALCOLM BRADBURY 

“You don't fix a train wreck. You bury the bodies and melt down the scrap.” – PETER MULHERN (a commenter on NRO referring to, what else, Corpsemancare)

“Nancy Pelosi said ‘We have to pass it to find out what’s in it’. That’s the definition of a stool sample.” – JIM HORN (Horn is my old buddy from Bangui days, where he was a valiant CIA communicator. He now lives in California, where he does his best to stop the encroachment of the Jihadists. Although last I heard from him he was thinking of leaving benighted California....)

“The number of problems that resolve themselves if only you wait long enough is far larger than the number of problems solved by mucking around in them.” -- ANDREW FERGUSON

«I’m starting to think that all of the world’s major problems can be solved with either oyster sauce or backing vocals.» -- BRIAN ENO

"Don't fight the problem, decide it." -- CALEB CARR (in his utterly unreadable novel, "Surrender, New York")

“If you can’t solve a problem, enlarge it.” – DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER

“There was no problem that could not be solved through strong drink and stubborn silence.” – MARTYN HARRIS

“Every politican has his problems. Nixon has Watergate, and I am going to die.” – GEORGES POMPIDOU (the Gaullist French President who came after De Gaulle – he said this in 1974, as he was dying.)

"Art is solving problems that cannot be formulated before they have been solved. The shaping of the quesion is part of the answer." -- PIET HEIN (the Danish "scientist, mathematician, inventior, writer and poet", 1905-1996)

“Few things are more boring than other people’s problems.” – GUY BELLAMY

“What you found in the end was that nobody really cared what happened to you or what sort of mess you were in: the purpose of your misfortunes was to supply an engrossing topic of conversation for other people.” – GUY BELLAMY

“Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant. Let me expand a bit. I sense that you may feel that I am free of problems. Let me assure you that I have the same anxieties and insecurities as anyone in this auditorium - maybe more.” -- CARY GRANT      (1904-1986)

"I have found that doing something about a problem nearly always makes it worse. The best  tactic is to lower your voice and hope it goes away." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS    (crikey....)

"The problems were like crows, cowardly and unimportant when alone, but bold and terrible in their thousands." --MARK HELPRIN

"This is a problem and problems are for solving. All you need to do anything is time to do it, being let alone long enough to do it, and a center to do it from." -- WALKER PERCY
  

“Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.” -- HENRY KISSINGER

"Every Man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not, and oftentimes we call a man cold when he is only sad." -- HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

"If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn't sit for a month." -- THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Procol Harum

"There was a richness and a mystery about Procol Harum's music that echoed in on you, magisterial melodies and teasing enigmatic lyrics you could invest with your own fantasies. It was great traveling music. I've been on a few journeys myself since the Salty Dog days, and Procol Harum has always been with me." -- MARTIN SCORSESE (in 2012)

"Poxiest lyrics ever written." -- SIR ALAN PARKER (The director of "The Commitments" and "Evita", and a HUGE fan of Procol Harum)

Procrastination

“Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.” – DON MARQUIS

"I tell you, we are here on earth to fart around, and don't let anyone tell you any different." -- KURT VONNEGUT                                    (With the notable and honorable exception of his short story "Harrison Bergeron", which everyone ought to read, I never shared my contemporaries' youthful enthusiasm for this rather labored and over-rated bore. However, this quote of his, which I just stumbled across, is so felicitous, that I'm considering founding an entire political movement around it....)

“Something the consulting firms understood all too well is the role played by justifying bullshit in the modern economy. For every hour of economically productive work, ten must be spent in senseless activity to maintain the illusion that what you are doing is more difficult and labor-intensive than it really is.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

                                                                                                                                                                                                  “Sooner or later – exactly. But why does that always have to mean sooner? Why doesn’t it sometimes mean later?” – MICHAEL FRAYN

Prodigies (Child)

"Infant prodigies only occur in the world of math, music and chess. These regions can be surveyed pictorially, patterns and shapes can be perceived there. Order can be discerned among randomness." -- WILLIAM BOYD

Productivity                                                                                                                          

“Something the consulting firms understood all too well is the role played by justifying bullshit in the modern economy. For every hour of economically productive work, ten must be spent in senseless activity to maintain the illusion that what you are doing is more difficult and labor-intensive than it really is.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 "Genuinely productive people now form a minority in any organisation.... The chief preoccupation of the modern organisation is the collation of numbers. Any money left over will be used to hire even more people in bogus administrative roles, largely as a reputational firebreak for the executive team, who are much more motivated by fear of scandal than by satisfying customers." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

Profiling

“Profiling is applied statistics. It is logic in action.” – JACK JOLIS (thank you, and thank you very kindly....)

“Don’t be nice — we are dealing with life.” – ISAAC YEFFET (Former security chief for EL AL. on 1 Nov 13 on MSNBC)

Profit(s)

“Profits are not deductions from the sum of the public good, but the real measure of the social value a firm creates. Those who talk about the horror of putting profits over people make no sense at all. The phrase is without intellectual content. ” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Profits are what keep the whole civilizational show on the road.” – JACK JOLIS

“Profits are what keep the whole prosperity shebang on the road. Without profits, we'd all be back living in caves or in trees.” – JACK JOLIS

"Without profit there is no trade." -- PAUL JOLIS (My Green Beret brother gets it. Actually, it sounds obvious -- and it is -- but it bears repeating, as the Left keeps trying to make "profit" into a dirty word) 

"One thing Leftists never understand is profits, the making of money -- everything is 'fund-raising' with them." -- RUSH LIMBAUGH (15 Dec. 2020)

“If you can just imagine profit apart from crime, then you have business.” – MARTIN CRUZ SMITH

“Projection”

"It's psychologically natural for a transgressor to accuse others of his, or her, own transgressions -- after all, that is what he, or she, is most expert in." -- JACK JOLIS

Progress, (“Progress”)

“People over fifty always think things are going to heck in a handbasket, or in one of those Prada backpacks, or in something.  The world has been collapsing for more than two thousand years.  Either the world was once a very wonderful place with a long way to fall  (of which there is no historical evidence) or people my age are full of crap.” – P. J. O’ROURKE  (here in his post-fifties…)

“Infinity pleased our parents.  One inch looks good to us.” – e.e. cummings (asshole.  Can’t capitalize his name.  Fucks up the LOOK of zis OEUVRE.  Unt, also, zis iss not PROGRESS!…it’s its opposite – “regression”)

“The four most dangerous words in the English language are ‘This time it’s different’.” – SIR JOHN TEMPLETON

“When it comes to subjects of which we have superficial knowledge, we are prone to succumb to doctrines that see change as natural and easy.” – RICHARD PIPES (“The corollary to “Conquest’s Law”, see Robert Conquest under “Reactionaries”.)

“It is always better to make slow progress than to wait for fast progress.” – RICHARD BROOKHISER (obvious, but snappy)

“As an Irish Catholic I have a soft spot for gloom myself. But I am a pessimist, not a masochist. I believe in progress, not in the re-molding of human nature embraced by so many social engineers but the small, incremental steps, especially in economic life, that can make a real difference between generations.” – WILLIAM McGURN

“If we want things to stay the same, things will have to change.” – GIUSEPPE DI LAMPEDUSA (the author, of course, of “The Leopard”.)

“ Restlessness is discontent – and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man – and I will show you a failure.” -- THOMAS EDISON

"Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man." -- C. S. LEWIS

“If you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.” – C. S. LEWIS

“We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world, it’s pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We’re on the wrong road. And if that is so, we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.” – C. S. LEWIS

“If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse’.” – HENRY FORD

“Sadly, evolution seems to be making humans ever more dull and pretentious. In the future we will all be NPR hosts.” – ED MORRISSEY (On the “Hot Air” blog)

“Progress goose-steps in circles.” – R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR.

"Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good" – THOMAS SOWELL

“We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case the man who turns back the soonest is the most progressive.” – C. S. LEWIS

“If you're walking the wrong way on a moving sidewalk ‘a step in the right direction’ doesn't do much.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“The real leaps forward are always by torchlight.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“We need the past like drivers need rearview mirrors. Get rid of the mirrors and, eventually, something terrible will happen. Similarly, if you concentrate on them too much, you’re sure to crash as well. Progress depends on knowing where you’ve been.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"Progress is real, yet it’s not stored in our genes or souls—but in institutions and traditions." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“All progress comes from the creative minority.” – GEORGE GILDER

“Things don't evolve; they peak quickly and inconspicuously, and then they fall apart.” – TOM BETHELL

“Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked. . . . It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal, and that you are a paralytic.” – G. K. CHESTERTON

“Even the bad things are better than they used to be. Bad music, for instance, has gotten much briefer. Wagner’s Ring Cycle takes four days to perform while a Madonna tune lasts little more than three minutes.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

“What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.” – HAVELOCK  ELLIS (turn-of-20th-century English doctor, writer, eugenecist and general crackpot on sexual matters)

“Progress leads to planning. Civilisation is humbler.” -- MICHAEL OAKESHOTT

"The 'progress' from Mozart to Wagner was a pretty big step in the Decline of the West." -- BILL KRISTOL

“A big chunk of so-called 'progress' is, in fact, just a matter of simple sanitation and hygiene.” – MARK STEYN

“Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.” – ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

“New ideas are commonplace, and almost always wrong.” – JON WAINWRIGHT (A Londoner writing to THE SPECTATOR, in January 2017)

"For most of man's life on earth, he has lived no better on two legs than he had on four." -- TODD G. BUCHHOLZ (economist)

"Over the long stretch of hu;an history before 1800, the evidence suggests that the long-run rate of growth of per capita income was very close to zero." -- DOUGLASS C. NORTH                                                       (Nobel-prize winning economist)

"The Englishman of 1750 was closer in material things to Caesar's legionnaires than to his own great-grandchildren." -- DAVID S. LANDES             (economic historian)

 "Liberals believe in the capacity of government to be good. Progressives believe that government's job is to push society forward towards ever sunnier uplands. The internal logic of progress rejects limits. The auction of progress always consumes its bidders." -- GREG WEINER (visiting scholar at AEI, in Oct. 2019)

 "What enormous things must have happened to make sure that nothing ever changed." -- MICK HERRON                                                                                                                                                                                              

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” -- PETER DRUCKER

“The biggest constraint to progress really is a question of psychology, not economics.” -- RORY SUTHERLAND  

"There are lots of good reasons why you may wish to go back in time, but shopping, like dentistry, isn't one of them." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

“Liberty diminishes in proportion as man progresses and becomes civilized.” – ANTONIO DE OLIVEIRA SALAZAR                                                         (a quite provocative statement from Portugal’s long-time dictator, who dictated relatively benignly from 1932 to 1968)

“Until the flush toilet, did men have any true concept of the end of the world?” –  JOHN UPDIKE

“Nearly all innovations for mankind’s progress were the result of wars, and the bigger the war, the more advanced the progress.” – PROF JOHN GREENWAY (the late, great “Gonzo Anthropologist” from Colorado)

"It cannot be proved that the unknown destination towards which man is advancing is desirable." -- J. B. BURY (1861-1927, a historian, and author of "The Idea Of Progress")

“Progressive”(“-s”) see also Liberals (-ism)

“A progressive must be tolerant of everyone and everything, and that turns them into witless monsters.” – GREG GUTFELD

"Just as every good Swiss keeps his rifle at home, ready to spring into action at any hour of the day or night to repel an attack on the Heimat, so every good progressive must be prepared at a moment's notice to transform himself into a white corpuscle and rush to the point of infection to attack any germ of heresy or doubt that infiltrates the body of the revolution." – CHARLES McCARRY

“Unlike even semi-rational philosophies, progressivism is built on sheer fantasy. Other doctrines may make errors, some of them very serious, but most are built on at least some foundation of real-world evidence and logical analysis. Progressivism is one of the few that is actually anti-evidence and anti-logic.” – JEFF PERREN (Some dude from “the Pacific Northwest” writing in PajamasMedia in Aug. 2010)

“Even where progressives claim to be laissez-faire – say, in matters of sexuality or abortion – there's always an implied expiration date (does anyone believe that progressives will remain so dogmatically pro-choice the day homosexuality can be prevented in utero?). It's very hard to find an area where liberals claim to be truly liberal (by which I mean libertarian) and their love of freedom isn't conducive to their preferred outcome. Personal liberty is awesome, so long as you eat the right food and smoke fashionable plants. They're for free speech in principle, but would define away disagreement as a 'hate crime'.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"The essence of progressivism is to be hostile to any external restraints on progressivism." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"For many progressives the State plays the role they think God would play if God existed." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“The ordinary modern progressive position is that this is a bad universe, but will certainly get better. I say it is certainly a good universe, even if it gets worse.” -- G. K. CHESTERTON (from his book “As I Was Saying”)

“The progressive mind is routinely shocked by the news that even the most well-intentioned experts will be wrong because they're still human beings.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“Liberals are the aggressors in the culture war. In the minds of progressives you are free to live anyway you want so long as it's progressive. You have the right to have me pay for things you want, solely because you want them and progressives say you need them. Any institution that agrees with progressivism is free to stay clear of the State if it wants to. But any institution that desires to go a different way must be ground down and forced to conform. It is this act of resistance and not any explicit ideological commitment that renders dissident institutions 'right wing'. Indeed 'right wing' is often just a liberal word for 'non-compliant'." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"The dream of progressivism is to make our domestic life like that of a warlike nation without actually going to war." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“These (progressive) issues start with sensible sentiments – be decent to gay people, permit contraception as a private matter – and after awhile we end up with a married lesbian who can get an abortion against her partner's wishes and force someone else to pay for it against his will. Not a perfect world, the progressive says, but we're getting close.” – JAMES LILEKS

“The progressive dream: You take a fast train to another city, where you board a streetcar to get to the bike-rental place, and then you bike to your destination, which is a physican assisted suicide center. Because there's just no point to life anymore?” -- JAMES LILEKS

“Progressives aren't satisfied with simply respecting things that fall outside the norm. The norm has to be demolished.” – JAMES LILEKS

“Progressives are the embarrassed children of fascism who changed their name solely because Hitler used it. But a name change is all it is. They still share the same philosophy, concepts of the role of government and, all too often, hatred of Jews.” – DEREK HUNTER                                                            (A D.C.-based writer and radio talker – here writing in TOWNHALL)

“We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case the man who turns back the soonest is the most progressive.” – C. S. LEWIS

“One of the worst things about being a progressive and so being on “the right side of history” must be that you thus make it impossible for yourself to learn anything from history.” – JAMES BOWMAN

“Having disposed for the most part of the living kind of history, which we call tradition, progressives now think it expedient to expunge any record of the fact that people once thought diffeently from the way they think now.” – JAMES BOWMAN

“History, hitherto the soul of culture, tends to be to the progressive what it so often is to the scientist: not just useless but a positive hindrance to understanding, a history only of error. That's what makes the progressives' alliance with a supposed science-based culture so fruitful for their purposes.” – JAMES BOWMAN

“Progressives work very hard to avoid thinking about the authoritarian nature of their program.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Progressivism is a luxury good for coddled urban professionals; it immiserates everybody else.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“In the progressive mind, which is a perversion of the Puritan mind, afflictions of the body are mere manifestations of afflictions of the soul.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"Because they think of themselves as a special enlightened caste, progressives care almost nothing about process. Process is for the little people. Elizabeth Warren wouldn’t care if a Supreme Court opinion read 'Ooo eee, ooo ah ah, ting, tang, walla walla bing bang' so long as it provided the result she wanted." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"Progressives conceive of themselves as a caste apart, a special and specialized group of enlightened men and women whose job it is to organize other people’s lives for them, a necessity because those people are too dumb to do it for themselves. And special people must enjoy special exemptions." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“One of the remarkable characteristics of progressivism is that its adherents claim to be partisans of “science,” rationally and empirically following the evidence where it leads — and then retreating into rank mysticism and half-baked metaphysics when the facts prove unappealing or discommoding.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Progressivism began as, and remains, an alliance of experts and victims.” – CHARLES KESLER (a professor at Claremont-McKenna College, in his book about Obama called “I Am The Change”)

“Let's stop bullshitting. Progressives believe only in progressive power. Accusing them of hypocrisy is like accusing shit of stinking.” -- KURT SCHLICHTER

“Progressivism is political syphilis.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

"For humanity to be organized and regimented it must first be classified, and hence the progressive romance with race, class, sex, etc." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“That’s progressivism: a purportedly secular movement with a whole lot of 'Thou Shalt' and 'Thou Shalt Not'.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"The progressive view is that the organs of government (and by extension the class of people who dominate them) must set as their task the promulgation of rules about how we should live and how we should desire to live, and that those rules can be tailored or revised in practically any way that is dictated by pragmatism. Setting aside that what they call pragmatism is always and everywhere a mask for ideology." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"For progressives, 'democracy' is a very plastic word that means, 'what we call it when we get what we want'.” -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“The Progressive Aristocracy doesn't want to  do that much, other than tell you how to live your life.” – JIM GERAGHTY

