C

California

“The coast dwellers up and down California - the real divide is not between northern and southern California but between coast-dwellers and inlanders - have long wanted California to resemble nothing so much as a European welfare state. Slowly but surely they are getting their way.” - TOM BETHELL (he wrote this in 1994, and since then California has come to resemble less a European welfare state than a Third World banana republic.)

“California is an irredeemably messed-up place to whose land borders someone should apply a humongous power saw so that the entire wretched state could float off into the Pacific Ocean and cease bothering us.” - JOHN DERBYSHIRE

“California – where the weather and the general population are matched in vapidity only by each other.” – AMMON SHEA (The young, I believe American, author of “Reading the OED; One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages”)

“Just as Americans ought to be able to learn the perils of a welfare state by looking at Greece, we ought to be able to learn the perils of illegal immigration by looking at California.” – ANN COULTER

“Statehouses are the laboratories of democracy. California's is the meth lab.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

“If you've got a billion dollars, there's no better place to live than California; if you've got a million dollars there's no worse place to live than California.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

“Surely never in civilization’s history have so many been so willing to leave a natural paradise.” – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

“Throughout history, Dark Age man relies on his own arms for protection. He travels as little as possible. He trusts no stranger. He has no state service for aid. He fears disease, eats no food not his own, and does not ever sleep far from home. And he prefers only those of his tribe. In other words, whether 900 B.C., or A..D. 900, or 2020, he is a Californian.” – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

“California’s polarization based on wealth resembles the Antebellum South’s racial segregation. That is the nexus: great wealth, great poverty. But the way I look at it is — they would not want to hear this — but just think of the old Confederacy or the Antebellum South — one party, Democratic — this is a one-party state. They had Big Cotton. We have Big Tech. Big Tech runs the whole state, just like Big Cotton ran the Antebellum South. The Old South, we had the plantationist class. Today, these are the people that live in Woodside or Berkeley Hills or Palo Alto, then you had everybody else: black slaves, and you had the poor, what they called ‘white trash.' There was no middle class. When I go to Stanford, I see all these wealthy kids there, and then I go along El Camino, everybody’s living in a trailer.

The other thing about the Old Confederacy, they were obsessed with race, and it was the one-drop rule. Everybody was trying to figure out, when a baby was born, what the precise percentages were, and then they were a ranked society. When I get my email in the morning, it’s all about one thing: race — race, race, race, race, race. I turn on the television: ‘white privilege’.

It’s just a sick fixation on our superficial appearance. It’s a very Confederate society, California. It’s medieval, feudal. There is no middle class anymore.” – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON      (in an interview with Alex Marlow of Breitbart, in Dec. 2021)                                                                                                                                       

“The California governance model has turned the Golden State into 'The Hunger Games'. Go east of I-5 - the reporters, the tech zillionaires and the Hollywood hypocrites never do - and California dreamin’ is a nightmare.” – KURT SCHLICHTER (who lives in L.A.)

"Basically, California has become 'Game Of Thrones', only with less attractive people." -- KURT SCHLICHTER     (On "Fox & Friends", 14 June 2018)                  

"California is full of liberal idiots who turned a beautiful state into an open hobo sewer." -- KURT SCHLICHTER      (in Dec. 2021)                                 

"In California the past is as thin as ether, The dream that surrounds you there is from hypoxia (lack of oxygen). It kills brain cells, fairly slowly, but by the end even the nonagenarians carry around skateboards." -- MARK HELPRIN

“California: If you use a plastic straw you can go to jail but if you come illegally you get the right to vote, welfare, and benefits. If illegals start using plastic straws in California will they finally be deported?” – CHARLIE KIRK (in July 2018)

"California must be allowed to secede. Make it the home of all the leftists and coyotes in the country. California has no redeeming features. No sane human can bear this..." -- THOMAS WICTOR (on 29 August 2018, frustrated that he's surrounded by a pack of wild coyotes but neither the cops or the relevant civilian "authorities" give a shit other than to tell him if he kills the coyotes he'll go to jail)

"California isn't what it used to be. The wide-open spirit that once attracted to the West Coast characters ranging from Jack Kerouac to Ronald Reagan has long since been supplanted by the tepid and sanctimonious spirit of progressive nanny-statism, oppressive taxes, endless regulation and Thou Shalt Nots, and generally dreadful project of trying to convert a glorious strip of the formerly Wild West into Norway with nicer weather." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON                                          (August, 2018)

"California: America's inflamed appendix." -- PHILIP SCHUYLER (A conservative Twitter superstar, in Sept. 2019)

“California is the dumb blonde of the union. Hot, but so stupid.” – GARY EATON (A Californian – and the leader of the rock band “The Army You Have”)

“California is a place where they shoot too many pictures and not enough actors." – WALTER WINCHELL (bada-BING, tchhh....)

 “A new candidate for Governor of California is running on a platform of taxing breast implants, which of course are California's largest natural resources." – JAY LENO

"When a New Yorker says FU, he means Have a nice day. When a Californian says Have a nice day, he means FU." -- RICHARD BROOKHISER

"California is a very dense state." -- GOV. GAVIN NEWSOM (on 16 March 2021. And yes, Gavin, yes -- yes it is.)

“One of the almost universal culture processes traditional in the United States is the irresistible movement westward of hard-core lunatics. Stopped at last by the Pacific Ocean, they back up in Los Angeles, where, after they become docile, they open funerary forests. It was inevitable that Beverly Hills have the highest percentage of head-bangers in the world (Israel is a close rival), for it has one of the highest concentrations of millionaires and maniacs running around loose anywhere.” – PROF. JOHN GREENWAY (the late “Gonzo Anthropologist from the U. of Colorado, who was, I believe, a California native.)

"Jesus, what people in California think is important." -- ROBERT PLUNKET (the author of “My Search For Warren G. Harding)    

“In California, I had the impression that anything might happen at any moment. In New England, I had exactly the contrary feeling.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS  

“Storm Damage Makes Florida Look almost As Bad As California!” — RON DESANTIS (After Hurricane Ian, in Oct. 2022)

"How is it that California, with the highest taxes in the nation, is incapable of managing its forests, dealing with homelessness, protecting its streets, educating its young, and, in short, addressing those problems for which its citizens are taxed?" -- DAVID MAMET (in 2022)

"California is not a 'model for the nation'. It is a warning to the nation." -- KEVIN KILEY (A Republican Assemblyman from California, on 27 March 2022)

Cambodia

“Pol Pot’s Cambodia is an interesting social experiment.” – RIICHARD GOTT (at the time of the Khmer Rouge’s annihilation of a third of Cambodia’s population. And, to the surprise of  absolutely no one, the charming Mr. Gott, then THE GUARDIAN’S Literary Editor had to resign, when it was discovered that he’d been taking $ from the KGB.)

“From 1979 onwards, the Left tried to argue, first, that the Khmer Rouge were not really Communists and, second, that their brutality was the result of US aggression. Neither argument stands up. The Khmer Rouge leaders such as Pol Pot and Ieng Sary had joined the Communist Party as students in Paris in the 1950s, worshipping at the feet of a long line of terrorists from Robespierre to Stalin. After Stalin’s death, the Cambodian Communists found a new hero in Mao. The Khmer Rouge were not just Communists; they belonged to the purest line of Communists.” – RICHARD WEST

Campaigning

“I had not the smallest idea that it was necessary to kiss so many dirty ugly women and drink so much ale, rum and milk, grog, raisin and elder wine, with porter and cider. I have been sick for a fortnight.” – RICHARD MEYLER (elected MP for Winchester, England, in 1812)

"Basically everyone loses 25 IQ points in the final 2 weeks of an election campaign, it's like showing up to a party where everyone is 6 drinks in." -- NATE SILVER

Camping

"I thought a moment and decided that camping out was better than being dead, but not by much." -- NELSON DEMILLE

"The best view of a mountain is, in my opinion, from the window of a room in a nearby first-class hotel. The same goes for camp sites. From a distance they seem bright, hopeful little settlements. You look out over a valley at the blue canvas dotted around the grass of some hillside, and  you can be fooled into thinking that lying down in a tent could be rather fun. When you are actually in one and your ears and nose are inches away from the soil as a keen wind scurries through the undergrowth, it is a different story. Your right should always seems to be grinding into the rockiest part of the terrain. You only discover it isn't the rockiest part of the terrain when you try to move. Perhaps your left should will mould itself ot the earth rather better. It doesn't. As you lie on your back and the wind whistles through the tent flap, you reflect that the only people who should be this close to nature are those who have gone through the burial ceremony." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS

"A Jew going camping, whoever heard of a Jew going camping? Jews go on cruises. Jews go to hotels. Camping, it's like a very Christian thing. The last Jew who camped, I think his last name was Moses." -- LAURENCE SHAMES (in his 1996 comic novel "Tropical Depression")

Canada

“Canada was explored, settled, and developed by people who didn’t want to be there in the first place.”  — ROBERTSON DAVIES (the big-deal Canadian author)

“Canada would seem to be everybody's second nationality. The question is whether it's still anybody's first.” - MARK STEYN  

“Broadway producers, accustomed to going to parties and hearing doctors, bond traders and orthodontists tell them what's wrong with their plays, like to say that show business is everybody's second business. Canada would seem to be everybody's second nationality. The question is whether it's still anybody's first.” - MARK STEYN (a half-Canadian half-Belgian - he says he’s descended from the two most boring nationalities on earth -- who, apparently, lives in New Hampshire. Oh, and he speaks with a British accent.)

“Canadians and Americans have different forms of government because the Royalist, throne-kissing, swine left America for Canada during the Revolutionary War and that's why they don't mind big government, switched to the metric system when ordered and will wait on line like good little subjects.” - JONAH GOLDBERG (in fairness, he was paraphrasing Seymour Martin Lipset at the time, but he said it nonetheless?)

"It’s funny how the word Canadian just drenches everything it touches with irony or drains the grittiness away." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“Canada is the Ned Flanders to the US’s Homer Simpson.” - DOM JOLY (British “comedian, broadcaster and writer”)

“Canada’s politics may be as dripping wet as Vancouver, but the people are warm and funny, and there is something sweet about the US's insecure, slightly wimpy northern neighbour. Yet there comes a point when weakness morphs into a reckless death wish.” - JANET ALBRECHTSEN (A writer for “The Australian”, in Jan. 2008)

" ‘Ottawa’: Indian for ‘Land of the Bed-Wetters’. " - ANN COULTER

“Canada is an honorary member of the Third World.” - FRED BARNES

“Canadians are a docile, Zamboni-driving people who subsist on seal casserole and Molson. Their hobbies include wearing flannel, obsessing over American hegemony, exporting deadly mad cow disease and even deadlier Gordon Lightfoot and Nickelback albums. You can tell a lot about a nation’s mediocrity index by learning that they invented synchronized swimming. Even more by the fact that they’re proud of it.” - MATT LABASH

“Canada is a nation of associate professors.” - WILL FERGUSON (A Canadian “satirist”)

“You have to know a man awfully well in Canada to know his surname.” – JOHN BUCHAN (a reminder to my fellow Yank hosers: a “surname” up north means “family name”)

"Down there (in the U.S.), being a liberal is a burden. Up here (in Canada), it is a badge of honour." -- MICHAEL IGNATIEFF (the "intellectual" leader of Canada's Liberal Party, and, yeah, it's such an "honour" that shortly after the fatuous prat uttered these deathless words, in 1911, he led his party to its worst electoral defeat in Canadian history....)

"Canadians often resent the United States for the same reason Philadelphia resents New York City." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"We in Britain do not regard Canadians as full-blooded foreigners." -- CHARLES MOORE

“The deeper mystery is why it is that residents of Canada are not 'Canadans' or, alternatively, why the country in which Canadians live is not 'Canadia'? The present setup is very jarring.” – PAUL KOTIK                                                                            (a very amusing commenter to NRO, and he reminds me of the quip of the immortal British comic Tony Hancock that Canada ought to be pronounced like Granada – Can-ahda....)

"Canada is a weird cold semi-socialist backwater pockmarked with Francophonic hostility and saddled with a ridiculous monarchy, a national wheat monopoly, and the pinko health-care system that Barack Obama really, really wants deep down inside. It’s basically a sprawling, low-ambition Sweden with a miniature France growing like an udder out of its soft underbelly." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Picking on Canadians is like smooshing an ice-cream cone in an Amish guy's face.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"Canada -- America's largest national park." -- CHRIS PLANTE

“Canada is America's hat.” – CHRIS PLANTE

"Ever time I talk to a Canadian, either he will get around to asking me what I think of Canada, or I will know that he wants to." -- WALKER PERCY 

“Sweden – the world’s leader in uterine transplants – is anxious to reclaim the title of the world’s most batshit crazy nation, which the Canadians and that simpering idiot Justin Trudeau currently have in their grasp.” – ROD LIDDLE

"Four years is pretty much the maximum any country; except Canada, can take of unrelieved wokery." -- ROD LIDDLE (referring to the re-election of Fidelito, in April 2023) 

“The golden rule of Canadian politics is this: Canadian politics will tend toward the least exciting possible outcome.” – PAUL WELLS (a columnist at “Maclean’s” magazine.)

"Canadians carry the burden of being widely regarded as the most boring people in the world. Perhaps this is partly because of the spreading of the poisoned testimony of their neighbors." -- MARK LAWSON

"It was a place defined by its neighbours and progenitors. Canada equals America minus x. Or, depending on where you went, Britain minus z. Or France minus y. Vancouver and Victoria were winsomly British. Toronto pretend American. Montreal insistently French. Only the centre -- Winnipeg -- held to a vision of what to be Canadian might mean, and even that was a spin-off of the Middle American mentality." -- MARK LAWSON

"Canada lacked either former significance or present importance." -- MARK LAWSON

"Canadians -- history's couch potatoes." -- MORDECAI RICHLER (A Canadian himself. A novelist, and a pretty damn good one, too.)