“For progressives it’s always five minutes to Brecht-O-Clock. What I mean is this desire to fix the people, not the government always seems to be lurking behind liberalism.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"Progressives are the car salesmen of the State, and there’s always more undercoating to sell." – JONAH GOLDBERG

“Progressivism's brand of national pride is: America is noble in theory, nightmarish in reality; cool around the edges, but rotten to the core.” – RYAN L. COLE              (a writer guy in Indiana)

“The political progressive has evolved a psychological mechanism that enabled him to turn moral judgments against himself into moral judgments against society.” – EDMUND WILSON (the American, to quote from his Wiki-entry, “writer, literary and social critic”)

“Progressivism: A process whereby leftists endeavor to burn your house down while banning fire extinguishers.” – CARMINE ZOZZORA (unless there's another “Carmine Zozzora”, this guy is an actor and producer – “Die Hard”, among others... but somehow I doubt it)

"For the progressive, a crime cannot be a crime: A crime must be a soapbox." – JIM GERAGHTY

“Progressive government. The failure of a trillion dollars to solve a problem is only proof you should have spent two.” – JAMES LILEKS

«To be relentlessly, grimly 'progressive', in the manner of a pancreatic tumour.» – ROD LIDDLE

«Progressives, as they like to be called, live not in the real world but in a sort of kindergarten fantasy where anyone can be whatever they want to be in a kind of glorious hierarchy of competing victimhoods, each one conferring a privileged status which must not be gainsaid. At least until reality intrudes – when the whole chimera falls t pieces because it is devoid of rationality, internal logic and common sense.» – ROD LIDDLE

«Playing the victim is a form of religious holiness for progressives. Anyone guilty of breaking their moral code must have their life wrecked.» – EARL ROBINSON (a black writer and blues lover, on the Twoot, in September 2017)

"Our worst enemy is not China, Russia, North Korea, or Iran. Our most dangerous enemy is the Progressives, including Joe Biden, his entire cabinet and administration, who are dedicated to destroying our Constitution qnd way of life!" -- DANIEL F. BARANOWSKI (the ex-President of the Harvard School of Public Health, in April 2023)

"And progressives have trouble countenancing the possibility of moral ambiguity." -- THEODORE KUPFER (a young writer for NATIONAL REVIEW in December 2017)

“Conservatives don’t often speak of being ‘on the right side of history.’ Progressives say it all the time, because they’ve figured out that History is an autonomous proper noun, capital H, and people who don’t understand ought to get out of the way. One way to make them get out of the way is to tell them to shut up, or make them change their language.” -- GEORGE WILL (in 2023)

 “Woodrow Wilson, whose haughty arrogance surpassed that of even the most self-important of his contemporaries and whose seething bigotry stood out in a time when racism masqueraded as science among genteel, educated progressives.” – STEPHEN TOOTLE (a history professor at The College Of The Sequoias)

"Rather than ushering in a golden age of enlightenment, the collapse of American Christianity gave rise to a new intolerance towards anybody who diverged from progressive opinion." -- ED WEST    (the English author, journalist and columnist, in Dec. 2023)

 "Liberals believe in the capacity of government to be good. Progressives believe that government's job is to push society forward towards ever sunnier uplands. The internal logic of progress rejects limits. The auction of progress always consumes its bidders." -- GREG WEINER (visiting scholar at AEI, in Oct. 2019)

“When socialists, like progressives, get honest, they admit they do not really want to generate more prosperity. They are done with that. Instead, they prefer that the economy be given a time-out – the economic equivalent of Xanax. Shut down capitalism and perhaps replace it with an old-styled kibbutz for 330 million people. Why? To prevent envy and to drain us of our competitive juices. They believe that competition is cancerous, eating away at our souls and our chances for happiness. If we could just stomp out competition, we could achieve self-realization and bliss. Rather than allowing the New York Stock Exchange to operate, they would rather we dress up like druids and prance around the rocks of Stonehenge in the hopes that it would help us pay our mortgage bills.” – TODD G. BUCHHOLZ (ex-White House “Economic Director” and hedge-fund manager and author)

“It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.” – CHARLES PEGUI (French poet, though decidedly NOT of the Left, in 1905)

"What certain progressives are seeking and are dangerously close to possessing is unfettered epistemological dominance — the right to lie with impunity and have attempts to correct those lies be deplatformed as hate speech."~ WESLEY YANG (The author of "The Souls of Yellow Folk")              

Promise

“Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.” – CYRIL CONNOLLY

“Betraying one promise is noticed more widely than keeping a dozen, for those to whom promises are kept abide in quiet contentment but those betrayed from cowardice do not.” – J. E. LENDON (a history prof at the U. of Virginia)

“Pronouns”

"An individual does not own, or have control over the pronouns used to describe him or her. Nor does the government, or the police, have any right to impose upon us a form of grammar which directly contradicts the truth. Address this issue and the madness might soon come to an end." -- ROD LIDDLE (Feb. 2023)

Propaganda

“Indeed, ‘those observing war from the safety of their living rooms’ have become the most important political force engaged today in modern warfare.” – DANIEL HENNINGER (In 2006. In this respect, “modern warfare” began with the Vietnam War.)

“If decade after decade the truth cannot be told, each person’s mind begins to roam irretrievably. One’s fellow countrymen become harder to understand than Martians.” – ALEXANDER SOLZHENYTSIN

“Perhaps man didn’t feel a universal hunger for freedom, liberty, and ‘All-You-Can-Eat Night’ at Red Lobster, but he sure as hell felt the all-consuming urge to disseminate propaganda, barely readable briefing materials. It united every government in the world – liberal capitalist, Afro-kleptocratic, Communist; Islamist, Euro-socialist. The one true God.” – RICH LOWRY (in his spy novel “Banquo’s Ghosts”)

“Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.” – ERIC HOFFER

“I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.” – W.E.B. DUBOIS

"You should know that if anybody wears pins that say whatever program 'works' you can take it as an assumption that it doesn't work. You don't see military people saying 'Machine guns work!'." -- NICHOLAS ZILL (American author and researcher at the URBAN INSTITUTE)

"I know well that nowadays requires a rod of iron to rule men, but it must be gilded, and we must make them believe when we strike them that they direct the blow themselves. It is necessary always to talk of liberty, equality, justice, and disinterestedness, and never grant any liberty whatever. No change of system is required, but only a change of language." – NAPOLEON (The Little Corsican said this in 1815 on St. Helena, to his English jailer there, Sir Henry Keating)

“We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, scorn and the like toward those who disagree with us.” – VLADIMIR ILLYICH ULIANOV a.k.a. LENIN

“He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.” – JOSEPH CONRAD

“All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach.” – ADOLPH HITLER

"Propaganda is the fundamental essence of  every religion, whether of heaven or hair tonic. You must keep it up until you build a faith in which people no longer know what is imagination and what is reality." -- ADOLPH HITLER (in 1920... already with the hair tonic....)

"Good whisky, like good propaganda, needs to have rough edges." -- ROBERT LITTELL

 “I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.” – FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

“The modern election is still mostly about having the right candidate. But it's increasingly important to get the right message to the right people at the right time – tapping into their deepest emotions and fears to figure out what buttons to push. We used to call this sort of thing propaganda. Now we call it 'a behavioral approach to persuasive communication with quantifiable results' and give awards to the people who are best at it.” – JAMIE BARTLETT (the author of the book “The People Versus Tech”, in 2018)

"In this day and age, it's not so much whose army wins, but whose story wins." -- STEFAN HALPER (the CIA/MI6 liberal Republican professor that the Obamarroids inserted as a spy into the Trump campaign in 2016)

“The art of sloganeering can serve two powerful ends – persuasion or cementing tribal allegiance. Usually you can’t do both.” -- RORY SUTHERLAND

“That’s the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody’s going to be against, and everybody’s going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn’t mean anything.” -- NOAM CHOMSKY (the pinko master)

Property

“Property embraces everything to which a man places a value and has a right, and which leaves to everyone else the like advantage.” – JAMES MADISON (anti-“capitalists” should note the second clause.)

“Property must be sacred, or liberty cannot exist.” – WALTER E. WILLIAMS (the late black columnist. Good man. Understood ALL…)

“Property means the ability to shut a door, and also the ability to open it. With property of your own you can get others off your back, and also lend them a helping hand. It is therefore one aspect of the individual’s sovereignty over his own life. Without private property there is neither home, nor family, nor security, nor charity, but only the subjection of everyone to the all-possessing state.” – ROGER SCRUTON

"Property is the fruit of labor. Property is desirable, is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently to build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence." – ABRAHAM LINCOLN

 "When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition. That is why buildings in the Soviet Union -- like public housing in the United States -- look decrepit within a year or two of their construction..." -- MILTON FRIEDMAN

“Without property rights, all other rights are meaningless.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

“Men forget more quickly the death of a father than the loss of a father's estate.” -- NICOLO MACHIAVELLI

"Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff." – FRANK ZAPPA  (at the Libek Institute in Belgrade)

“You do not need a Lockean theory of property, or even the American belief in divine investiture, to understand that trade, and therefore property, is older than the State and outside the State. That isn’t a question of philosophy, but a question of archaeology.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Private property is divisive. It arouses envy, and envy is a hugely powerful emotion, a driver of all manner of political evils.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"Property Law is what makes the market economy work." -- HERNANDO SE SOTO                                         (the great economist from Peru)

 “Proportionality”

“Disproportion is the common denominator of almost all of life's absurdities.” – GEORGE WILL

Propriety

"Propriety's enduring power: the bridle it still is on public rhetoric, the inspiration it provides for personal posturing, the persistence just about everywhere of this de-virilizing pulpit virtue-mongering that the Europeans unhistorically call American puritanism. As a force, propriety is protean, a dominatrix in a thousand disguises, infiltrating if need be, as civic responsibility, WASP dignity, women's rights, black pride, ethnic allegiance, or emotion-laden Jewish ethical sensitivity." -- PHILIP ROTH

Prosperity

“Rising prosperity brings moral laxity in its wake.” – TOM BETHELL                                                    (this, along with the seeds of auto-destruction inherent in democracy, go a long way towards explaining the Decline of the West.)

"Prosperity, the Left screams, creates inequality, and indeed it does; another name for inequality being prosperity." -- DAVID MAMET
 

“Our riches did not come from piling brick on brick, or bachelor's degree on bachelor's degree, or bank balance on bank balance, but from piling idea on idea.” – DEIDRE NANSEN McCLOSKEY (Author and economics, history and English prof at the Univ. of Illinois, Chicago.)

Prostitution

“…the world’s oldest profession (which, judging by the amount of age-old literature on the subject, must surely be writing about prostitution).” – ZENDA LONGMORE (an English lady writer, originally from, I believe, the Caribbean…)

"If you do away with harlots, the world will be convulsed with lust." – ST. AUGUSTINE

“I challenge you to distinguish a naked prostitute from any other naked woman.” — HENRI LECLERC (the French lawyer for the priapic Dominique Strauss-Kahn)

"The whores' great wisdom: 'Men don't pay you to sleep with them. They pay you to go home'." -- PHILIP ROTH

 “Some guys are born to go to whore houses.” – NORMAN MAILER (One wishes he’d expounded a bit on this self-evident bit of cod-sociology. Anyway, this would never have made the cut into this Compendium had it been uttered by a lesser poseur than Mailer….)

"I don't see the problem. They're easy on the eye, they pay the rent on time and they're not members of the resdients' association." -- (LORD) CHARLES CADOGAN     (the English milord who owns much of the real estate in London's Chelsea)

"A Gourmet who thinks about calories is like a Tart who looks at her watch" -- JAMES BEARD (His capitalizations. And I dunno -- in my, ahem, experience, looking at her watch is an integral part of a tart's routine...) 

Protectionism

“Prescribing tariffs as a remedy for high unemployment is like prescribing LSD as a remedy for broken bones: it might create the hallucination that a remedy is in the works, but it will in fact only inflict further harm on the patient.” – DONALD J. BOUDREAUX (a fellow writing in the “Café Hayek” blog)

Protest(s)

“I don’t write protest songs.” – BOB DYLAN (And it’s true – other than 1 or 2 he wrote very early-on, pre-’64, when he was besotted with the leftist activist Suze Rotolo)

“Have you ever heard anyone as incoherent as the people staging protests across the country? Taxpayers ought to be protesting against having their money spent to educate people who end up unable to say anything beyond repeating political catch phrases.” – THOMAS SOWELL (commenting on the “Occupy Wall Street” traveling circus of 2011)

“If crucifixes work on vampires, maybe math books would work with Occupy Wall Street” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

“I'm starting an expensive restaurant. Half of the menu is T-bone steak; half is deep fried turd-on-a-stick. I'm calling it ‘College’. Honest question, 'Occupy Wall Street': If you had a 4 year time machine, would you still major in Critical Studies, or switch to Diesel Repair?  $200,000: enough to buy (a) a 4 year journey of self discovery and cognitive thinking skills; or (b) a Subway franchise. The problem with choosing option (b) is that your windows get smashed by people who chose option (a).” – DAVID (“IOWAHAWK”) BURGE

"To 'persuade' people by frustrating their normal life is to use force, inviting force in return." -- PETER JONES (Quite rightly so, sah! Mr. Jones is THE SPECTATOR's long-serving "Classics" columnist)

“Life isn't fair. A lot of us came to terms with that in puberty or sometime shortly thereafter, but protesters across the country are still stunned to learn that the world does not value what they do as much as they do.” – JIM GERAGHTY

“The silly led by the sinister.” -- CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS (He'd been refering to anti-Iraq War protesters)

"When you men get home and face an anti-war protester, look him in the eyes and shake his hand. Then, wink at his girlfriend, because she knows she's dating a pussy." -- USMC GEN. JAMES MATTIS (Ret. -- as fast as possible by President Corpseman; of course, he later had his problems with President Trump....)

"Our progressive friends tut-tutted that the protests were 'mostly peaceful'. 'Mostly peaceful' is another way of saying, ''Peaceful, if you ignore the violence'.” -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“As far as I'm concerned, the KGB gave birth to the antiwar movement in America.” – ION MIHAI PACEPA

“I’m against all these protest signs, but I don’t know how to show it.” – MITCH HEDBERG (the late American comedian – who died in 2005)

Protestants

"The lowest common denominator of any mainstream Christian Church is that its ministers accept the validity of each another's orders and therefore sacraments: that is the essence of "communion". Now that Anglicanism encompasses women and gay bishops (and, come to think of it, gay women bishops), roughly two thirds of its provinces do not recognise the ministry of bishops and priests ordained by the other third. That is not a Church: it is an ecclesiastical car crash." – DAMIAN THOMPSON (In the London Daily Telegraph, 20 June 06. Anglicans/Episcopalians – the whole farrago’s a “fahce”,  as they say in Boston.)

“Well, I'm not a Christian, but I want to live in a Christian country – a Protestant country, specifically, as I believe that it is the best guarantor of my freedom and the freedom of others, many of whom <i disagree with.” – JULIE BURCHILL (the pudgy and ageing, but still endearing, ex-Trotskyite British enfante-terrible)

“Protestants, white and black, don’t even know what politics is and rely instead on rules, or on being cool.” – RICHARD BROOKHISER (“cool”, Richard? As if....)

"Americans are Protestant, not necessarily in the content of their religion but in their habits of mind and assumptions. All of them. The Catholics, the Buddhists, even the Jews. That's one of the basic characteristics that make Americans so strange the rest of the world." -- HAVIV RETTIG GUR                                        (of The Times Of Israel)

"Aside from literacy, Protestantism engendered other beneficial concepts, now almost universally derided. Self-denial, diligence, hard work, obedience, quiescence in the face of authority and, more crucial even than these, patience. Abide a while, your reward will come later: a central tenet of Protestantism." -- ROD LIDDLE (in January 2021)

Protestants (Episcopalian/Anglican)

“The Episcopal Church stands for just about nothing. Its decline is a formidable achievement in a country where religion is still considered normal and churches are full.” – PETER HITCHENS

"Seldom can an Episcopalian (or an Anglican) be taken for a Christian." -- WALKER PERCY 

“The Established Church may not be good at preaching the Gospel; but it does offer powerful evidence of diabolical possession.” – BRUCE ANDERSON

“The Church (of England) is the only society in the world that exists for the benefit of its non-members.” – WILLIAM TEMPLE (the Archbishop of Canterbury 1942-1944, and if he's right, it's a wonder that the damn C of E has any members left anymore at all....)