“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

“For those who aspire to live in a high cost, high tax, big government place, our nation and the world offers plenty of options. Vermont, Canada and Venezuela all offer you the opportunity to live in the socialist, big government paradise you long for.” - MARCO RUBIO

"The Canadians have always been self-satisfied little prigs, willing to bow and scrape before whatever powers might be. They don't deserve their wild and beautiful land." -- TED JOY (a retired American journalist, on the Twoot, 21 July 2022)

"In Canada, the Kingdom of Reason, stating an obvious fact out loud is tantamount to committing a hate crime." -- LEAH McLAREN (in Feb. 2022, in conjunction with the "truckers' protest" against government regulatory overkill)

“Cancel Culture”

"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)

"This cancelling of history is, aside from being an expression of almost exquisite stupidity, a religiously-inspired pogrom more damaging than anything we have done since the looting of the monasteries." -- ROD LIDDLE (And by the way, the "looting of the monasteries" he refers to was perpetrated by Henry VIII between 1536-1541)

“Liberty depends on memory. Doing away with the past is the chief technique of modern tyrants.” – DAVID BARCLAY (the late billionaire co-owner, with his twin brother, of the UK DAILY TELEGRAPH and the UK    SPECTATOR)

“Cancel culture needs to start canceling numbers. I suggest beginning with the number 9. Personally, it's the number that I dislike the most. This is because, in 4th grade, it was the ‘9-times’ part of the multiplication table that tripped me up. I was fine all the way through 8 X 10 = 80. But when I got to the 9s I fell apart. To this day when I see 9 X 9 I want the result to be 99, and I suffer a feeling of exclusion and powerlessness and a need to go to a safe place when I'm told by the people who hold power in our society that the answer is otherwise. As any woke person will tell you, ‘The personal is the political’. And this is true 9 times out of 10, so to speak. Therefore, with righteous indignation, I demand that 9s be banned.” – P. J. O’ROURKE                                                                                                                                                      (in April 2021)

“A world where half the things you know are things you mustn’t say is a mad world. And a world where no one remarks on this is madder still.” – MICHAEL FRAYN

"The present can have no meaning if we keep erasing the past." -- RICHARD MADELEY (the English host of their "Good Morning Britain)  

"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)

"If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future.“ — WINSTON CHURCHILL (one of the more prominent cancel-ees....)

“To believe artefacts with colonial or slave trade associations reproduce violence today requires subjecting oneself to hours of bad scholarship or ‘workshops’. The poor do not have that privilege. Such are the luxuries of an elite mob. And if democracy has any real meaning, it is surely the ability of the majority to laugh at their foolish ideas.” – ALEXANDER PELLING-BRUCE (a black chap, actually, writing in the UK SPECTATOR on 10 April 2021)

“I have a ‘Reverse Voltaire’ theory:  I agree with what you have to say, but will fight to the death to prevent you from saying it.” – MARY LENG (A Brit lady philosopher – “of mathematics and of science”, if you please – who philosophizes at the York University. At least she did at the time of this typing....)

"There is a kind of low-level totalitarianism detectable in many institutions today -- from elite universities to newspapers, publishers and technological companies --which reveals that practices such as informing, denunciation and defamation can all flourish even in the absence of a one-party dictatorship." -- NIALL FERGUSON

“It’s a very complex situation, this cancel culture, or this instant rush to judgment based on essentially what amounts to polluted air. It's got so far out of hand that I can assure you, no one is safe." – JOHNNY DEPP (I don’t think it’s a “very complex situation” at all, I think it’s just the latest wrinkle in leftist totalitarianism – but if the actor’s upset, that’s fine by me. He said this in Sept. 2021.)

“Canceled of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but the company of ghastly bores with bath breath and worse ideas. Yippee!” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS (in Nobember 2021)

"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....)

"Everyone is just one unacceptable opinion away from being a rightwing, MAGA, white supremacist threat to society." -- CHAD FELIX GREENE (A right-wing poofter, author of "Without Context")

Candor

“I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer.” – DOUGLAS ADAMS

"If everything you or I said in private were revealed to the world, we could all be made to look awful." -- DENNIS PRAGER

"Tell your prospective client your weakness before they notice them. This will make you more credible when you boast about your strong points." -- DAVID OGILVY       (the legendary English advertising pioneer) 

Cannes

“We thought Cannes the most loathly (sic) hole in the known world and that, once we got out of this damned Riviera, nothing short of armed troops would induce us to return. Of all the poisonous, foul, ghastly places, Cannes takes the biscuit with absurd ease. Until we came here, I was thinking Monte Carlo not all it might be, but now I look back on those dear old Monte Carlo days with an absolute pang.” – P. G. WODEHOUSE (He's right about the awful Monte Carlo, but I quite like Cannes....)

“Cannes is all fur coats and no knickers.” – ANTHONY PEREGRINE (A France-based correspondent to THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, and “knickers”, of course, is Brit for “panties”)

Cannibals

'Two cannibals were eating a clown – one said to the other, 'Does he taste funny to you?' ” – TOMMY COOPER                        (Brit music hall comedian, 1921-1984)

“Capitalism”

“It is not to the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” - AYN RAND

“America’s abundance was created not by public sacrifices to 'the common good', but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America’s industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance–and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.” – AYN RAND

“Leftists always used to talk about building socialism. Capitalism doesn’t require building. It’s just what happens if you leave people alone. It arises, in short, from human nature, and only needs harmonizing under some mild, reasonable, laws and customary restraints. You don’t have to build it by forging a New Capitalist Man, or anything like that.” - JOHN DERBYSHIRE

“I used to assume that capitalism was human nature… it was not human nature at all, but culture.” - ALAN GREENSPAN

“They tell you capitalism is a dog-eat-dog system. What is life if not a dog-eat-dog system? This is a system which is in tune with life. And because it is, it works.” - PHILIP ROTH (As Jean-François Revel titled one of his books, “Le Capitalisme - Mais Ce N’Est Rien Que La Vie”)

«I find myself more and more relying for a solution to our problems on (Adam Smith’s) invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking 20 Years ago.» --- JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES (he said this incredible thing JUST A FEW DAYS BEFORE HIS DEATH, in 1946)

“Those who hate capitalism think that wealth is finite and that anyone who accumulates more than he needs is robbing somebody else.” - CHARLES MOORE (he’s of course describing the disastrously fallacious “Zero Sum” theory of economics – and indeed, of life.)

“Arguments for capitalism are not necessarily arguments for particular capitalists.” - CHARLES MOORE

“The moral argument for capitalism is about the freedom and prosperity it engenders. It is not about a banker being ‘better’ than a teacher.” - CHARLES MOORE

“Another of the good things about capitalism is that it can wipe the smug smile off the faces of its own practitioners with amazing speed.” - CHARLES MOORE.

“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? At the end of the day, the first answer is capitalism, rightly understood. That is to say: free markets, private property, the spirit of entrepreneurialism and the conviction that the fruits of your labors are your own.” - JONAH GOLDBERG

“Just because business thrives under capitalism doesn’t mean businessmen are necessarily principled capitalists. Businessmen - at least those at the helm of very large corporations - do not like risk, and capitalism by definition requires risk. Capital must be put to work in a market where nothing is assured. But businessmen are, by nature and training, encouraged to beat back uncertainty and risk. Hence, as a group, they aren’t principled capitalists but opportunists in the most literal sense.” - JONAH GOLDBERG

"Capitalism is the most cooperative system ever created for the peaceful improvement of peoples' lives -- it has only a single fatal flaw: It doesn't feel like it." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“The free market capitalist system is the best system for supporting human dignity and pushing humans to behave morally. It does this by allowing individuals to take personal responsibility for their behavior. It allows individuals to find their most productive occupation, and forces people to face the challenges of the real world head on. It respects competition between free people. That is why it works and why only capitalism, of all systems, has led to permanently and significantly higher standards of living.” - BRIAN WESBURY (An American economist, in October 2009)

“Capitalism may lead to greed but at least it doesn’t lead to murder.” - STEFAN NIESIOLOWSKI                                                 (Deputy Speaker of the Polish Parliament in 10 March 2010. And I think he’s wrong about “capitalism leads to greed” - nothing does - greed is just part of human nature.)

"Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists." – G. K. CHESTERTON

"Never trust anyone you can't punish. Capitalism only works when you can hurt the people who let you down. With no prospect of retaliation, there can be no trust, and you can't trust anyone who is too big to jail." -- RORY SUTHERLAND (An advertising executive at Ogilvy-Mather and The Spectator’s "The Wiki Man")

“Socialists believe their mission is to seize capital for the masses. But the great secret of capitalism is that, detached from a capitalist, there is no capital.” – GEORGE GILDER

"Take capital away from capitalists and it will wither rather than multiply." -- STEVE FORBES

"Capitalism has its limits. It creates wealth, but is utterly silent about what should be done with that wealth." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“Leftists make an egregious mistake when they treat capitalism as the opposing ideology to Communism, when it is nothing of the kind: It's not an ideology at all, but merely a way to get things done to the benefit of the many.” – JEAN-FRANCOIS REVEL

"Capitalism without failure is a bit like religion without sin." -- LARRY KUDLOW

“Capitalism is the greatest system ever created for alleviating general human misery, and yet it breeds ingratitude.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"As the smell of Communism is compounded from boiled cabbage and damp serge so the smell of Capitalism is a combination of the warm scent of popcorn and the sour stench of pizzas." -- GEORGE COURTAULD (what "sour stench of pizzas"?)

"Capitalism is a human instinct: an inherent impulse to trade and barter and swap and sell and haggle." -- GEORGE COURTAULD (in his 1995 "The Travels Of A Fat Bulldog")

“The predominant form of bad capitalism in contemporary America is created by the joining of a capitalist enterprise with the coercive power of the state, not by the impurity of the motivations of the capitalist. This distinction is crucial for defenders of free enterprise.” – JIM MANZI (Businessman and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute)

“What we call ‘capitalism’ is really innovation and is based on the great virtues: hope, faith, love and courage” – JIM PETHOKOUKIS

"Capitalism does not work if money is free." -- LIONEL SHRIVER (an American lady novelist -- I mention this because her first night might lead you to believe otherwise -- who knows more economics than most "economists") 

“Capitalism's deadliest foe isn't the anti-capitalist movement. It's the capitalists.” – LLOYD EVANS

"I thought that if we just redistributed resources, then we could solve every problem. I now know that’s not true. The off-ramp out of extreme poverty is, ugh, commerce, it’s entrepreneurial capitalism." -- BONO (real name Paul David Hewson, and the pompous ass -- who said this in October '22 -- probably thinks he's the first to have discovered this truism)

“Capitalism is the best thing that has ever happened to the material condition of the human race. From the dawn of history until the 18th century, every society in the world was impoverished, with only the thinnest film of wealth on top. Then came capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. Everywhere that capitalism subsequently took hold, national wealth began to increase and poverty began to fall. Everywhere that capitalism didn't take hold, people remained impoverished. Everywhere that capitalism has been rejected since then, poverty has increased.” – CHARLES MURRAY

“Under capitalism, wealth is less a stock of goods than a flow of ideas, the defining characteristic of which is surprise.” – GEORGE GILDER

“Capitalism feeds on information that is outside of the company itself and therefore under the control of others. Only an altruistic orientation can tap the outside incandescence ofinformation and learning that determine the success of capitalism's gifts.” – GEORGE GILDER

“Explaining capitalism by self-interest or greed is like explaining airplane crashes by the force of gravity. Greed and gravity are general and ubiquitous in regimes of all sorts and therefore irrelevant to the extraordinary results of capitalist creativity.” – STEVE FORBES

“Capitalism is, for the most part, boring. In the real world, capitalism is nothing more or less than what happens when property rights are respected.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Every era and every culture has its great men – every Golden Horde has a khan at its head. Civilization is sustained by nobodies, and the magic of capitalism is that it allows aggregates of nobodies not only to send men to the moon but to give them tasty powdered orange-juice substitutes to take along for the ride.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“The only capitalism that the Left can imagine is crony capitalism. When the Left says 'We hate capitalism', it is saying in effect what the Right says when it abominates the government's 'picking winners and losers' in the market. The difference is that the Left cannot imagine any other kind of capitalism – one based on free markets rather than favoritism – while the Right can.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Every chimpanzee troupe has a boss, but only human beings have capitalism.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"It is, after all, capitalism and capitalism alone that has created a society rich enough that we could well do away with our censorious rhetoric about the “deserving” poor and worry a little bit less about who really deserves what, there being more than enough to go around." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"What we call 'capitalism' is not, and never has been, primarily about the bloodless pursuit of a slightly better profit margin. The business of business is important -- it is necessary -- but the best part of capitalism is, and always has been, joy." KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man." -- WALTER E. WILLIAMS

“I put capitalism in quotation marks because it is an unscientific term. As a label for the market system, it was invented by Marxists, and is used by them to brand the marketing system in advance as a mere tool of the interests of the capitalist class.” – IRA STRAUS

“Capitalism pays people to be nice.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

“The reason to avoid communism is not because it is inefficient, but because it tries to be too intelligent. Communism might be able to build a boring bridge or lathe factory, but it could never have created Red Bull: no bureaucracy could ever must the level of insanity necessary to try charging￡2 for a slightly disgusting drink in a tiny can. Its popularity defies explanation: it is the duck-billed platypus of the carbonated drinks world.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

“Poor nations are poor because of the lack of capitalism, not because of it.” – JAMES PETHOKOUKIS

"Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin. It doesn't work." -- ALLAN MELTZER (Prof. of Economics at my daughter Annie's alma mater, Carnegie-Mellon Univ.)

"Capitalism isn't a worked-out ideology like socialism, rather it's what people do when left to themselves." -- ALAN JUDD

“Capitalism is necessary for liberty, but it is not sufficient for liberty.” -- MILTON FRIEDMAN

"Capitalism is like a dead mackerel in the moonlight -- it shines, but it stinks!" -- BILLY WILDER (in his comedy "One, Two, Three" of 1961)

“The biggest problem in the world in the unequal distribution of capitalism.” – RUSH LIMBAUGH

"We need a better word for what happened since 1800 in the West, and now increasingly the rest. The worst enemies of liberty popularized 'capitalism' in the late 19th century. We shouldn't let them go on setting the intellectual agenda." -- DEIRDRE NANSEN McCLOSKEY

"The C-word (capitalism) draws undue attention to the financial sector. Worse, it embodies a mistaken theory, still popular among some economists, right and left, that capital accumulation is what made us rich. What actually made American and Swedish and Japanese people rich was innovation, that is, invention-carried-out, 'exchange-tested betterment', you might say, or even 'innovism'." -- DEIRDRE NANSEN McCLOSKEY

"Socialism has its points, but mass prosperity is not one of them. Private property has its flaws, but mass poverty is not generally in recent centuries one of them." -- BEN STEIN

"Capitalism makes socialism possible." -- DENNIS PRAGER

“I don’t use the word ‘capitalism” partly because it was coined as a pejorative by Marxists for ‘free enterprise’, and partly because the ‘-ism’ suggests it’s a system – when it’s not system at all, but rather economic human nature allowed to run free.” – JACK JOLIS

“It’s wrong to regard capitalism as the product of the greed of a few rather than the desires of the many; as something done to us, rather than something we do voluntarily.” – JACK JOLIS

“Capitalism is the greatest engine of human progress ever invented.” – MARTIN VANDER WEYER (in his 2021 book, “The Good, The Bad, And The Greedy”)

Capitalism, (Anti-)

“Anti-capitalist talk is the New Year's resolution of politics: vestigial puritanism. When it starts to pinch, the fervor wanes.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"Capitalism, Crony"

“For the record I don't want regulations/government that are allied with business. I want regulations/government allied with free markets. The first problem with government being business's ally is that it quickly becomes the ally of *existing* business over new business. The second problem is that government becomes ally of big business over small business because government finds big easier to deal with.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"It's very hard to disentangle democracy (i.e. classical liberalism) and capitalism. Without the former the latter becomes corporatism." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“There is nothing conservative about bailing out Wall Street. Likewise, there is nothing progressive about billion dollar loans to millionaires to build solar panels.” -- RAND PAUL                                                                                                                             (I’m leery of this guy, and I sure don’t like his foreign policy, but on this he’s absolutely right.)

"The real crime of crony capitalism is that it makes us stupider." -- JERRY BOWYER                                                                        (The American economist, author, columnist and radio guy. Good fella.)

"The rich get richer. The poor get benefits. The middle class pays for it all" – RON FOURNIER (a liberal American journalist, but not a... crazy one....)

“Both the Left and the Right denounce crony capitalism, but we’re furious about the cronyism, and they’re furious about the capitalism.” – JIM GERAGHTY

"If your business plan depends on help from the government, it's not a 'business'." -- DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE

“Some people make fortunes by building a better mousetrap; some by making campaign donations to the US Secretary of Mouse Security.” – DAVE «IOWAHAWK» BURGE

“The bigger threat we have got than socialism is state-controlled capitalism, which is where we're headed, where we have big government and a handful of big companies. That's what you're seeing in technology right now with these these massive companies. It's the biggest danger we have.” – STEVE BANNON (in March 2018)

Capital Punishment

“Grass grows easily over the battlefield, but over the scaffold, never.” - WINSTON CHURCHILL

“Capital punishment has been the ultimate source of law and order.” – RICHARD WRANGHAM (In his book “The Goodness Paradox”)

"Europe, like lovely, liberal Canada, does not believe in the death penalty for criminals.  Only for victims." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY (he was referring to their enthusiasm for euthanasia for those who are depressed as a result of being victims of crime... no kidding.)

“Caring”
"You will be made to care." -- ERICK ERICKSON      (the radio talk show host) 

Carter, Jimmy

“He is unable to distinguish between our friends and our enemies, and has ended by adopting our enemies' view of the world." - DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN (the great senator from NY, and, incidentally, one of only 2 Democrats I ever voted for – the other being Ed Koch —  and in both cases, the Noo Yawk “Republican” was to their left.)

“Comparing anyone to Jimmy Carter feels like an attack because Carter was a failed president who went on to a post-presidential career of great obnoxiousness.” - RICH LOWRY

“Sometimes, when I look at my children, I say to myself, 'Lillian, you should have remained a virgin’.” - LILIANE CARTER (mother of Jimmeh)

"A scamp mountebank from Jerkwater America whose knowledge of government and history was somewhere between that of the wash-room attendant at '21' and a modestly educated welfare queen." -- R. EMMETT TYRRELL, Jr.

“During the Carter years, the government was mostly in the black while everyone else was in the red.” – GEORGE GILDER

“Jimmy Carter's mind is like a seat cushion that bears the imprint of the last person who sat in it.” – JOHN B. ANDERSON (the liberal Republican Congressman who ran for Pres. as an independent in 1980)

“Carter was a Baptist teetotaler (deeply boring) who carried his own garment bag and lectured us for being depressed, when the reason we were being depressed, when the reason we were depressed was because he was president.” – CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY

“Carter believes fifty things, but no one thing. He holds explicit, thorough positions on every issue under the sun, but he has no large view of the relations between them. Carter thinks in lists, not arguments, and the only thing that finally gives coherence to the items of his creed is that he happens to believe them all.” – JAMES FALLOWS (who was once Carter's speechwriter....)

“Jimmy Carter was an honest and sincere man, but he had no idea what he was doing. He was incredibly naive for an American president. His attitude changed after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.” – VLADIMIR BUKOVSKY

"Carter complains about people taking '3-martini lunches' -- Hell, until Carter became President, no one in this country felt the NEED for '3-martini lunches'." -- BARRY GOLDWATER

“You suspect Jimmy Carter said ‘I will never lie to you’ just to get the first one out of the way with twaddle.” – JAMES LILEKS

Cartoons

“Caricatures are close to ideograms, and political cartoon is an exercise in modern hieroglyphics.” - PAUL JOHNSON

“There’s a common denominator in cartoons that’s always funny: peril.” – NICK NEWMAN (a cartoonist for the UK SPECTATOR)

“Every day thousands of people read the OpEd pages. The next day none of them remember the articles. A year afterward they still remember the damn cartoon.” – PAUL CONRAD (3-time Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoonist for the LA Times)

Castro, Fidel

“Castro's net worth somehow is over $550 million. I guess you save money when you wear the same outfit for 40 years. Khaki shirt, khaki  pants, khaki hat. I call it the "beige of pigs." – CRAIG FERGUSON

Catalonia

“The Catalan problem is impossible to solve. It is a perpetual problem, which has always been, and will remain as long as Spain exists. It is something that no one is responsible for; it lies in the very character of that people; it is its terrible destiny, which drags distress throughout its entire history.” – JOSE ORTEGA Y GASSET (in 1932)

Catholics (Catholic Church)

“There is no such thing as an ex-Catholic.” - JIMMY BRESLIN (or an ex-Marine. Or an ex-intelligence officer.)

“The Catholic Church is held together by one word: calamity.” - JIMMY BRESLIN

“One cannot really be Catholic and grown-up”. - GEORGE ORWELL

“This afternoon, led by curiosity and good company, I strolled away to mother church, or rather grandmother church. I mean the Romish chapel. . . . The entertainment was to me most awful and affecting: the poor wretches fingering their beads, chanting Latin, not a word of which they understood; their pater nosters and ave Marias; their holy water; their crossing themselves perpetually; their bowing to the name of Jesus, whenever they hear it; their bowings, kneelings, and genuflections before the altar. The dress of the priest was rich white lace. His pulpit was velvet and gold. The altar piece was very rich, little images and crucifixes about; wax candles lighted up. . . . Here is everything which can lay hold of the eye, ear, and imagination — everything which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.” – JOHN ADAMS

"I am not a Catholic, but on the other hand I do not regard the Roman Church merely as 'artistic material'. It is sacred, if for no other reason that it is the faith that has been most loved by human creatures, and loved over the greatest stretch of centuries." -- WILLA CATHER         (the lady American novelist)

“He who travels in the Barque of Peter had better not look too closely into the engine room.” – RONALD KNOX                       (a famous English priest – 1888-1957)

“If you ever feel queasy in the Bark of St. Peter, it is better to stay away from the engine room.” – (Monsignor) RONALD KNOX

"Grant them their first absurdities and you will find Roman Catholics a reasonable people -- and they have civilized habits." -- EVELYN WAUGH        (in "Work Suspended", in 1942)

“The Catholic Church is divine, and the proof of it I take to be this: that no purely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted more than five minutes.” – HILLAIRE BELLOC

"Cathedrals were the space programs of their day (‘The Knights Templar were the first Space Force’: Discuss). Cities and nations constantly competed to see who could build the tallest Cathedral — which is why most are built on the tallest ground available. The idea was both theological and political. Theologically, the idea was to get as close to God as possible. Politically, it was a desire for, well, national greatness." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"I’m hard pressed to think of an institution that did more for the progress of humanity than the Church, despite the long list of indictments one can draw against various popes, priests, and Catholic potentates." -- JONAH GOLDBERG 

“It is said on the Continent (Europe) that a good Catholic is a man whose wife goes to church.” – DAVID LODGE

“The common mistake of outsiders was that Catholicism was a beautiful, solemn, dignified, aesthetic religion. But when you got inside you found it was ugly, crude, bourgeois. Typical Catholicism wasn’t to be found in St. Peter’s, or Chartres, but in some mean, low-roofed parish church, where hideous plaster saints simpered along the wall, and the bored congregation, pressed perspiration tight into the pews, rested their fat arses on the seats, rattled their beads, fumbled for their smallest change, and scolded their children. Yet in their presence God was made and eaten all day long, and for that reason those people could never be qyuite like other people, and that was Catholicism.” – DAVID LODGE

“Catholicism is the only religion to die in.” – OSCAR WILDE

“Catholicism – often a good port of call for those on the way to a nervous breakdown.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS         

 
"Guilt was, after all, one of the things that made sex really interesting. One of the most positive things the Catholic Church had done for screwing was trying to stamp it out." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS

Catholics (Jesuits)

"The differences between the life of a Jesuit and that of a spy are not so great. Each trades in souls. The priest saves souls, the spy preserves illusions." -- CHARLES McCARRY

"When I'm asked about my faith, I tell people that I was baptised as a Catholics, and converted to atheism by the Jesuits." -- LLOYD EVANS

Cats

“My rule of thumb about pet cats is that, like exclamation marks, two or more denote eccentricity in an owner.” - JEREMY CLARKE

“The phrase ‘pet owner’ of course, is not an issue with cats. Cats don’t have owners - they have staff.” - PRISCILLA PALOMINO (some broad living in San Francisco.)

“I have noticed that what cats most appreciate in a human being is not the ability to produce food - which they take for granted - but his or her entertainment value.” - GEOFFREY HOUSEHOLD (the English author of the great novel “Rogue Male”.)

"The reason cats are so pissy is they're God's perfect killing machines but they only weigh eight pounds and we keep picking them up and kissing them." -- RICK CANTON (a conservative fellow on the Twoot)

"No cat worthy of the name can tolerate lack of worship." -- MICK HERRON                                                                     (the quite good and amusing English spy/thriller novelist)

“A cat is God’s way of allowing man to caress a tiger.” – JOSEPH MERY                                                                                                               (the French pote, 1797-1866)

"Tigers are the biggest cats. Cats are the smallest tigers." -- ROBIN WHITE (in his thriller "Siberian Light")

"A lot of women are dog lovers. No amorous woman will admit to owning a cat -- with good reason. a pet is an alter ego that reveals how you relate to others. A dog is a son. A cat is a mother-in-law." -- LLOYD EVANS 

"Only priests and crazy people smile at cats." -- MARK HELPRIN

“Blood is never far from the surface with cat owners.” – FRANK MUIR                                                                                                (the very funny English TV scriptwriter)

"Cat ownership is associated with a 2x odds of developing schizophrenia." -- NICHOLAS FABIANO     ("science writer"; with the Dept. of Psychiatry of the Univ. of Ottawa)

Causes (and Lost Causes)

“There is no lost cause, because there is no gained cause.” -- T.S. ELIOT

"There is no such thing as a Lost Cause, because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors' victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that it will triumph." – T.S. ELIOT

“You talk of a lost cause, but that is not true. It is an unwon cause.” – JOHN STEINBECK (the old pinko was writing to Jackie Kennedy, of all people, about Scotland, of all things.)

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” – ERIC HOFFER

“Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it.” -- PHILIP K. DICK (the celebrated libertarian-ish sci-fi author)

“Niven's Law: There is no cause so noble that it will not attract fuckheads.” -- LARRY NIVEN (another celebrated libertarianish sci-fi author)

“Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for.” – LEWIS R. FOSTER (the man who wrote “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington”, the 1939 Oscar-winning movie in which JAMES STEWART   speaks those famously stoic words.)

Caution

"One always starts a journey in a strange land -- taking too many precautions, until one tires of the exertion and abandons care in the worst spot of all." -- GRAHAM GREENE (in 1939)

Cavemen

“Because Neanderthals have been patronised and demonised for too long, some consciousness-raising is badly needed. Some rebranding needs to be done. The word Neanderthal carries a pejorative overtone of a lunk-jawed caveman looking at a fire and not knowing how to light it. We need something new. Perhaps ‘First Man’ would be good. I could imagine meeting somebody at a party and asking them politely how much ‘First man’ they had in their make-up. Or of course ‘First Woman’, depending on how they gender-identified. I’ve noticed, though, that that women tend to think of being Neanderthal as a purely male preserve.” – HUGH THOMSON (without the “p”. Thomson is a British travel writer, film maker and explorer.)

Celebrity

“When everybody’s somebody then no one’s anybody”. - W.S. GILBERT (of Gilbert & Sullivan fame…)

“A celebrity is someone who is well known for his well-knownness” - DANIEL BOORSTIN

"You got guys who can't even play that got jerseys, shoes and everything." - CHARLES BARKLEY (the ex-“ bad boy” of the NY Knicks.)