“Mine is a muddled Church for muddled people.” – BISHOP RICHARD HOLLOWAY (the most muddled Bish of them all – in his case, of Edinburgh, in 2012)

“Present-day Anglicans are no longer Tories at prayer but the Labour party trying to remember how to pray, while not really understanding the point.” – ROGER SCRUTON (in his book “Our Church”)

“In most important controversies (in the Anglican Church) – those over women priests and homosexuality – are being fought out between American liberals and African conservatives, with the old English establishment looking on in mild astonishment at the fuss.” – ROGER SCRUTON (also in “Our Church”)

“The (Anglican) bishops could never quite make up their mind about poverty. They said it was dreadful when Thatcher 'condemned' people to it, but then got even angrier when under her, most of them got much richer.” – CHARLES MOORE

“Anglicanism was never really about God.” – MATTHEW PARRIS (Sound like fighting words, but they’re actually not… and I know what Squire Parris means...)

“I may not a pillar of the Church (of England), but I hope I am a buttress – I support it from the outside.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

“Ludicrous gimmicks are the main reason worshippers are deserting (the Church of England) in droves. Instead of listening to a vicar called Dave addressing them as if they had a mental age of three, they are sick and tired of trendy clerics banging tambourines, extolling the virtues of internaional socialism and nuclear disarmament and ringing up newspapers to proclaim their homosexuality.” – RICHARD LITTLEJOHN (the columnist for the UK “Sun”, in 1995)

"Why does the Church Of England so routinely make a person feel certifiable for trying to believe?" -- MARY WAKEFIELD    (in Dec. 2023)

"It is not an easy fate for a Church to be joined at the hip to liberalism. It is open to charges that it is full of moral muddle. Our Church is full of moral muddle. But that is because you and I are. It reflects us. It is the muddle of honesty. The alternative is a Church that issues clear moral rules that most of its adherents do not quite believe in." -- THEO HOBSON

Protestants (Lutheran)

“An Irish temper makes you appreciate Lutherans.” – JOHN UPDIKE

“Modern Lutheranism is a warm croissant of a religion when compared to the tooth-cracking zwieback of some other Reformation denominations.” – JAMES LILEKS

“Had Martin Luther had better manners, we’d never have heard of him.” – MATTHEW PARRIS

Protestants (Methodists)

“The great certainty of the United Methodist Bishops is no doubt related to their wondrous insouciance about tyranny.” – RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS

“I’m a Methodist. I’m not sure we even have Jesus.» -- KURT SCHLICHTER

«Methodists mistrust pleasure so deeply that even their buildings have to be hideous.» – DAVID NOBBS

«In what way, I wondered, did a Methodist’s method differ from anyone else’s?» – CHRIS MILLER (my ΑΔΦ brother, in his 2006 memoir “The Real Animal House.)

Protestant Reformation, The

«Christianity didn't adapt to modernity: it inadvertently made modernity, by trying to be more purely itself.» – THEO HOBSON (the British theologian and author, in 2015)

Proust, Marcel

“I am reading Proust for the first time. I think he was mentally defective. I remember how small I used to feel when people talked about him and didn't dare admit that I couldn't get through him. Well I can get through him now – in English of course – because I can read anything that isn't about politics. Well the chap is plain barmy. He never tells you the age of the hero and one page he is being taken to the WC in the Champs Elysée by his nurse and the next page he is going to a brothel. Such a lot of nonsense.” – EVELYN WAUGH

Provincialism

“It was part of his own provincialism to be surprised by the provincialism of others.” – JOHN UPDIKE

Provocation

“Weakness is more provocative than strength.” – DONALD RUMSFELD

Prudence

“When directly compared or weighted against each other, losses loom larger than gains. This asymmetry between the power of positive and negative expectations or experiences has an evolutionary history. Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce.” – DANIEL KAHNEMAN                                                                                                                         (psychologist, and author of “Thinking, Fast And Slow”, and this is known in the trade as the “prospect theory”, which posits that people will take bigger risks in the hope of minimizing a loss than in the hope of maximizing a gain.)

"If the highest aim of a captain's were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever." -- SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS

“Prudence was another word for fear.” – ALEX BERENSON (Don’t believe it.)

Prudery

"This frantic prudery is a result not of a resurgence of conservative values, but of a progressive fear of men." -- GUS CARTER (the deputy features editor at the UK SPECTATOR, in March 2023, and when he refers to "progressive fear of men" he's not talking about a growing fear, but rather a fear by Leftists)

Psychiatry/Psychology

“And the cure goes on for ever, since there was no disease.” – ROGER SCRUTON (in April 2006, debunking Freud and his fraudulent, pardon the pun, “discipline”.)

“There is no such thing as a completely normal, well-adjusted person, and to entertain the fantasy that there might be entails putting the whole population into therapy. – MARTYN HARRIS

“Psychoanalysis is the impossible profession, as it educates us about the impossibility of education.” – ADAM PHILLIPS (a shrink himself, in his book “Side Effects”, and all I can say is, “Yup, ‘doc’, that pretty much sums up your whole racket”…)

“Psychiatry invents illnesses that it pretends to cure.” – KARL KRAUS (a German “critic and polemicist”. I’ll say. In 2004)

"Men will literally colonize Mars before going to therapy." -- ASHLEY ST. CLAIR (the author of "Elephants Are Not Bees")

"Analysis has a way of unraveling the self:  the longer you pull on the thread, the more flaws you find." -- DAVID LODGE
 

“Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. I really do not care.” – VLADIMIR NABOKOV (it took me awhile to twig what the hell he was talking about, here, but now I figure he was referring to jerking-off – “Onanism”. If not, then I dunno….)

“I have always been suspicious of psychotherapy. It seems to encourage unhappy people to do what they do too much of anyway, which is to concentrate on themselves.” – CHARLES MOORE

“Therapy is celebrity by another name. An artificially created audience bears witness to your anguish and joy and enables you to resolve the terrible contradiction that underpins every human being’s world-view. Each of us, in his gut, feels like the star of his life. But in his head he knows he’s just one of billions of forgettable cameos. Celebrity and therapy resolve this conundrum. Therapy lets you believe your little world, and its problems are as significant as the rest of humanity.” – LLOYD EVANS

“Psychiatry has no application to politics, and anyone who pretends it does is a fraud.” – CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER (a psychiatrist himself, as it happens)

“I used to try to read people’s minds for a living. It’s called psychiatry.” – CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

“We live in more of a pussy generation now. Everybody’s become used to saying, ‘Well, how do we handle it psychologically?’” – CLINT EASTWOOD                        (to ESQUIRE magazine, in 2009)

“Freudianism is the disease which presents itself as its own cure.” – KARL KRAUS (an Austrian satirist and “man of letters” during the early 20th Century.)

“Psychiatry enables us to correct our faults by confessing our parents’ shortcomings.” --   LAURENCE J. PETERS (the famous Canadian “educator” – he of the eponymous “Principle”)

“I do not care for these patients, they annoy me, and I find them alien to me and to everything human.” -- SIGMUND FREUD (on his crazy patients)

“Analysis, like cocaine, is God's way of telling you you have too much money.”-- MICHAEL WALSH

“My sister pronounced on strangers' emotional problems, in public, like a cabby with a microphone. What was her qualification? Only that she was an emotional problem herself.” – JON CANTER

“The word ‘psychiatrist’ frightens everybody who isn’t rich.” – JOHN UPDIKE

"Freud is fun to read, but in the workplace he doesn't hack it." -- JOHN UPDIKE

"Some patients get better, the rest become psychoanalysts." -- W.R. BION     (a big-deal psychoanalyst who happened to be Samuel Beckett's shrink)

"Us old shrinks never retire.  We just vanish in a puff of theory." -- DAVID MITCHELL     (in his 2020 novel "Utopia Avenue")  

"If there's not something wrong with you, there's something wrong with you." -- LIONEL SHRIVER

" 'Never went to therapy.'  Put that on my gravestone." -- ELON MUSK

"I approve of phone sex on economic grounds. Whatever the cost per minute, it must be cheaper than years of Freudian analysis -- a similar experience of sitting in the dark and talking dirty." -- DAVID MAMET

"Children should be exposed to some of that kind of bollocks (therapy), if only to stop them taking it seriously." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS (the very amusing English novelist)

"The best that we shrinks do is render the unspeakable speakable." -- WALKER PERCY     (who, in fact, was a shrink before he became a novelist)

"Being a shrink has to be the greatest con ever: one sits in a room with a patient who talks for an hour and then pays $400-plus for the privilege." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

P.T.S.D.