“A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn’t know.”  - H. L. MENCKEN

“We are told to let our light shine, and if it does, we won't need to tell anybody it does. Lighthouses don't fire cannons to call attention to their shining – they just shine." — D. L. MOODY    (the 19th century American religious leadeer and founder of, of all things, the Mt. Hermon School -- which was, along with Choate, our great rivals when I went to Deerfield... in the early 60s) 

“The thought processes of fandom resemble those of dementia.” – RICHARD BROOKHISER

“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.” - ALICE COOPER

"A demagogue loves to be loved, and he doesn't worry about the quality of the people who love him. He's only worried about the quantity. He wants a lot of people to love him, so to speak, without discrimination. That bears a close resemblance to what we call a 'celebrity' in our democratic society now. A celebrity, I would say, is right next door to a demagogue." -- HARVEY MANSFIELD (Mansfield is the ultimate oxymoron -- a conservative Harvard prof)

"You're not a star until they can spell your name in Karachi." -- HUMPHREY BOGART

"The nice thing about being a celebrity is that when you bore people they think it's their fault." -- HENRY KISSINGER

"I need Kleenex for both the seven-passenger and coupé Cadillacs. One does not regurgitate and let fly a hock-tuey out of the car window and expect to hold the respect of his public. One cannot forget their Nobless Oblige." -- W.C. FIELDS

"I do not like it when people recognize me, and I like it even less when they have never heard of me." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS (the extremely amusing English novelist)

"I stopped believing in Santa Claus at the age of 6, when my mother took me to see him in a store and he asked me for my autograph." -- SHIRLEY TEMPLE 

"I hate to sound like an old man, but why are these people famous? What qualities do they possess that endear them to the wider world? We may at once eliminate talent, intelligence, attractiveness, and charm from the equation, so what does that leave? Dainty feet? Fresh, minty breath? I am at a loss to say. anatomically, many of them don't seem quite human. Many have names that suggest they have reached us from a distant galaxy: Ri-ri, Tulisa, Naya, Jai, K-Pez, Chlamydia, Mo-Ron. (I may be imagining some of these.)" -- BILL BRYSON (In 2015)

Censorship

“The general taboo against explicit sexual material, which operated before the 1960’s, has been replaced by a more restrictive form of censorship, a haunting fear of causing offence. We may have pornography on demand, but we are more frightened of our own thoughts, and others’ words, than an army of Victorian matrons.” - DANIEL WOLF (an English writer in THE SPECTATOR in Feb. 2006)

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

«Once you get a taste for shutting people up, it's hard to stop.» – MARK STEYN

“As I've had cause to learn myself in recent years, when some goons want to kill you over a book, the merits of the book are not the issue; the goons are.” – MARK STEYN

“Google made an explicit announcement recently that said that sometimes they would put warnings on things that are factually accurate because, even though they are true, they do not think it is in society's interest for people to be seeing it. Now you will be banned or deleted or blocked or silenced simply for disagreeing with the official version of events. It is just groupthink enforced by a cabal of woke billionaires, who have more power than anyone else on the planet.” – MARK STEYN (in Sept. 2021)

«An entirely new, unique and dense sort of ignorance will be manufactured by a combination of censorship of the Press and censorship by the Press.» – G. K. CHESTERTON

“The whole principle (of censorship) is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak.” – ROBERT HEINLEIN

"Either you refrain from expressing your political views or you will have only yourselves to blame if we treat you as the worst and most pernicious elements." -- VLADIMIR ILYICH LENIN

"My view is that not even bad books ought to be banned." -- ANTHONY BURGESS (now there's an interesting take....)

"Millennials don't fear censorship because they plan on doing the censoring themselves." -- LIONEL SHRIVER (The 60-something American lady journalist and novelist, living in England, who is a liberal but who seems to have gotten herself in quarrels with even bigger liberals.)

“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

"This supine self-censorship goes way beyond political correctness, a shop-worn term too pallid for the profundity of the problem. Not only is expressing a view that deviates from progressive orthodoxy a crime, but so is merely providing a forum for that deviation." -- LIONEL SHRIVER

"Censorship of scientific discussion permitted policies like school closures." -- JAY BHATTACHARYA    (a prof of medicine at Stanford) 

“On the contrary, action against writers merely enhances their stature.” – TACITUS (58-120 AD)

"Dumbbell censors are easy. You use their quotes in the ad (for your movie). Liberal censors are much harder to fight."  – JOHN WATERS (the American weirdo movie maker)

“Self-censorship is the most insidious censorship of all.” – JACK JOLIS

“People censor themselves because of the dangerous proposition that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness.” – GEORGE ORWELL

"Conspiracy is fed by censorship." -- WILL CAIN (he'd been talking about the Lahaina fires, on 27 August2023, but the insight is a universal one)
 

“Unpleasant ideas don’t dematerialise if you ban them, they acquire sometimes the power of taboo and they actually increase in strength by being secret and covert.” – SALMAN RUSHDIE

“The censorious language which used to come from the right and the old is now coming from the left and the young.” – SALMAN RUSHDIE (in April 2020)

“We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.” -- ANTHONY BURGESS (In A CLOCKWORK ORANGE)

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

“When the media tells you not to talk about something, you probably should start talking about that thing.” -- ROBBIE STARBUCK (the host of “Grow Up” podcast, a 2nd generation Cuban-American, on 17 Sept. 2020, on WMAL)

“Certainly a word cannot be more obscene than the thing it signifies. The word in itself can’t really hurt or dirty you. The speaker is only expressing his wish to hurt; he is casting spells. To call upon the law to stop him is to make an ass of the law and yourself. It implies you believe witchcraft works.” – BRIGID BROPHY (The British novelist.)

“It's been amazing to watch how in the Trump age, onetime liberals have become the country's staunchest defenders of censorship and corporate personhood.” – MATT TAIBBI   (On 10 Dec. 2020)

“Censors are always freely available: watchers are everywhere. Scratch away the apparatus of state, of tyrannical political systems, and we’re left with our own natures. We cannot endure freedom. The Stasi is now in our own minds, no longer in the body politic; and the more frightening for that.” – FAY WELDON

“I think it is just damned weird that our nation’s biggest bookseller is also our premier book-banner .” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON (Referring specifically to Jeff Bezos and his Amazon, on 30 March 2021)

"Remember, the Ministry of Truth's mission wasn't just to censor things, it was to re-define the meaning of words for the benefit of The Party."-- PAUL JOSEPH WATSON (Conservative Brit blogger and something of a YouTube star)

“Never in the history of mankind were the people who censored and banned books the good guys.” – AMY CURTIS (an excellent lady from Milwaukee, on the Twoot)

“A world where half the things you know are things you mustn’t say is a mad world. And a world where no one remarks on this is madder still.” – MICHAEL FRAYN

“ ‘Unintimidating’ is code for self-censorship.” – LLOYD EVANS

"These are not independent private platforms. These are not independent businesses. These are not independent actors. The Biden administration on multiple levels, and senior staff among others are working with Facebook and other social media platforms... to identify misinformation, to censor the social media posts and to spread information. It can no longer be said that it is an independent business without any taint of government activity. It is doing the work of the government. It is doing the work specifically of the Biden administration and the Democrat party, so the First Amendment does apply." - - MARK LEVIN (in 2021, referring to the Biden Administration’s encouraging “Big Tech” to censor US citizens)

"There is a kind of low-level totalitarianism detectable in many institutions today -- from elite universities to newspapers, publishers and technological companies --which reveals that practices such as informing, denunciation and defamation can all flourish even in the absence of a one-party dictatorship." -- NIALL FERGUSON

"If we become unable to distinguish between private and public conversation, we shall all go mad." -- CHARLES MOORE

“The perpetual, shameless, censorship on purely political grounds by the likes of Facebook, Google, Twitter and Instagram worries me rather more than our pandemic does, because there seems to be no readily available vaccine for it. If you had thought that Twitter and Facebook’s deliberate suppression of stories, along with a serving US president’s astonishing removal from all social media sites because they didn’t like what he was saying, was simply the consequence of a peculiarly fraught US election, think again. They are still at it now, even more so. Theories which they do not like because of their political consequences, or provenance, are banned under the heading ‘false news’. It is increasingly the case that ‘false news’ is simply news that liberals do not wish you to hear about.” – ROD LIDDLE (in June 2021)

“Any society where people can plausibly claim that violence is speech and speech is violence has a problem grasping some fundamental distinctions.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"Pretty much everyone is in favor of censorship, but we only use the word censorship for the kinds of censorship we don’t like." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"On climate change we own the science, and so we've partnered with Google to ensure that the public gets the UN message." -- MELISSA FLEMING (The UN Under-Secretary for Public Communications, in Sept. '22 and a Deep State totalitarian if ever there was one. And Google has become the world's Chief Censor.)

"I think that the ban of Donald Trump on Twitter is an unacceptable act of censorship... Don't tell me he was banned for violating Twitter rules. I get death threats here every day for many years, and Twitter doesn't ban anyone.  Among the people who have Twitter accounts are cold-blooded murderers (Putin or Maduro) and liars and thieves (Medvedev)... Of course, Twitter is a private company, but we have seen many examples in Russia and China of such private companies becoming the state's best friends and the enablers when it comes to censorship.” — ALEXEI NAVALNY (November 9, 2020)

"When even one American - who has done nothing wrong - is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth - then all Americans are in peril." -- HARRY TRUMAN

Central African Republic, The

“From the C.A.R. we get 1% of our profits and 99% of our headaches.” – ALBERT E. JOLIS (my dad, ruefully reflecting on our company’s long involvement in that country, from the late 1930s, when it was still part of French Equatorial Africa, until final abandonment in 1984.)

“In the Central African Republic, Jean-Bedel Bokassa transforms his state into an Empire and declares himself its Emperor. He orders a golden crown; a bejeweled throne;he adorns himself in velvets. The French laugh, but they supply the goods. In the First World business is business. Nevertheless, are we entirely certain that Bokassa’s subjects shared our sense of absurdity?” – SHIVA NAIPAUL (in his 1985 essay “The Illusion Of The Third World”. And the answer to his question is “No”. In fact, Bokassa’s reign, from 1967 to 1979, is today considered, rather ruefully, as that poor old country’s “Golden Age”.)                                                       

“Centrism”

“The center of what, exactly?” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

Certainty

"If you're certain that certainty is evil, what does that make you?" -- JONAH GOLDBERG (in reply to the liberal columnist Anthony Lewis who'd said that anyone who was "certain" about anything, i.e., religion, was "evil".)

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” – VOLTAIRE

“To be absolutely certain about something, you must know everything or nothing about it.” -- HENRY KISSINGER

“I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything.” – RICHARD FEYNMAN

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

"I have read in the financial press that we live in uncertain times, as though at some stage in the past everyone knew exactly what was going to happen. I am unable to recall such a time." -- JOHN MURRAY (a resident of Guildford, England, in March 2023)

"Crow's Law: Do not think what you want to think until you know what you ought to know." -- JOHN CROW (of King's College, London -- his "law" was quoted by both Winston Churchill and my friend Edward Jay Epstein) 

“Stupid people are always certain.” – IRVINE WELSH (the Scottish writer, author of “Trainspotting”)

“We crave certainty and certainty is what cults do best. If there’s a distinction between a cult and a religion, it’s that certainty is not the same thing as faith. Faith acknowledges doubt and struggles on nonetheless. Certainty is madness.” – MARY WAKEFIELD

Challenge(s)

"It's not the mountain before you that will wear down your resolve, but the pebble in your shoe." -- SUN TZU

Change

“If it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.” - LUCIUS HENRY CARY (The “Third Viscount Falkland”, in 1649)

“We changed everything, and yet we still wonder why everything's changed.” – MARK STEYN

“The first rule of tinkering is, of course, 'save all the parts.’ But in dismantling the social fabric, the parts cannot all be saved, for one of them is time.” – DAVID MAMET

“There is a time for everything, and the time for change is when you can no longer help it.” – PRINCE GEORGE, THE SECOND DUKE OF CAMBRIDGE  (A grandson of George III, sounding, I must say, very much like the Third Viscount Falkland, above....)

"Change is inevitable, except from vending machines." -- STEVEN WRIGHT (the American funny guy)

“People change and forget to tell each other.” – LILLIAN HELLMAN (I hate this Stalinist old bat, but it's a good quote anyway....)

“All great change in America begins at the dinner table.” – RONALD REAGAN

"You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending." -- C.S. LEWIS 

“A Constitution is not meant to facilitate change. It is meant to impede change, to make it difficult to change.” - JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA

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

“The world doesn't change in front of your eyes; it changes behind your back.” – TERRY HAYES (the amusing Anglo-Australian novelist – author of, not least “Mad Max”)

 “The only way to get our society to truly change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe.”
– DANIEL BOTKIN (emeritus professor at UC Santa Cruz and a big Globwarmista)

"What enormous things must have happened to make sure that nothing ever changed." -- MICK HERRON

“Conservatives abhor change not because they are content with things as they are, but because they know from every example since the first inventive Australopithecine man-ape picked up a knobbed femur and used it to smash an enemy’s skull that change ultimately causes disaster.” – PROF. JOHN GREENWAY (the late Gonzo Anthropologist from Colorado, in 1977)

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.” – CHARLES DARWIN

Chaos

"Chaos creates unique opportunities." -- SAMUEL M'CHEYNE GLASSER (a guy who knows, trust me)

"Pandemonium can be a revivifying purgative." – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

"Chaos is the natural state of mankind, and tyranny is its usual remedy." -- GEORGE SANTAYANA (the Spanish-born American philosopher, 1863-1952, whose real name was Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás.)

Character

“Be more concerned with your character than your reputation. Your character is what you are while your reputation is merely what others think you are.” – JOHN WOODEN (The UCLA basketball coach fellow.)

"Fame is a vapor, popularity is an accident, riches take wings, those who cheer today may curse tomorrow and only one thing endures - Character." -- HARRY S. TRUMAN

"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." – ABRAHAM LINCOLN

"Peoples' characters really change once they once they get into a gorilla suit." -- RICHARD RAYNER (in his 1988 novel "Los Angeles Without A Map") 

“The Commander was an officer and a gentleman, the first I had met, I think, and he had taken part in the battle of Jutland. I used to take him a cup of tea in the morning and stay for a ritual chat, for which he was always terribly, though inarticulately grateful. The Commander definitely didn’t know who he was or where, but he couldn’t be anything other than humorously cheerful about it. He was a gallant old gentleman and a big hit with our ladies. He stumbled headfirst into the fire one Christmas, to no real ill effect.” – LLOYD EVANS (he wrote this in January 2020. The Battle of Jutland was in 1916)

“It takes depth to go truly shallow.” – HERMIONE EYRE (a Brit journalist, novelist, and former child actress)

"That most tiresome of types, a "character'." -- LUCY HUGHES-HALLETT (an English "cultural historian")

 Charisma

"Charisma consists of being like everybody else." -- TOM WOLFE     (even if this is true, surely it can only be partly true...) 

Charity

“Many supposed 'charitable' groups are nothing of the sort. They are affinity sects with blatantly political programmes, justifying every campaigning excess as 'saving the planet'.” -- SIMON JENKINS (an honest lefty who ought to know – he was the head of the UK “National Trust” when he wrote this, in August 2014)

“Charity is about what happens when romantic love fails. It's about what happens when people don't agree with your beliefs. When  people make jokes that fail. When celebrities have a bad day.” -- MOLLIE HEMINGWAY

“Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.” - JAMES MADISON

“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)

“Nothing brings out the worst in people more than Charity and Amateur Dramatics.” – CECIL BEATON (famous English fashion photographer, 1904-1980)

Charles III, King

“I think Charles is more socialist than the Labour Party. I think Prince Charles is actually further left than any of these people we talk about in politics.” – NIGEL KENNEDY (The famous left-wing British violinist is reported as saying this in Dec. 2021, and of course he said this approvingly... though I agree with him about King Bigears....)

"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

Charm

“Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art.” – EVELYN WAUGH (in his most overrated book, “Brideshead Revisited)

"Charm in a guy is a warning sign. Like black and yellow stripes in nature mean 'Watch out, there are stings near this honey'." -- DAVID MITCHELL     (in his 2020 novel "Utopia Avenue")

"Charm is a weasel word; it can evoke the superficial and insincere and engender suspicion and mistrust." – ARIANE BANKES (an Englishwoman who describes herself as a "Writer, reviewer, curator")

Chavez, Hugo

“Hugo Chavez is a devious charlatan and a talented idiot.” - MARIO LOYOLA (a bigwig at The Competitive Enterprise Institute)

Cheating

“In war you cheat; in sports you don’t.” – JACK JOLIS

"Fair play for one and all, that's my motto. But I don't mind playing unfair once in a while to bring it about." -- WILLIAM BOYD (actually said by a character in his 1993 novel "The Blue Afternoon") 

Chechnya

"The Chechens are a combative People, difficult to conquer, easier to buy." – GEN ALEXEI YERMOLOV (to Czar Nicholas I — in 1850!)

“Russians smoke. Chechens burn.” – MARTIN CRUZ SMITH

“Checks and Balances”

"Government is a living thing and no living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live." -- WOODROW WILSON (Ass.)

Cheerfulness

"Cheerfulness cannot be excessive; it is always good." -- SPINOZA (I happen to think this is total codswallop, but I'm happy to include it because Spinoza, B.d., was such an inspiration to Bertie Wooster's man and mentor, Jeeves.)

Cheerleading (-ers)

“I am pro-cheerleader. Okay, I'm technically pro-cheerleader outfits.” -- KURT SCHLICHTER

“Cheerleaders are just strippers who lack commitment to their art.” -- KURT SCHLICHTER

Che Guevara

"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 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....)

"You can't spell cliché without Ché." – KYLE SMITH

“Judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail. We execute based on revolutionary conviction.” – CHE GUEVARA GUEVARA          (in 1959)

Chess

“Unquestionably chess is ‘the most beautiful game’. Why, then, does it always turn ugly?” – MARTIN AMIS

Chicago

“We have Democrats who run things like the family business and we have Republicans who help them. All right?” - JOHN KASS (columnist for the CHICAGO TRIBUNE, in September 2006)

“I’d rather be a lamppost in New York than mayor of Chicago” – JIMMY WALKER                                                                        (the flamboyant and somewhat criminal Mayor of New York City 1926-1932, played in the 1957 movie “Beau James” by Bob Hope.)

“Chicago is the only great city in the world to which all its citizens have come for the avowed purpose only of making money.” – HENRY BLAKE FULLER  (1859-1927 – American – Chicagoan – novelist and short story writer.)

“The only good thing to come out of Chicago is I-75 south.” – LEWIS GRIZZARD                                                                            (a quite funny lib – a native of Atlanta, as it happens)

“The only vote that matters in Chicago is voting with your feet.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

Childbirth

“Real horror movie stuff, bodies splitting open, gushing fluids, eight and three quarter hours of screaming agony. Childbirth sounds a lot like Alien.” – KYLE SMITH

“On the one hand, we'll never experience childbirth. On the other hand, we can open our own jars.” – BRUCE WILLIS

“If you want to know the feeling (of childbirth), just take your bottom lip and pull it over your head.” - CAROL BURNETT

“Watching a woman give birth is like watching your favorite pub burn down.” – ROBBIE WILLIAMS   (The English pop singer – who claimed in 2014 that he was “49% gay”.)

“I am not convinced that the Great Designer In The Sky was entirely sober when he devised the means by which we propagate. The eccentric process that he came up with starts in farce, ends in pain and is messy, uncomfortable and dangerous. Unfortunately there was nobody there to take him firmly by the elbow and whisper in his ear: ‘Back to the drawing board on this one, Sunshine.’ And so we are saddled with the discomforts of childbirth.” – GUY BELLAMY

“With childbirth, the mind goes blank. If you remembered too clearly, you’d never do it again.” – FAY WELDON

“Writing books is the closest men ever come to child bearing,” – NORMAN MAILER (where that leaves the legions of lady authors I’m not sure....)

"Both of my daughters had contrived to get pregnant simultaneously (though in separate buildings) and were scheduled to give birth at roughly the same time in different London hospitals, and I was under strict instructions to be nearby in order to -- well, I don't know what. Boil water perhaps. Standing around in a willing but useless manner. who knows?" -- BILL BRYSON

Children, (Childhood)

“You’d have to have been a pretty miserable kid to be happier as an adult, and that I wasn’t.” - PETER FARRELLY (one half of the Farrelly Brothers – the Providence RI-based version of the Coen Brothers movie-making team…. And, by the way, “Spoken like a gentleman, sir!”….)

“As a child, I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn’t like.” - PHILIP LARKIN

“One of the many benefits of having children is that one is too busy to have other crises.” - DAVID NOBBS (British novelist)

“A person who doesn’t like children only likes people when they’re convenient to them. It’s a real give-away of selfishness.” – DAVID NOBBS

"The idea that small children are open-minded and imaginative is completely ridiculous. They resemble nothing so much as members of the provincial, middle-European bourgeoisie -- petty little martinets who view any change in their routine as an act of unconscionable aggression. Men may be from Mars and women from Venus, but children are from Belgium." - TOBY YOUNG (the very funny English author, social-climber and kvetcher)

“Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child.” -- TOM STOPPARD (from his play “The Coast Of Utopia”)

“Every generation faces a barbarian invasion in the form of its own children, who need to be civilized.” -IRVING KRISTOL

“Until I was thirteen, I thought my name was ‘Shut up’.” - JOE NAMATH

"Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians who must be civilized before it is too late." – THOMAS SOWELL                       (same as Irving Kristol, above -- take your pick....)

"Looking at this 'all kids belong to all of us' from the other way, I have to say . . . I'm not particularly interested in raising your children. As I've mentioned, my boys are near perfect, and from what I can see, world, your kids are mostly brats. They throw tantrums in public, have little or no patience or impulse control, and appear to consist on a diet of sugar and whatever they pull out of their nose.” – JIM GERAGHTY                                                                                                                                                        (On Melissa Harris-Perry of MSNBC saying “kids belong to everyone”)

"When an opponent says 'I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already... You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community’." – ADOLPH HITLER                    (See Geraghty and Harris-Perry above)

"That's the criminal thing about having children -- they keep incompatible people together." -- RICHARD BURTON (The actor -- who, as far as I'm concerned, redeemed himself with 1 picture -- "The Wild Geese")

“For the children, though we know they are never listening, are always watching.” – DAVID MAMET

“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” – VLADIMIR I. LENIN 

“The only thing that prevented a father's love from faltering was the fact that there was in his possession a photograph of himself the same early age in which he too looked like a homicidal fried egg.” – P. G. WODEHOUSE

“Unlike the male codfish, which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all, the British aristocracy is apt to look with a somewhat jaundiced eye on its younger ones.” – P. G. WODEHOUSE

“There is nothing more creepily Orwellian than people who bandy about the phrase ‘our children’." – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

“I normally avoid criticizing people's children, but I have to admit my kids are mouthy slobs.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

“Unless you're my wife, there is no 'our children'."– DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

“If someone doesn't have kids, why would they give a shit about the climate in 100 years?” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

“All those writers who write about their childhood! If I wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me.” -- DOROTHY PARKER

“Kids don't need encouragement to believe in 'me'. They have no trouble with that. They begin life unable to distinguish self from other, and it's anyone's guess as to when they twig that other people exist.” – MARY WAKEFIELD

“So we grew up in a good and happy place. And we were good. Or we were as good as kids were expected to be. We didn’t suffer from childhood obesity, dyslexia, lactose intolerance, or behavioral disorders. We were husky, a little slow at reading, farted a lot, and were pains in the neck. Anyway, we were happy.” – P. J. O’ROURKE (on his “Baby Boom” childhood in Akron, Ohio.)

“I have the best kids in the world and I can't take them for more than 15 minutes at a time. Don't know how you parents of inferior kids do it.”– DANNY ZUKER (Writer/producer of “Modern Family”)

“Having children is like living in a frat house -- nobody sleeps, everything's broken, and there’s a lot of throwing up.” -- RAY ROMANO (Yes, the "Everybody Loves Raymond" Ray)

“I believe the primary rôle of the state is to teach, train and raise children. Parents have a secondary rôle.” – HILLARY CLINTON                (in her book “It Takes A Village”)

"There is more to be learned from the questions of a child than the discourses of men" -- JOHN LOCKE

“Childhood is not a restaurant one chooses for good food and competent service. Childhood is a home where everything is, or should be, predictable.” – JON CANTER

"I suppose children simply aren't nomads -- their hearts must be somewhere." -- F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

"Every generation, Western civilization is invaded by barbarians. We call them children." -- HANNAH ARENDT

“In childhood, we assume the world to have been elaborately arrayed for our own benefit, with a virtual eternity allowed for inspection of its many large and experienced parts.” -- JOHN UPDIKE

"Having adult children makes you look 100 years old.” -- KARL LAGERFELD

 "A child does not need a context like you and me." -- WALKER PERCY

 "You can't fool children and you can't fool dying people." -- WALKER PERCY

“Children get in the way of adults behaving like children.” — BEN SIXSMITH (an English conservative writer, who happens to live in Poland)

“Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days" – FLANNERY O’CONNOR

“Kids always know geography better than adults. Kids know apartments better, buildings better, neighborhoods better.” – DONALD WESTLAKE (using “geography” in its most expansive sense)

“The wonderful thing about children is that you can tell them anything you want and watch them grow up believing it.” -- EVELYN WAUGH

“Children are generally either  prigs or gangsters and always dull and generally ugly.” -- NANCY MITFORD

"Everyone talks about leaving a better planet for our kids..... let's try to leave better kids for our planet." -- AVA ARMSTRONG

“Give a child what it wants and it’s gone for ever. Grudge it, and it’s yours for life.” – FAY WELDON (sounds a bit opaque, not to say perverse, but it also sounds a bit heavy – so it’s in.)

“If you raise your kids you can spoil your grandkids. If you spoil your kids you have to raise your grandkids.” – MARY ALVAREZ (a wise American woman on the Twoot on 18 April 2021)

“Never try to fool children, they expect nothing, and therefore see everything.” – HARRY HOUDINI                 (real name Erik Weisz, born in Budapest, Hungary.)

“Every book is a children’s book if the kid can read” - MITCH HEDBERG (the late surrealist American funny-man)                                                                                   

“Children bore very easily. They do not have a large library of experience to think back upon. They do not have sexual fantasies to enjoy. They have only hundreds of millions of fears and anxieties to occupy their minds. And worst of all, their lives are controlled by people who actually think it’s interesting to clean gutters on a Saturday afternoon.” – JOHN HUGHES                                                                          (one of America’s greatest film-makers – here writing in the old NATIONAL LAMPOON, in the early 70s)

"Every technological advance seems to make us convinced that our children, if they take advantage of it, will go mad. It is never true." – ROD LIDDLE (radio, TV, rock'n' roll, the internet, smartphones, etc.. Except from my vantage point in 2021, ... they are mad.)

"My wife and I have decided that we don’t want to have children. We will be telling them tonight at dinner." -- BRANDON FREEL (an amusing chap from Iowa, on the Twoot) 

“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.” – JAMES BALDWIN (I was never a big fan of Mr. Baldwin, to put it mildly, but this is just clever enough to squeak by the cut.)

"I'm asked if I want to go monkey shooting. I don't. It will be too much like shooting my own children." -- GEORGE COURTAULD (in his 1995 "The Travels Of A Fat Bulldog")  

“It was amazing how little time children wasted. How they went on to the next thing with such satisfaction and certainty.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS

“When we are growing up, are we ever in possession of the full facts?” – DEBORAH ROSS (Hell – are adults? Anyway, Deborah, the UK SPECTATOR’s movie critic, said this in Den. 2021)

"Childhood is the Kingdom where nobody dies." -- EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY (Obviously, this isn't true -- but it sounds about par for the course for a popular lady pote....)

"Because children have the abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say 'Do it again' and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. Grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony." -- G. K. CHESTERTON

China/Chinese

“Over the millennia, the Chinese have mastered every art except politics.” - BRUCE ANDERSON (British journalist, and boy did he get this right…. You could say the same thing, while I’m thinking about It, of Germany….)

“Punishing China is like flogging a jellyfish.” - WINSTON CHURCHILL

“Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world.” – NAPOLEON

“As for me, I prefer to sniff French shit for five years than eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life.” – HO CHI MINH                (in 1946)

“Report me to the Race Relations Board if you like, but these (Chinese) people are the rudest and most aggressive I have ever come across, and I wonder what on earth it is in their culture or ours that makes them so. I once asked Christine, the delightful woman who owns the Ming, why it was that I get the feeling that the Chinese loathe us. She said, ‘Because we do’. She said it with a smile, but she was talking for the other billion. Incidentally, since I know the Chinese to be very prudish about sex as a rule, how come there are a billion of them?” - JEFFREY BERNARD (the late drunken boulevardier and raconteur, and the subject of Keith Waterhouse’s play “Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell”, which starred Peter O’Toole, who Jeff very much resembled…)

“Abroad, China lends its diplomatic support and implied military muscle to anybody sufficiently basket-case and despotic enough to be considered a pariah by the rest of the civilized world. If they’re whacko and vicious enough, you can bet that China will be the closest ally. Especially if they’re whacko, vicious and, uh, what was the word… ‘socialist’.” - ROD LIDDLE (in March 2008)

"The Chinese are the least religious people in the world, but the most superstitious." - JOHN DERBYSHIRE (Whose wife is Chinese-born.)