" 'PTSD' -- It's also called 'life'." -- GREG KELLY (on his radio program, 22 October 2021. Kelly, the son of the great NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, was himself a combat USMC Harrier pilot, 1991-2000)

“Public”

“A wise man once remarked that the difference between liberals and conservatives is their reaction to the word public — when liberals hear the word public, they think ‘public television,’ and when conservatives hear the word public, they think ‘public toilet.’” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON                                                                    (and I think that “wise man” was P. J. O'Rourke)

" ‘Public’ is just a euphemism for either ‘government-owned-and-run’ or ‘crappy’. Usually both.” – JACK JOLIS

"In the public world, it was public living that was hard living:  private life was simple enough, but the communal centers were murder. Here went on the displays of delinquency, and malice, and emptiness; here one despaired of man." -- MALCOLM BRADBURY 

Publicity

“In the pantheon of human importance, we always accord high status to the inventor, and low status to the showman. But almost every significant technology, even vaccination, has required ten times as much effort in the selling as in the conception. As I say ot my vicar wife, if ever she criticises my working in advertising: ‘Fair enough. But no one would have heard of Jesus if it hadn’t been for St. Paul.’” – RORY SUTHERLAND

“The only bad publicity is your obit.” – DOUG KENNEY (One of the best of the genius writers who put together America’s greatest magazine, NATIONAL  LAMPOON)

"The publicity enterprise propelling modern life, which seems to make it clear that few today are able independently to estimate the value of anything without promptlng from self-interested sources. this means that nothing will thrive unless inflated by hyperbole and gilded with a fine coat of fraud." -- PAUL FUSSELL

Public Opinion

“Civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice.”  --  WILL DURANT (the famous historian)

“Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they are many in number; or that after all, they are other than the little shriveled, meager, hopping though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.” – EDMUND BURKE (sounds very much like our “anti-war” crowd, every time America needs to go to war….)

“The tyranny of the majority dictates its will by means of popular opinion, presumes to tell men what to read and think, how to dress and behave; it is fatal, in short, to the individual.” – JOHN STUART MILL

“If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse’.” – HENRY FORD

“I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.” – MILTON FRIEDMAN (in 1975)

“There is no such thing as public opinion – governments manufacture public opinion and manipulate it at will.” – AYATOLLAH RUHOLLAH KHOMEINI

"It is easier to fool the people than it is to convince them that they have been fooled." – MARK TWAIN

“I awoke, only to find that the rest of the world is still asleep.” – LEONARDO DA VINCI

“All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach.” – ADOLPH HITLER

"The greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled." -- ALDOUS HUXLEY

 "You can’t put your finger on a problem when you’ve got it to the wind." - DICK ARMEY (The one-time Republican Majority Leader of the House)

“If you really want to know what’s going on in a country – the real country, not the government machine or the export community – don’t ask the taxi drivers. They only talk to journalists. In any case, they’ll only tell you what you want to hear. Ask the nuns. They know better than anyone whether there is going to be grumbling about prices increase, riots or even coup attempts. Thy know it all, and they love to gossip. Not because they are political. I’ve never met a political nun. But because they are so wrapped up with the people in their clinics and schools. They know if the rains are a day late; if there are more locusts about than in previous years; if the price of sorghum is going up or down. They can tell you if the government’s austerity programme is beginning to bite, and who is suffering most. I know some nuns who can tell you what the average family in the bush has to eat and which ministers feed their pet dogs better than their staff. Their contacts are enormous, their sources of information amazing. And unlike taxi drivers they always tell the truth.” – PETER BIDDLECOMBE

“If there is hope, it lies in the 'Comments' threads.” -- JOHN DERBYSHIRE

“People say Putin's the most popular guy in Russia. I say 'Yeah, I'd be popular too if I owned NBC'.” – GEORGE W. BUSH

“When was the last time 100 million people were right about anything?” – DANIEL FOSTER (of NATIONAL REVIEW)

"People cannot take very much truth, and peaceful government depends on the noble lie." -- PLATO

"When public opinion is so much in agreement on an issue, we should all be on our guard. It's exactly when everyone agrees about an issue that bad decisions are made, some with awful and far-reaching unintended consequences." -- ROSS CLARK (in the SPECTATOR)

“I’ve decided that polls – and most analysis – are more interesting than reliable.” – ANNUNZIATA REES-MOGG (the sister of Jacob, and, in May 2019, elected as a Brexit Party Member of the European Parliament)

"The trouble with market research is that people don't think what they feel, they don't say what they think, and they don't do what they say." -- DAVID OGILVY

“Before I studied public opinion, I often wondered, ‘Why are democracies’ policies so bad?’ After I studied public opinion, I started asking myself the opposite question: ‘Why aren’t democracies’ policies even worse?’ The median American is no Nazi, but he is a moderate national socialist — statist to the core on both economic and social policy. Given public opinion, the policies of First World democracies are surprisingly libertarian. Compared to the wealthy, the poor are much more anti-gay. They’re much less opposed to restricting free speech to fight terrorism.” – BRYAN CAPLAN                                                               (in his “Why Is Democracy Tolerable?”, of 2012)

"In Africa, when public opinion was not involved, matters could be arranged." -- THOMAS PACKENHAM (the English author of the 1991 "The Scramble For Africa", and I expect that this truism would apply to pretty much any damn where.)

“10% of of the population, when energized can drive policy.” -- WENDY SCHMIDT (The wife of Google founder Eric Schmidt. And this is very scary stuff -- it's nothing short of American Bolshevism.)

Public Sector (-Private Sector)

“The private sector is controlled by the government, and the public sector isn't controlled by anyone.” – ARTHUR SHENFIELD (and English economist)

“The Democratic party is fairly easy to identify: people who work for government at all levels. The politics of the public sector is almost exclusively Democratic. And what they care about isn’t social justice or inequality or diversity or peace or whether little Johnny can use the ladies’ room if his heart tells him to — they care about getting paid.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"The private man is always at the disadvantage of, and prey to, the 'public' man." -- JACK JOLIS

“Public Service”

"Elected office should be like jury duty, an annoying civic obligation that you can't wait to get out of." -- DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE

"A lot of what is called 'public service' consists of making hoops for other people to jump through. It is a great career for those who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do." -- THOMAS SOWELL

“I have never gone into public life. Most of the ills we suffer are caused by people going into public life. I have never voted in a parliamentary election. I believe a man’s chief civic duty consists in fighting for his King when the men in public life have put the realm in danger. And that I have done.” – EVELYN WAUGH

Public Speaking

“The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending; and to have the two as close together as possible.” – GEORGE BURNS

 
"He fixed his mind on a rule his father had given him for public speaking:  Get a vague plan and then say anything that comes into your head." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS

"Remember 'ABC-XYZ' -- 'Always Be Cheerful -- and Examine Your Zip(per)'." -- PRINCE PHILIP, THE DUKE OF EDINBURGH

Public Transport

“If you're on public transport and you don't see the transvestite, it's you.” – COLIN BLAKE (a funny doctor in Boston)

Publishing

“One might say the entire book industry is largely a progressive book group.” – DAVID ROSENTHAL (publisher of Simon & Schuster, in 2008)

“In most other occupations, people try to hide their incompetence, only in publishing it is flaunted as though it were the chief qualification for the job. ‘I don’t know how to sell this’, ‘I don’t know what the market is for this book.’ ” – DONALD WESTLAKE

“Publishers are the biggest bloody fools anywhere off the stage and the High Court.” – SIR KINGSLEY AMIS                           (in fairness, this is from his novel “The Folks That Live On The Hill”)

"It's now a truism that white males have a vanishingly small chance of being published anywhere, though I wee no marekt research verifying that the book-buying public doesn't want to read white males' work. The book biz is now overwhelmingly the province of women, and hewing to a rigid set of progressive orthodoxies while shunning even faintly conservative writers has become the norm in this industry." -- LIONEL SHRIVER (author of both fiction and non-fiction, in Feb. 2023) 

Puerto Rico

“Qauint old Spanish Puerto Rico, where everybody spent American dollars and drove American cars and sat around roulette wheels pretending they were in Casablanca. One part of the city of San Juan looked like Tampa and the other part looked like a medieval asylum.” – HUNTER S. THOMPSON (in 1959, when he was 22)

“Maybe, God forbid, the place (Puerto Rico) was what it appeared to be – a mélange of Okies and thieves and bewildered jibaros.” – HUNTER S. THOMPSON

"The myth of Latin virility goes all to pieces in Puerto Rico. Queers who had thought New York was a pretty good deal come to San Juan and call it Valhala. A legion of pederasts wander the narrow sidewalks of the Old City, giggling at every crotch." -- HUNTER S. THOMPSON (he wrote this in 1962, and having been to PR at about that time, I can confirm the good doctor's observation -- though I can't honestly say if it's still true these days....) 

“The transition from New York to San Juan involves no ‘culture shock’ – to begin with, one only notices a rise in temperature.” – SHIVA NAIPAUL              (in 1981 – and this actually says more about Noo Yawk City than it does about Puerto Rico.)

Punctuality

“It is better to be late rather than early. The former shows a sense of sturdy independence and no undue respect for higher authority, the latter merely shows womanish excitement and nervousness.” – HUBERT GOUGH (Gen. Gough was the commander of the British Fifth Army in WW1, and jeez, my late brother Alsie would have loved this one....)

“It is always later than you think, but it is never too late to start anew.” – ROGER KIMBALL

“Why should anybody be late? I know exactly how long it takes me to dress.” – QUEEN MARY (QEII’s granny)

Punctuation

 "Using an exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke." -- F. SCOTT FITZGERALD (!!)

“Also, very important. Cut out nearly all the exclamation marks. They are death to a story.” – P. G. WODEHOUSE (in 1928)

"The period doesn't belong to human beings, it belongs to God." – LASZLO KRASZNAHORKAI    (the Hungarian "avant-guard" writer, famous for endless sentences and who once wrote a 300-page novel which consisted of a single paragraph.)

“I don’t want to leap and grin while saying something utterly mundane. That’s what an exclamation mark does. It leaps and grins on your behalf.” – MARK FORSYTH (in the SPECCIE, Oct. 2018)

"I soon acquired the knowledge that the colon stood for 'as follows', and would occasionally boldly slip one into one of my student compositions. Not long after college the dash came as a pleasing surprise to me -- up there with the discovery of oysters, if not giving as much pleasure as the discovery of sex." -- JOSEPH EPSTEIN

"Exclamation points may be used only in dialogue, and then only when the speaker has just been disemboweled." -- D. KEITH MANO                                                                                                                            

"When people describe themselves as 'free spirits" I always assume this means they won't be using proper punctuation." -- JULIE BURCHILL
“I must be tired my commas are dropping away.” – JOHN UPDIKE                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        “The semi-colon is a funny fellow. In the 18th and 19th centuries writers went mad for it and in 1837 two rival French legal experts fought a duel over its use: one favored the semi-colon to end a certain passage, the other a colon. The semicolon supporter was wounded in the arm. Today I still find it an impressive piece of punctuation and young people would be well advised to use it in emails in order to impress their bosses.” – TOM HODGKINSON                                                                 (The Editor of THE IDLER – and, as best I can determine, appears to be a different chap from “Thomas W. Hodgkinson”)

"We have now reached a level in which many people are not merely unacquainted with the fundamentals of punctuation, but don't evidently realize that there are fundamentals. Many people seem to think that capitalization and marks of punctuation are condiments that you sprinkle through any collections of words as if from a salt shaker." -- BILL BRYSON (in 2015)

"My British view is that semicolons are like guns - valuable in the right hands, but best not made available to everyone." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

"This is why apostrophes matter. If you ask them to heal the inexorable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, they tell you to try next door." -- RORY SUTHERLAND 

Punishment

“If, in the nauseating sentimentality about children which prevails in our increasingly childless society, there can be no question of reintroducing corporal punishment in schools, then the only hope is to flog their wretched, mumbling, dope-smoking parents and hope they pass it on.” – AUBERON WAUGH (Evelyn’s son, and “like father, like son”.)

Puritanism

“Government attracts puritans who like banning things on the grounds that prevention is for our own good, an argument that is potentially limitless in its self-justifying intrusion.” – ALAN JUDD (one of my favorite authors, particularly of the excellent “Short Of Glory”, which is among the best novels on Africa, along with Waugh’s “Black Mischief”, William Boyd’s “A Good Man In Africa”, and my – P. N. Gwynne’s – own “Firmly By the Tail”….)

“It would have been a far better thing to subsidize the witches and hang the Puritans.” – PROF. JOHN GREENWAY (the late, great Gonzo Anthropologist from the U. of Colorado)

Puritanism, the «New»

"For at least one could say about Hitler and his assassins, that they enjoyed their anti-Semitism. But the Left proceeds, from day to day, in a sort of sad, wistful fury at all the things of life not recognized in its cosmogony. To them, in an inversion of the truly, historically, Liberal philosophy, everything not permitted is forbidden. And we have become a nation of noodges. Macauley suggests that the Puritans were expelled from England not because of their religion, but because everybody had sickened of their kvetching. The puritan has become, of late, the totalitarian, where every last thing, thought, and utterance in the Liberal Day must be an assertion of some Liberal Value; One-Worldness, Compassion, Conservation, Equality, the dread of giving offense, and guilt." -- DAVID MAMET

“The progressive left, having won the culture war, has unconsciously taken on many of the least attractive aspects of its Christian opponents. The left has always had a puritan streak, but what is fairly new is the extent to which it has abandoned libertarianism, leaving the right to take up the cudgels on behalf of free speech and other individual rights.” – TOBY YOUNG

“In an age of uncertainty in which the values that underpinned our society are melting away, people seem to be more attracted to puritanical censure.” – TOBY YOUNG (in January 2018, after he'd been hounded by the censorious leftist politically correct mob)

“We appear to be in the grip of various secular belief systems that are far more dogmatic than modern Christianity. The ebbing away of the Christian tide has left a God-shaped hole in the Anglosphere and it has been filled with something and it has been willed with something more sinister – a constantly mutating moral absolutism.” – TOBY YOUNG (in November 2019)

“Left-wingers are the puritans of our age.” – JAMES BARTHOLOMEW (English journalist for the TELEGRAPH and the SPECTATOR, in February 2016)

"When I was a kid, the humorless, fun-crushing scolds were all creaky old people; now they're all snot-nosed children." -- DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE

"A variant of the ancient American Puritan tradition has shed its religious doctrine and orthodoxy and emerged on the left. It hardly takes a lot of imagination to see the woke Twitter brigades and campus Comstocks as modern day Puritans, furious that someone somewhere is living or thinking wrong. And just as the prudes of old controlled the newspapers, the mainline churches, the Harvards and Yales and, let us not forget, the television networks and movie studios, the new prudes and puritans control the same commanding heights of the culture. What makes it all so confusing to them is that they don’t realize they’ve won the culture war" -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"The manifest soullessness of meritocratic life helped encourage the rise of left-Puritanism, but since the new Puritans don't believe in the soul, they've failed at the re-enchantment part and just settled for the abolition of revelry." -- ROSS DOUTHAT 

"Why has the 21st century become so judgmental, so censorious, so reproachful? It was never like this when I was a youth, nearly 60 years ago (mid-60s). True, the actual rules in those days -- on divorce, sex before marriage, homosexuality, forms of address, deference to one's elders, 'bad' language, the length of skirts and the like -- may seem strange restrictions to modern eyes, but there was a more freewheeling attitude to sin. There was a devilment, a tolerance of loucheness, a curiosity about people who broke the social rules. Today, a new puritanism is abroad." -- MATTHEW PARRIS (in July 2023)

"Puritanism has bred the assumption that 'good peope' do not need free speech, because they couldn't possibly wish to say anything harmful, whereas 'bad people' grasp at it as a cover to say bad things." -- CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE (the Nigerian lady noveslist, in  Dec. 2022) 

Purity

“Purity is for losers.” – LIONEL SHRIVER

“Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart, for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.” – JAMES BALDWIN

Putin, Vladimir

"How can I be a gangster if I worked for the KGB? Come on." – VLADIMIR PUTIN (on being called a “gangster” by Marco Rubio)

“Putin doesn’t care about saying anything new at the UN because he has tanks in Ukraine, fighter jets in Syria, and Obama in the White House.” – GARRY KASPAROV (Past world chess champ and currently prominent Russian small-"d" democrat. His main activity is trying to get out of, or staying out of, Putin's jails.... Said this in Sept. 2015)

"Obama says whatever he wants to say, Putin does whatever he wants to do." -- GARRY KASPAROV

"What the left is trying to tell us with this Russia-bashing is that they liked the country a lot better when the Communists were in charge." -- DINESH D'SOUZA (In Dec. 2016)

"In Russia, the President assassinates you." -- BILL GERTZ

“Putin is probably not a liberal or a democrat, but he is more liberal and more democratic than seventy percent of the population.” – MIKHAIL KHODORKOVSKY (if you can call a sudden overnight Russian “oligarch” billionaire a poor schnook, then this is the poor schnook ex boss of YUKOS who Putin chucked seemingly open-endedly in the slammer. in 2006.)