" 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

"Partout et toujours, il y a un Chinois qui dort."("Everywhere and always, there's a sleeping Chinaman") -- JANE JOLIS (uttered in French, upon seeing just that in a Brooklyn playground, in January 2021)

"Mandarin speakers often sound aggressive when they are not; a conversation about the weather can sound like a dog fight." -- GEORGE COURTAULD (in his 1995 "The Travels Of A Fat Bulldog")

“The dark thought comes: With all their other manifest talents and abilities, perhaps the Chinese just can’t do government. They seem to be hopelessly, irredeemably bad at it. Perhaps gangster-despotism is the best they can rise to.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

"If it has four legs and is not a chair, has wings and is not an aeroplane, or swims and is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it." -- PRINCE PHILIP, THE DUKE OF EDINBURGH                                                                                                                         (The splendid, half-Greek Duke was much well in his 90s when he said this. Sharp as a thumbtack -- he's the only "royal" I really have time for, although Liz gets points for longevity and stoicism alone. I was once in Swaziland when the Queen and the Duke were visiting -- it was a bit of a tricky visit because in those days South Africa was still being boycotted, but the airport in Swaziland's capital, Mbabane, was too small for the Royal Jet, so they had to sort of "slip through" via Johannesburg. Anyway, the point of this story is that that night, on Swazi TV, the young lady reading the news said, (and I swear, like Dave Barry, I am not making this up), "Tonight we saw the arrival of her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Eleventh, and her husband, the Duck of Edinburg" – pronouncing it Edin-berg.  Oh, what wizard japes....)

“Chopsticks are one of the reasons the Chinese never invented custard.” – SPIKE MILLIGAN

"There are no China experts, only China specialists." -- FAN GONG

“China, where coolies sit in expectorating rows, nourished on nothing but rice and the spleens of pangolins.” – BORIS JOHNSON

"No outside power has ever destroyed China, but if you hang around long enough, it always destroys itself." -- CHARLES McCARRY

“Take the Chinese. They’re a century behind everybody else. They ignore human rights. They steal, torture and kill. They don’t drink beer and play pool. They’re not proper people.” – GUY BELLAMY (in his 1991 novel, “The Comedy Hotel”)

“No one can possibly know what dark and grotesque things pass through the minds of this hydra-headed racial anomaly that are the Chinese.” – P. J. O’ROURKE (In a 1976 NATIONAL LAMPOON piece called “Foreigners Around The World”)

“Where do you want to go, China or India? I have always found India infinitely more fascinating – for a simple reason. If you ask Sinophiles about China, they always quote statistics. Indophiles tell you stories.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

"They are sneaky bastards.  Having lived in China from 1945 to 1950, I can affirm from personal experience that they sleep with their eyes open." -- SAMUEL M'CHEYNE GLASSER

"The days when Chinamen were considered sinister are long gone, but their present mode -- a sort of relentless, steely jollity that seems to say, 'We are Chinese! We are here! And there are a fuck of a sight more of us where we came from!'." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS (the English comic novelist, in 1999)

"The Chinese apparently regard body functions as so unspeakably shameful that the toilets there have no signs at all and furthermore are hidden away in the most derelict and shame-making back areas, unlikely ever to be discovered but by those in the shameful know." -- PAUL FUSSELL (in 1991 -- and about six years later I myself discovered the painful truth of this apércu in Dalian Airport...)

"Worry about what China does right not what it does wrong." -- DANIEL P. GOLDMAN (columnist for Asia Times and PJ Media; President, Macrostrategy LLC, in June 2023)

China, Red

“Communist China survives, as a pointless tyranny, only by embracing the system that Marx spent his life repudiating.” - PAUL JOHNSON

"China is getting old before it's getting rich." -- MARK STEYN (in August 2011)

“We were told a generation or two back that, by doing trade with China, China would become more like us. Instead, on issues such as free speech, we are becoming more like China.” – MARK STEYN (in Sept. 2021)

“To comprehend China today, imagine the Harvard alumni Association with its own army. The communist Party is basically a gigantic Skull and Bones.” - DAVID BROOKS (in Dec. 2007)

"There used to be no income inequality in China because everyone was poor. This is a tradeoff you accept for growth and freedom." ― MICHELE CARUSO-CABRERA (the CNBC business news bimbo reporterette)

“China is on course to become the world’s leading economy without ever having been a developed economy.” – MARK STEYN          (Reminds me of black Africa, which went from tom-tom drums to cell phones without ever having land-lines)

“China spends ninety percent of its time thinking about new and interesting ways to sink our ships and shoot down our planes.” – DENNIS BLAIR (ex-CINCPAC and ex-Director of National Intelligence – appointed by Obama but quickly fired for disagreeing with his boss)

“China will grow old before it grows rich.” – TOM SWITZER (Exec. Dir. Of the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, and a presenter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in July 2018)

"China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man. They can’t even figure out how to deal with the fact that they have this great division between the China Sea and the mountains in the east, I mean in the west. They can’t figure out how they are going to deal with the corruption that exists within the system. I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what, they’re not competition for us.” -- JOE BIDEN                   (1 May 2019. And they say Trump can't talk....)

"China is a nation of Trumps, and even Trump doesn't want to do business with them." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON                                (who of course hates Trump, in June 2019)

“China is brutal. They torture people. They do things people couldn’t even dream of. I think they have a particular affinity for it that the Russians never had. Russians, in general, are more blunt. Chinese are creative in their sadism.” – MORGAN FELDMAN (A conservative woman on the twoot, on 28 Jan. 2020)

"China is Xi Jinping" - EDWARD N. LUTTWACK

"China's going to have a free press. globalization will drive it." -- THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN                                                               (in 1999. Stupid, stupid ass.)

"China can stop reporting deaths at will, by shooting the guy whose job was to report deaths." -- BANSI SHARMA                    (a guy on the Twoot)

"If we assume the worst about China’s Xi Jinping, we would still underestimate his maliciousness and ability to inflict harm." -- GORDON G. CHANG

"China's communists are not interested in 'saving the world'. They are interested in ruling it." -- GORDON G. CHANG (27 Jan. 2023)

"Everything in China is national security and national security is far more important than the economy." -- DAN HARRIS (a self-described international lawyer, on the Twoot, 1 June 2023)

“For years we’ve been obsessing over Russian interference. Yet while we fret over oligarchs and social-media bots, the most dangerous assault on our democracy and security goes not just unchallenged, but largely unnoticed. Beijing is richer and more sophisticated than Moscow on every level, and its influence more prevalent across society. But even as we witness events in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, we still struggle to see China as a threat to our way of life.” – JULIET SAMUEL               (A DAILY TELEGRAPH columnist, in August 2020)

“The risk for India and the West is not armed conflict with China. It is that the struggle for supremacy in Asia will be lost with hardly a shot being fired. Sun Tzu would be proud.” – – FRANCIS PIKE                                                                                                       (historian and author of “Empires At War”)

"China doesn’t want deals, It wants domination." -- TODD L. GRIFFITH                                                                                                (My Twoot-rabbi, on 28 October 2020)

“The most significant and lasting change brought about by Covid is that it has woken the West up to the threat posed by Communist China.” – JAMES FORSYTH           (in Dec. 2020)

"China's technological edge is one of the reasons it is in so many ways a more formidable competitor than the Soviet Union was. Another is its position in the world economy, It is no coincidence that no Hollywood studio has made a movie critical of China since “Seven Years In Tibet” in 1997. The five-year ban that Beijing imposed on Columbia Tristar led America's moviemakers to conclude that it was best to hold their tongues when it came to China." -- JAMES FORSYTH (in December 2020)

“This isn't the Cold War. This is something different. The China threat is already within our borders.” – SECRETARY OF STATE MIKE POMPEO (on 16 January 20021)

"There is no such thing as a Chinese private company. Period. Full stop. The Communist state can legally own or take control of any economic and business entity or force you to operate as directed by state authorities." -- MIKE POMPEO

"The scope of the challenge America is facing from China is monumental. The CCP wants to flip countries into their column so that China can expand its military and economic presence everywhere." -- MIKE POMPEO

"And then there was Xi Jinping and the CCP. Few times in history has such a dangerous colossus bestrode the world." -- MIKE POMPEO      (Trump's superb SecState and CIA boss -- the only guy to ever hold both those positions) 

“It is not China that is the problem. It is communism.” – CHRIS PATTEN (the last British Governor of Hong Kong – who turned it over to the ChiComs in 1997, when incidentally, I happened to be passing through. And he said this in January 2021.)

"They (the Chinese Communists) do not give a damn." – LEE KUAN YEW (the founding president of Singapore, and an ethnic Chinese himself)

"China doesn't actually view the United States as its chief adversary. It views its own people as the biggest threat to its rule. It's why they spend more money on surveilling and controlling their own population...than they spend on their military." -- MATT POTTINGER (The ex-Deputy National Security Adviser, under Trump, speaking to the US Senate on 8 June 2021)

"Nike is a brand that is of China and for China" --JOHN DONAHOE (Nike CEO, on 25 June 2021)

"The worst crime, degradation or human depredation you can imagine -- XI and his CCP have already done worse, are doing worse now, and are planning worse in the future." -- JACK JOLIS

"We are in World War III.  We did not have a pandemic... we had a biological attack." -- LTG  THOMAS G. MCINERNEY (of the USAF, retired – and he said this in 2021)

"If I did not learn English, I would have believed only in what was taught; learning English made me question things; I believed China was the richest and shall liberate the world, until I visited Australia and saw we Chinese need to be liberated first."– JACK MA (the Chinese tycoon, head of “ALIBABA”)

"The Chinese Communist Party is probably the funniest thing that exists, but it doesn't have a sense of humor." -- AI WEIWEI (the Chinese dissident artist, exiled to Germany)

“Why are Americans sleeping? We aren't sleeping, we are spending our time teaching and assisting little boys how to become little girls. And, if we aren't busy doing that we have the Sec of Defense, responding to an order from the 'commander' in chief, designing stylish new uniforms for pregnant 'soldiers'. You're not going to win the battle for the 21st century if you are such silly people. And Americans are all silly people. Do you know who doesn't care that there's a stereotype of a Chinese man in a Dr. Seuss book? China, All 1.4 billion of them couldn't give a crouching tiger flying fuck, because they're not silly people. If anything, they are as serious as a prison fight. In two generations, China has built 500 entire cities from scratch and mostly cornered the market in 5G and pharmaceuticals. Oh, and they bought Africa.
In China alone, they have 40,000 kilometers of high-speed rail. America has none. We've been having Infrastructure Week every week since 2009 but we never do anything. Half the country is having a never-ending woke competition deciding whether Mr. Potato Head has a dick and the other half believes we have to stop the lizard people because they're eating babies. We are such silly people. Nothing ever moves in this impacted colon of a country. We see a problem and we ignore it, lie about it, fight about it with each other, endlessly litigate it, sunset clause it, kick it down the road, and then write a bill where a half-assed solution doesn't kick in for 10 years, Then the half-assed bill is forgotten. China sees a problem and they fix it. They build a dam. We debate what to rename it. It took ten years for a bus line in San Francisco to pass its environmental review and it took 16 years to build the Big Dig tunnel in Boston, compared to a 57-story skyscraper that China built in 19 days and Beijing's Sanyuan Bridge, which was demolished and rebuilt in 43 hours. We binge-watch, they binge-build. When COVID hit Wuhan, the city built a quarantine center with 4,000 rooms in 10 days and they barely had to use it because they quickly arrested the rest of the disease, They were back to throwing raves in swimming pools while we were stuck at home surfing the dark web for black market Charmin. We're not losing to China, we lost. The returns just haven't all come in yet. They've made robots that check a kid's temperature and got their asses back in school. Most of our kids are still pretending to take Zoom classes while they watch TikTok and their brain cells fully commit ritual suicide. Our teacher's unions are finding every single way to keep themselves on the payroll, but keep students out of the classrooms. Do you think China's doing that, letting political correctness get in the way of nurturing their best and brightest? Do you think Chinese colleges and universities are offering courses in 'The Philosophy of Star Trek, 'The Sociology of Seinfeld,' and 'Surviving the Coming Zombie Apocalypse'? Can this be real? Well, let me tell you, China is real. And they are eating our lunch. And believe me, in an hour, they'll be hungry again." – BILL MAHER (on his TV show in August 2021)

“If US foreign policy is left up to the private sector, we will all be speaking Chinese tomorrow.” – KYLE BASS                                            (the Chief Investment Officer for Hayman Capital Management, on the last day of 2021)

"Vast and over-populated though China is, the police know exactly who everybody is and exactly where they ought to be." -- CHARLES McCARRY (the great spy novelist wrote this already in 2004)

“The Chinese Communist Party is celebrating its 100th year and so is J. P. Morgan. I'd make a bet that we last longer. (I can't say that in China. They are probably listening anyway.)" – JAMIE DIMON                                          (the Greek-American boss of Chase, at Boston College in November 2021)

 "China makes our movies. They run our sports leagues. When we send little Aiden and Jayden off to college, China is there teaching them to hate us. Their spies bang our congressmen on the Intelligence Committee. They buy our land. This is an embarrassing national security failure." -- JESSE KELLY (the radio talk show host, in Jan. 2022)

 
"China is an 'intelligence state'." -- NIGEL INKSTER (a former director of the UK's MI6 -- their CIA)

"No western spy agency is actively seeking to subvert the CCP (though the last Trump administration came close." -- NIGEL INKSTER    (the ex-MI6 boss, in April 2024)

“If the US was not in Asia, there would be no problems because everyone would be forced to capitulate to every whim of China.” -- ZHANG YOUXIA (the 3-star general who is Vice-Chairman of the Red Chinese Central Military Commission, in Nov. 2023)

"Becoming the number one  superpower by the mid-(21st)-century is what Xi intends,  but China will not  become America  2.0 -- not the world's policeman so  much as the world's secret policeman." -- CHARLES PARTON     (an English diplomat and China expert, in Feb. '24)

"There are moral consequences for immoral actions. We are collaborating with a regime (Communist China) that's on a par with the Nazis, and we are profiting through that regime and ignoring the mass slaughter that's been inflicted on millions of Chinese." -- TREVOR LOUDON       (the greatest living Kiwi, in June 2024)

"It’s entirely possible that economic decay will make China more, not less, dangerous." --  JONAH GOLDBERG       (Indeed.  In October 2024)

“I've lived in China and as I've said I've been there about 30 times...I don't fall into the category that China necessarily needs to be an adversarial relationship, I totally disagree.” -- TIM WALZ

Chirac, Jacques

“Russian President Putin and Chirac stand in the lowest rank of the hierarchy of villains - petty creatures. Chirac’s fingers itch for the till; indeed, he may well end his days in jail. But for the present his strong suit is humbug, and his appeal to the very worst instincts of the French - posturing, cultural and moral pride, verbal fantasizing and grandiose delusions - has put him in the line of those political mountebanks like Louis Philippe and Napoleon III who briefly enjoyed the favour of the streets. “ - PAUL JOHNSON

Chivalry

“If today's Left knows the meaning of the word chivalry at all, it is only to denounce it.” – CHARLES MOORE

Choice/Choosing

"The very act of choosing something generally makes us want it more. It is simply harder to like something when you haven't chose it." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

"Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before." -- MAE WEST

Christianity

“If the soul is immortal as Christianity claims, it must have existed before our birth.  In that case, Christians are believers in reincarnation.” - FLORENCE KING (the famously Southern American writer and curmudgeon.)