“Putin is at heart a Communist, and a Russian imperialist. What he worries about and what every Russian ruler worries about, is to appear weak.” -- RICHARD PIPES (the eminent historian and Russian expert, who died in 2018)

“The secret of understanding Russia is to realize that everyone over there, every man woman and child, is dead drunk, all the time. Except for Putin.” -- JACK JOLIS

“These days Putin’s Russia doesn’t even try very hard to be a beacon on a hill. It just wants everyone else to look as rotten as itself.” -- PETER POMERANZEV (Soviet-born UK-based journalist, and Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics, in Aug. 2020.)

"A majority of Russians believe they are free, despite all the repressive actions of the Putin regime, This dominant Russian definition of freedom is one of the major reasons that Putin enjoys the support he does because his economy has continued to deliver, his policies have maintained stability, and his isolationist and aggressive stance has eliminated for most comparisons with the West.

That doesn’t mean that the majority of Russians “have no idea about the value of freedom of speech, fair elections, the need to criticize the authorities and so on, but for them such ideas are in the sphere of ‘politics’ from which they are alienated, something that fuels 'the most anti-elitist attitudes of populists'.

Perhaps almost three out of four agree about what would be the optimal arrangements if Russia were prosperous and stable, but they aren’t prepared to take the risk of losing what they have and fear that getting involved in politics will only put them and their country in danger of precisely that.

And so they support Putin and declare that they feel free – and they are even grateful to him for helping to solve their own deeply ingrained inferiority complex by isolating Russia ;" -- LEV GUDKOV     (a prominent Russian sociologist, in March 2024) 

Q

Qatar

“Qatar has only 300,000 natives, the rest (1,400,000) are all immigrant labourers. If you call that a country, I'm a giraffe.” – TAKI  THEODORACOPULOS

“Qatar—more a bank than a country.” – CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

“When you hear Qatar, think DeathToAmerica Iran. Qatar is Iran’s unpaid agent in the Gulf and, indeed, in the entire Sunni/Arab world.” – JACK JOLIS

Quaintness

“The more picturesque the neighborhood, the higher the rate of tuberculosis.” – CHARLES DICKENS

Quarrels

"Perhaps the principal objection to a quarrel is that it interrupts an argument." -- G. K. CHESTERTON

Quebec

“Today for some democratic reason minorities seem to think they should be treated as more equal than the majorities. Try asking for a beer in a Montreal bar in English and you’ll very soon see how minorities impose their will on the majority, even though a minority is still a minority and not a majority in spite of the majority pretending it is in the minority and the minority, the majority just for the sake of peace and quiet.” – PETER BIDDLECOMBE

«In Quebec, people used to speak a sort of French that people in France dismissed as an archaic dialect of some other langage, maybe Finnish.» – CALVIN TRILLIN (He’s right, there. I happen to speak perfect French and I once found myself on a plane with a group of tourists from what turned out to be Quebec, and I sweear for the life of my I couldn’t understand a word of what they were jabbering about – or even from where they might be from, until I asked ‘em.)

Queen Elizabeth II

“I have always admired Elizabeth II for many things, particularly her 100-per-cent non-participation in celebrity culture .” – CHARLES MOORE

"I liked Queen Elizabeth for the same reason that I liked Richard Nixon -- because the Left didn't." -- JACK JOLIS

"The widespread profound affection that the British public has for Queen Elizabeth is partly based on the fact that although she's always been there, we've never had too much of her at any given moment: she's a combination of cosiness and mystery, and she doesn't get on our nerves. The Queen doesn't over-emote or tell us every thought that passes momentarily through her head: she's a one-woman antidote to the excesses of social media." – JENNY McCARTNEY (in the UK SPECTATOR, April 2018)

"I can't wear beige because people won't know who I am." -- QUEEN ELIZABETH II

"And I have to be seen to be believed." -- QUEEN ELIZABETH II

“She (the baby Elizabeth II) has an air of authority and reflectiveness astonishing in an infant.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL (in a comment to his wife, when Elizabeth was 2 1/2.)

"It's highly unlikely that anyone else (than the Queen) in history has known 14 presidents." -- GEORGE W. BUSH (to the English journalist Robert Hardman)

"Charles is the standard definition of a liberal -- as assemblage of special interest groups. His mother being the exact opposite, she embodied a profound respect for the way things are done." -- RICHARD STARKEY

"The Queen is the past-mistress of nothingness." -- POLLY TOYNBEE (the leftist English journalist, in THE GUARDIAN)

Questions

"When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question." -- LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

"You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions." – NAGUIB MAHFOUZ (writer, Nobel laureate (11 Dec 1911-2006)

"If you get people asking the wrong questions, you don't need to worry about the answers." -- HUNTER S. THOMPSON

“It’s inbred into anybody who’s in the spy business not to ask a lot of questions until you know you’re entitled to the answers.” – DUANE “DEWEY” CLARRIDGE

Quitting                                                                                                                                 

"Age wrinkles the body. Quitting wrinkles the soul" -- DOUGLAS MacARTHUR

Quotes

“Aphorisms are literature’s hand luggage. “ – JAMES GEARY (author of “We Are What We Think”)

"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read a book of quotations." -- WINSTON CHURCHILL (hey!....)

"If it were not for quotations, conversation between gentlemen would consist of an endless succession of 'what-ho!' 's." -- P. G. WODEHOUSE (dat's better.....)

“I quote others only the better to express myself.” -- MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

“I scarcely every quote; the reason is, I always think.” -- THOMAS PAINE           (the more I learn about this character, the less appealing he becomes....)

“It is a compliment to a quotation that it gets misattributed.” -- CHARLES MOORE

"Why not stop trawling the Internet for quotes and read a book? I write books, not quotes." -- SALMAN RUSHDIE

"Abraham Lincoln has become the reputed author of more amusing sayings than he could ever have had time to utter in his lifetime." -- NORMAN BIRKETT (actually, this bloke was The First Baron Birkett, a distinguished judge who was one of the Brits at the Nuremberg Trials) 

"A writer must be quoted. To write and address your readership directly is nothing, after all that’s a writer’s job. But to be quoted by others makes your important. I have been quoted dozens of times as having said this: ‘A Hungarian is a man who is behind you in a revolving door but gets out in front of you,’ a saying I have never said. But that’s beside the point. To have something attributed to you, reflects even more glory and is incomparably better than to be quoted on something you have actually said." –  GEORGE MIKES (Hungarian-born British journalist, humourist)

“The Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.” – WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (oh dear....)

“If we take the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as our guide, then Shakespeare produced roughly one-tenth of all the most quotable utterances written or spoken in English since its inception – a clearly remarkable proportion.” – BILL BRYSON

“Beck's work on the fifteenth edition (of “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations” in 1980) was the start of the work's downfall: donning the intellectual bell-bottoms and platform shoes of its era, Bartlett's began spouting third-rate Third World, youth-culture, and feminist quotes, part of a middle-aged obsession with staying trendy." – ARAM BAKSHIAN (commenting on the handiwork of Bartlett’s editrix Emily Morison Beck, 1915-2004)

"Directly quoted individual voices are the yeast that allow history to rise." -- SARA WHEELER (an English travel author and biographer)

"The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste." -- SUSAN SONTAG (... and as the editor of this Compendium and a huge fan of Surrealist art I can only agree with the old pain in the arse.) 

"It's better to be quotable than to be honest." -- TOM STOPPARD

"I hate quotations" -- RALPH WALDO EMERSON

"Why should I give my readers bad lines of my own when good ones of other people's are so plenty?" -- BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

"Why does every quote have a counterquote?" -- MORT WALKER (in the mouth of his greatest creation, the indomitable "Beetle Bailey")

"Who quotes these days? Only the strong and the brave.  Quoting is dangerous." -- HILARY MANTEL

"No longer do we try to change the world, we simply clap quotation marks around it." -- COSMO LANDESMAN

"The first rule is that most common quotations were not said by the people to whom they are attributed. The second rule is like unto it:  a few big names -- Winston  Churchill, Oscar Wilde -- attract quotations as magnets attract iron-filings." -- DOT WORDSWORTH

"When we can't think for ourselves, we can always quote." -- LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN      (1889-1951, and we get the last laff by putting him in this Compendium)