“One of the reasons we can be pretty sure Jesus actually existed is that if He had not, the Church would never have invented Him. He stands so passionately, resolutely and inconveniently against everything an established church stands for. Continuity? Tradition? Christ had nothing to do with stability. He came to break up families, to smash routines, to cast aside the human superstructures, to teach abandonment of earthly concerns and a throwing of ourselves upon God's mercy.” – MATTHEW PARRIS (The atheist, poofter, ex- British Conservative MP – and here he was griping about the Church of England, and not the Catholic Church, particularly)

"Mainstream Christians -- whose idea of sensible and respectable orthodoxy is engaging in weekly sessions of symbolic or mystically literal cannibalism in honor of a Jewish god-man who ran afoul of the Roman criminal-justice system after a dinner party went south 20 centuries ago." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"Christianity, of course, has reached the peak of absurdity. And that's why one day its structure will collapse. Science has already i,pregnated humanity. Consequently, the more Christianity clings to its dogmas, the quicker it will decline." -- ADOLPH HITLER

"Of course Christianity is a myth. But it's a myth that happens to be true." – J.R.R. TOLKIEN

“You do not have to believe in order to regard Christianity as the greatest story ever told.” – BRUCE ANDERSON (the noted Brit journalist)

“I read the Bible, but I don't trust what it says” – JIAN ZEMIN (the president of Red China, to George W. Bush)

“The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad.” – G.K. CHESTERTON

«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)

"You don’t need to go to church to be a Christian. If you go to Taco Bell, that doesn’t make you a taco." – JUSTIN BIEBER (I never thought I’d ever be quoting THIS turkey. Who’s probably the only human being I can think of who might actually benefit from converting to Islam)

“I left Islam because I studied Muhammad's life. I accepted the Gospel because I studied Jesus' life.” – NABEEL QURESHI (the author of “Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus”)

“Christianity. The ultimate rebel religion for it teaches men to act against their own instincts to kill, to rape, to steal. It tells men they are heroes and saints if they go against human nature. Judaism says the same thing although not as clearly.” – BEN STEIN

“Drinking beer is easy. Trashing your hotel room is easy. But being a Christian – that's rebellion.” – ALICE COOPER

"In his time, of course, there was no such thing as a Christian. Jesus was attempting to perfect Judaism, not found a new religion, and until the eminently practical apostle Paul pointed out that the movement would attract few converts if gentiles were required to observe the bewildering requirements of Hebraic religious law, all followers of Jesus were intensely observant Jews." -- CHARLES McCARRY

“The sexless and colourless Christian promise – the questionable rapture of being one among billions of court-flatterers.” – DAVID LODGE

Christie, Chris                                                                                                                                  

“If Christie is the answer, it’s a bad question.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

Christmas/(Santa Claus)

“As far as I can see, there is absolutely no compensatory advantage to being old apart from the possibility of not seeing another Christmas.” - JEREMY CLARKE (the author of the “Low Life” column in the UK  “ Spectator”)

“So let’s not be tough on Christmas gift-giving. Unless of course we’re talking about fruit cake, which I believe in some magazine’s survey of preferred and un-preferred gifts finished below no gift at all. I’m convinced I could get all the people in the lower 48 who like fruit cake in my dining room with space left for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ defensive unit. In uniform. Writer Calvin Trillin suggested that there is only one fruit cake in America, but the people who receive it as a gift give it away to others so quickly that the motion gives the impression that there are many fruit cakes.” – LARRY THORNBERRY

“That forced march of jollity.” - RICHARD BROOKHISER

“We run up Christmas lights as our part of the annual pretense that God descended to Earth in a baby’s body.” – JOHN UPDIKE (in 1996)

“Why would anybody halfway normal want to live at the North Pole on a bunch of shifting ice flows? Or stay up all night flying around the sky distributing presents to children of doubtful deservingness? There is a point where altruism becomes sick. Or else a sinister cover-up for an international scam. A man of no plausible address, with not apparent source for his considerable wealth, comes down the chimney after midnight while decent law-abiding citizen are snug in their beds - is this not at the least, cause for alarm?” - JOHN UPDIKE (see Peejay, below:)

“Santa Claus is a Democrat, but God is a Republican.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

“Wherever you are, there’s no getting away from the essential truth that Christmas is a foreign affair.” - STEVEN BAILEY (writing in the UK SPECTATOR in Dec. 2007)

“As a general rule, the lower the household income, the more money the occupants will spend on external Christmas decorations.” – TOBY YOUNG

“Christmas is this garish and cluttered carnival of unreflective consumption – a tinselled and glitter-balled waste of space.” – STEPHEN BAYLEY    (described in Wiki as a “British culture critic, style critic and author”. Sounds like a big poof to me…)  

"Santa Claus has the right idea. Visit people once a year." -- VICTOR BORGE

"The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live." - GEORGE CARLIN

"For a successful Christmas (or life), avoid hope." -- ALAIN DE BOTTON

"I deplore the collectivization of gaiety and compulsory bad taste of Christmas." -- CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

“The whole point of Christmas is not to have arguments. That's what Thanksgiving is for.” -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“That's the true spirit of Christmas – people being helped by people other than me.” -- JERRY SEINFELD

“Christmas is a huge day. It marks the beginning of a worldwide attempt to overcome who we are and make us more like divinities.” -- BEN STEIN (woah – heavy, bro...)

“For me, Christmas shopping is that annual conversion of one’s indifference to others into active hatred.” -- PHILIP LARKIN (the great poet-laureate of Great Britain, and Kingsley Amis’ best, dour, pal)

"The entire Cheka (the KGB predecessor) must be on the alert to see to it that those who do not show up for work because of Nikola (Christmas) are shot." -- VLADIMIR I. LENIN (He actually wrote this in a hand-written order, in 1919)

 "Christmas Day's the longest day, longer than D-Day -- and more stressful. You're sitting there, exhausted, thinking 'and it's only 11 o'clock in the morning'." -- NOEL GALLAGHER   (of Oasis, of course, in an interview with Rachel Johnson, Boris' sister.)

Church (-es)

“Talking in church – everything you say, why, you get a feeling you’re interrupting, even when you’re not.” – PETER USTINOV

“Church and State, (Separation of”)

“As government grows, the separation of church and state is replaced by the state as church.” – MARK STEYN

“Yes, render unto Caesar and all that. But render only what is Caesar's – and not one mite more.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

Churchill, Winston

“The key to Winston is to realize that he is unable ever to get the modern point of view.” – LEO AMERY                                      (A multiple member of Churchill's cabinets)

“The greatest man who ever lived, Winston S. Churchill.” – BEN STEIN

“Chutzpah”

“America has always been an assertocracy, where anybody with enough chutzpah and cojones can con the press into believing damn near anything.” - STEVE SAILER

C.I.A., The

“The C.I.A. is not the place for tender egos and shriveling violets.” - WILLIAM  J. CASEY (I think the old mumbler meant “shrinking” but, as always, he got his meaning across…)

“You don't join the CIA if you have an overwhelming urge to be universally loved.” – JOSE A. RODRIGUEZ, JR.                      (on page 155 in his "Hard Measures". A pretty phlegmatic hombre.)

" 'The Outfit', as we Old Boys call the US intelligence service, never among ourselves referring to it by the three vulgar initials employed by headline writers and other outsiders." -- CHARLES McCARRY (the best American spy novelist of them all)

"The sacred Outfit creed: Do Good by Stealth." -- CHARLES McCARRY  

"CIA types are so into deceit, deception, double and triple crosses, paranoia, and bullshit, that you never knew what they knew, when they knew it, and what they were making up. This doesn't make them bad guys, and in fact you have to admire their world-class bullshit. I mean, a CIA guy would lie to a priest in a confessional. But admiration aside, it's not easy to work with them if you're not one of them." -- NELSON DEMILLE

"A CIA guy wrestling with a moral issue is like professional wrestling: most of it is phony." -- NELSON DEMILLE

"CIA-types like to give the impression that they know more than they are saying. In most cases what appears to be quiet assurance and wisdom is actually clueless stupidity." -- NELSON DEMILLE (Now now, Nelson -- I actually like Nelson, but I wonder if it's possible that he once applied to the Outfit... and was turned down?)

"Some political commentators lament the fact the CIA was not the Boy Scouts. Those of us who worked in the CIA were surprised -- we had always assumed that we had been expected to act otherwise." -- RICHARD HELMS (My old boss. Well... ONE of my old bosses. A great man, in any case.)

"The CIA has ended up with some strange and often unsavory bedfellows. Most you wouldn't bring home to Mom." -- ROBERT GATES (that was always part of the fun of working for them. Anyway, Gates was one of the better Directors.)

"In the public's mind the CIA has always been seen less as an instrument of government than as a mythical creature dwelling among us." -- TED  GUP (the leftist journalist's nevertheless useful and not un-interesting 2000 "The Book Of Honor: Covert Lives And Classified Deaths At The CIA")

“This has all the earmarks of a CIA operation. Everyone died except Sukarno.” – WILLMOORE KENDALL (upon hearing of a reported Agency attempt on the life of President Sukarno of Indonesia.)

"The CIA was set up by me for the sole purpose of getting all the available information to the President. It was not intended to operate as an international agency engaged in strange activities." -- HARRY TRUMAN (heh heh, "strange activities". Actually, he was getting a little gaga by '64, when he wrote this – “strange activities” is exactly what it was intended for....)

“That few (CIA) case officers today have had any military leadership experience is a serious limitation.” – DUANE “DEWEY” CLARRIDGE (in 1997 – and the situation has gotten a lot worse since.)

“For those who grow up believing that anyone can be president, it’s not a big leap of logic to conclude that anyone should be able to become a case officer in the CIA. Part of the problem lies in the dual definition of the term elite. In the Clandestine Service we unquestionably do think of ourselves as elite – a collection of the brightest and most dedicated men and women our country can produce, committed to the defense of America and one another. The US Marine Corps regards itself in much the same way, that is, as an elite body of personnel devoted to the defense of our country. It is just that, and it has a positive image; no one belittles or takes pot-shots at it. When we are accused of being an elite in the press, however, the word is the same but the image becomes perverted. Journalists revel in portraying us as a bunch of blue-blooded fops sitting around that bastion of privilege, the headquarters at Langley, clipping coupons, giving one another secret handshakes, and spying as a lark until the rest of dear ol Mumsy’s trus fund kicks in.” – DUANE “DEWEY” CLARRIDGE

“Doing illegal things is exactly what the C.I.A. does when it operates abroad. We break the laws of other countries. It’s how we collect information. It’s why we’re in business.” – DUANE “DEWEY” CLARRIDGE

“An effective Clandestine Service cannot mirror the gender and ethnicity of the American population as a whole. Like it or not, gender and ethnic quotas or diversity are no substitute for talent. Furthermore, the rest of the world retains its prejudices and cultural attitudes towards females and various ethnic groups. This presents serious problems and disadvantages for female and ethnic officers, particularly in recruitment. Because the Clandestine Service cannot control or even influence the world’s various prejudices, we should allow it do deal with reality.” – DUANE “DEWEY” CLARRIDGE

“Unlike all other US government agencies and the US military, the Clandestine Service cannot undertake its own public relations campaign, for if its successes are to be effective, they should remain secret.” – DUANE “DEWEY” CLARRIDGE (this is the great and perennial public opinion “Catch 22” that bedevils spook outfits in democracies)

"The CIA should hire the same advertising firm as the Pentagon, since the country would be better off hiring more agents than soldiers. For a fraction of the cost of waging war, we can train a thousand operatives to infiltrate terrorist organizations, pay foreign journalists to write favorable stories, influence religious leaders, and quiet the hysteria being built against the West." -- E. HOWARD HUNT (in 2006, well before the Obamarroid "Khmer Rouge Democrats" got finished weaponizing both the CIA and the Pentagon)

"Americans need to know that what happened to the CIA didn't happen just by chance. The CIA was systematically destroyed by political correctness, by petty Beltway wars, by careerism, and much more. At a time when terrorist threats were compounding globally, the agency that should have been monitoring them was being scrubbed clean instead." -- ROBERT BAER                                                                               (In 2002)

"In the CIA, as elsewhere in the federal government, you're innocent until you're investigated." -- ROBERT BAER

"I have no issue with (the) CIA -- they never let me down. But US diplomats have not allowed me to act against the Taliban." -- ABDUL RASHID DOSTUM     (the great, and wrongly-maligned Uzbek warlord and our ally in Afghanistan -- to Toby Harnden in 2020)

"Pity the poor souls who signed on with the CIA expecting to experience the world of Sean Connery’s James Bond only to find out they are imprisoned in a gulag of asexual pronouns and a bureaucracy spawned by Dilbert." -- LARRY JOHNSON  (the somewhat, er, erratic ex-CIA analyst who's moved from far-left to the "right", in July 2022)

"If CIA officers opened fire, they had failed, it meant they were not collecting intelligence." -- TOBY HARNDEN

"We don't steal secrets." -- JOHN BRENNAN     (Obama's CIA boss, a swine who is both a communist AND a Muslim convert, and these words of his are the LEAST of his sins -- although they offer an insight in the damage he's wreaked in my old Outfit....)

Cinema

“Painting with money.” - MICHAEL WINNER (the British film-making, describing the process. Rather nifty, actually - rather like Jerry Lerwis’definition of a yacht: “A hole - surrounded by water, into which you throw money.”

“Of course the thing amounts to what we critics call crap. That ought to go without saying. But then, did the makers think it wasn’t crap? I very much doubt it. In fact, I will go further and say that many of the worst movies being made today were intended by their makers to be just exactly as bac as they are.” - JAMES BOWMAN (referring here to Mike Myers and his 2002 “Austin Powers: Goldmember”).

"The most important person in the motion picure process is the writer, and we must do everything in our power to prevent them from realising it." -- IRVING THALBERG (the early film producer -- of the Marx Brothers, among many others)

"Screen-writing is what feminists call  'shit-work' -- if it's well-done, it's ignored. If it's badly done, people call attention to it." -- WILLIAM GOLDMAN (Sounds like working for the CIA... Anyway, Goldman himself was the screenwriter of, among others, "The Princess Bride" and one of my own faves, "Magic" which starred Anthony Hopkins and his wooden killer dummy.)

“The screen illuminated a world they could never hope to achieve, where men stalked among big-breasted women, and where all events kindly conspired to throw the one into the arms of the other.” – DAVID LODGE (in his 1960 debut novel, “The Picturegoers”.)

“The movies are probably a very unsafe guide to popular taste, because the film industry is virtually a monopoly, which means that it is not obliged to study its public at all closely.” – GEORGE ORWELL

 
“All film technique originates in dreaming. We could dream slow motion before the moving camera was invented. In our dreams we could cut between parallel actions, we assembled montage shots long before some self-important Russian claimed to show us how. This is where film derives its particular power. It recreates on screen what has been going on in our unconscious." -- WILLIAM BOYD

"All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun" -- JEAN-LUC GODARD (Commie Frogue "auteur")

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

"A film is green-lighted on the basis of its cost, cast, subject, and director. The reading of a script is considered superfluous, as is a script itself." -- DAVID MAMET (One of America's best creenwriters, in 2022)

"In the world of film, the writer does not stand on the top of Olympus as he does in the world of novels, he's right at the bottom amongst the invertebrates, the very last in the food chain." -- WILBUR SMITH

Cities

"I was starting to get to know the city, and when that happens in a screwed-up place, it's time to leave." -- NELSON DEMILLE

"If the world comes to an end I’d like to be in Cincinnati, because everything comes 10 years later there." -- MARK TWAIN

“There are only 3 cities in America: New York, Chicago and… New Orleans. All the others are Cleveland.” – BRIAN WILSON                   (not the Beach Boy, but an old fellow who was then of the WMAL, Washington D.C., morning show)

"The American baseball stadium is one of the greatest of all American building types, as much as the town square, the street, the park, and the plaza, the baseball park is a key part of the American public space." -- PAUL GOLDBERGER                 (the American architectural critic)

“I worry about towns that feel they have to tell you what they are. It indicates that although that’s what they’d ideally like to be, or what the powers that be want them to be, in reality they are the exact opposite.” – PETER MOORE                        (the Australian travel writer)

"The greatest cities always get worse, not by traffic or tourists, but by governments." -- BERNARD LEVIN (the long-time columnist for the Times Of London, in 1993.)

"Whore fights are part and parcel of living in a big city." – SADIQ KHAN                                                                                              (the mayor of London, in July 2020, and don’t even ASK me what the hell he was referring to here, just... bask in the moment....)

"America's prosperity becomes apparent the moment you leave her large cities." -- VASSILY AKSYONOV

"The decline of big, Democrat-owned US cities continues apace, poleaxed by the double whammy of 1/ COVID making us realize they're unnecessary, and 2/ ANTIFA/BLM riots and rampaging 'no cops' crime having made them unlivable. (And this is no bad thing -- for civilization at large.)" -- JACK JOLIS (Sept. '23)

"People move to cities because there are more fucks there." -- BORIS JOHNSON (Uh, he said this quite some time before he became Prime Minister)

"I am from a 3rd world country and I see cities in the US where I wouldn't want to live now. When you see cities in the US eroding so fast, this has to be by design." -- NAYIB BUKELE (the Lebanese-descended President of El Salvador -- a guy who gets it -- in Oct. '23)  

 “I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man."-- THOMAS JEFFERSON      (in 1800)

Citizenship                                                                                                                                                   

"When we’re referring to 'American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki' — provoking Rand Paul to carry on for 13 hours about Obama killing an 'American citizen'with a drone – the phrase 'American citizen' has lost its essential meaning. We don't have a drone problem. We don’t have a spying problem. We have an immigration problem." -- ANN COULTER

“There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all … The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic … There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.” -- THEODORE ROOSEVELT

“If you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.” -- THERESA MAY                                                                          (British PM, in October 2016)                                                                                                                                                

"One of the reasons countries such as Japan and Switzerland work as well as they do is that neither country automatically confers citizenship -- or rights, for that matter -- on anyone who has managed to enter, legally or illegally. One needs to earn the right, otherwise you're out." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

"Regarding citizenship as an irrelevance rather than an honor both disincetivizes naturalization and corrupts the idea of the sovereign people." -- MATTHEW CONTINETTI

"Even the very ideas of citizenship -- and the rights and privileges that come with them -- are hotly contested, with many Democrats furiously insisting that denying non-citizens welfare, education in public universities, or even the right to vote is bigoted and un-American. 'Assimilation' is increasingly a fighting word. No wonder it has become difficult to appeal to Americans as Americans." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the earth, can come to live in America and become an American." -- RONALD REAGAN                          (in his last speech as President)

“Open borders and sanctuary cities are blurring the distinction between illegal immigrants and Americans, and activist judges are eroding the Bill of Rights. The American Founders institutionalized the best of a long Western tradition of representative government, with the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. These contracts outlined the rare privileges and responsibilities of new American citizens. Yet the concept of citizenship is being assaulted by the legal blending of mere residency with citizenship.” – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON (in January 2020)

“Civil Liberty”

“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption….  Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.” - EDMUND BURKE

“No normal society guarantees a right of sedition.” - STEPHEN SCHWARTZ (the American writer on national security, in 2004. And, incidentally, a Jew who converted to Islam. Although - amazingly - he remains sane and sound. He went on to say, in that line, “Western Democracies may indeed be compelled to end their long summertime of legal self-indulgence in the face of Islamist terror.”)

“Global terrorism means traditional civil liberty arguments are not so much wrong as just made for another age." - TONY BLAIR (In other words, like a lot of the Geneva Conventions, and in the words of John Bolton, “quaint”. In August 2006)

“I am quite fond of my civil liberties and would hate to lose them. On the other hand, I’m appalled at the fatuousness of today's civil libertarians, who seem to care more about terrorists' rights than national security. That very much includes the New York Times, with its penchant for compromising national secrets. In an age of terror, society ought to be able to strike a reasonable balance between civil liberties and national security. By insisting that liberty is an all-or-nothing proposition, civil libertarians make it more likely that we will eventually end up with nothing.” -JAMES TARANTO   (Editor of the Wall St. Journal’s “Best Of The Web, in Aug. 2006)

"A concern for civil liberties, taken to its illogical conclusion, impinges on or destroys the civil liberties of others." -- THEODORE DALRYMPLE

“For the curtailment of civil liberties, public health policy, graciously instituted for our own good, has been the thin end of the wedge for decades. Over time, that wedge has been getting fatter.” – LIONEL SHRIVER

Civil War (American)

“But the fact is, if the Civil War had been fought between (Stonewall) Jackson and McClellan, the South would have won in as little time as it would take McClellan to wet himself.” – EVERETT EHRLICH

"Enlisting in the Confederate Army was the natural, human thing for Father to do. Like so many others, including Robert E. Lee, who neither owned slaves nor approved of slavery, Father felt his first allegiance to be to his adopted state." -- BERNARD BARUCH      (1870-1965) 

Civil War, (in general, & “Civil War II”)

“You have to remember a war even to regret it.” – LIONEL SHRIVER (despite her name, this is a lady – an American lady novelist-journalist living in the UK, & she said this in 2017,     in response to all the destruction of Civil War statuary in America)

"I suspect the civil war the libs may well provoke will come as a surprise to them even though they'll fire the first shots." -- KURT SCHLICHTER (in August 2018)

“When you hate each other but accept the election results, you have a country. When you stop accepting election results, you have a countdown to a civil war.” – DR. JACK DEVERE MINZEY (1928-2018. Head of Education, Eastern Michigan University)

"You want one, Democrats: you’ll get one. The result will be the same as last time except we won’t be in a Grant-like mood at the end of it." -- MARK NOONAN                                                                                                                                                                     (An American Navy vet, and author.)

“The Democrat civil war forces will consist of 72% Twitter blue checks wearing body armor that says PRESS.” – KURT SCHLICHTER (On 22 Sept. 2020)

"Well, when you want to start another Civil War (your garbage party is 0-1) then you go ahead and do that and then you can abolish anything you want if you win. If." -- KURT SCHLICHTER (to Robert Reich on 2 Nov 2020)

"We are two different countries pretending to be one country for the sake of appearances." -- JESSE KELLY

"We are nation divided over whether pregnant men exist. The coming civil war will certainly be the weirdest one in history." -- MATT WALSH (conservative blogger, on 13 July 2022)

Civility

“No one in America has been allowed to finish a sentence in the past 10 years." -- PEGGY NOONAN (In 2006. Great line, Peggy.)

“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

“Fuck civility. Hyperbole, passion and metaphor are beautiful parts of rhetoric. The marketplace of ideas cannot be toned down for the insane.” – PENN JILLETTE   (the American magician, actor, musician, inventor, television personality, and best-selling author – on the Twoot, in July 2019)

“Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does.” – GEORGE ORWELL

"Civility is to protect the left." -- KURT SCHLICHTER (9 May 2022)

Civilization

“Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe.  That, before 9/11, was what happened to us.  The very concept of the enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary.” - LEE HARRIS                (from his 2004 book “Civilization and its Enemies”)

“Like pygmies moving through the African forest, civilized society makes its slash-and-burn progress through the myriad expressions of human spontaneity, seizing something still precious for its inviolate link with the inner man, forcing the outer man to stimulate it, robbing it thereby of meaning, and moving on.” - MATTHEW PARRIS

“Civilizations die from suicide, not from murder.” - ARNOLD TOYNBEE

“Civilization is an enormous improvement on the lack thereof.” - P. J. O’ROURKE

“Civilisation is an exercise in self-restraint.” - W. B. YEATS

“There is no document of civilization that is not simultaneously a document of barbarism”. - WALTER BENJAMIN (“famous” -  I never heard of him - German writer, philosopher, “thinker”.)

“For all the manifold crimes committed by Westerners (each of them equaled, however, by the people of other regions), the fact remains that systematic curiosity about alien civilizations and cultures is, or was until very recently, a uniquely Western phenomenon.” - THEODORE DALRYMPLE

"Contemporary Britain is an unlovely place sinking into a hell of Hogarthian depravity from which there are no easy roads back: Consider what LBJ's Great Society did to the black family, and then imagine it applied to the general population. The Britannic inheritance will last longer in India and australia than in the mother country." -- MARK STEYN

“For many young Europeans, Western civilization comprises little more than pop music, soccer, a sexual free-for-all, social-security programs, and five-week holidays to exotic places: not a strong position from which to face either the economic or the ideological challenges of the day.” - THEODORE DALRYMPLE

"Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians who must be civilized before it is too late." – THOMAS SOWELL

"Civilization has been aptly called a 'thin crust over a volcano.' The anointed are constantly picking at that crust." – THOMAS SOWELL

“You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization ― including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility, and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain ― without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.” – THOMAS SOWELL

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

"Classical civlization as a whole died a very long and gruesome physical death once there was no longer any place you could sail to if you wanted to get away from Caesar.... And the event should serve as a grim warning to the postmodern world." -- DANIEL CLOUD                                  (A prof at Princeton)

"All great civilisations are based on loitering." -- JEAN RENOIR                                                                                                               (The Frogue "auteur du cinema" made this comment in 1949 while in Calcutta, of all places, and it's either one of the great insights or one of the great fatuities of all time -- I'm not sure which....)

“Democratic civilization is the first in history to blame itself because another power is trying to destroy it.” – JEAN-FRANCOIS REVEL

“For me, western civilisation came to an end when a lunch companion said, 'No wine for me, I have to be back to the office by two’.” – KEITH WATERHOUSE

"The Mediterranean is the human norm. When men leave that exquisite lake, they approach the monstrous and extraordinary." -- E. M. FORSTER (actually, a character of his -- Cyril Fielding -- said this, in his "A Passage To India") 

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

“Civilization's most vital function, after all, is to shield humans from the vagaries of climate and save us from the discomfort of cohabiting with insects, vegetation, critters, and beasts that spread pestilence and death and make our skin itch.” – DAVID HARSANYI (A Canadian conservative, here writing in NR, Sept. 2014)

“The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.” – SIGMUND FREUD

"Civilization is as much about forgetting, and attendant helplessness, as it is about learning. In my own lifetime, handwriting and mental arithmetic have gone to the wall, and the art of everyday literary nuance is being ousted by the application of quick, characterful emoji." -- SIMON INGS (in THE SPECTATOR, Feb. 2018)

“Above all, religion has been the central impulse of all civilizations until, perhaps, our own.” – CHARLES MOORE

“A civilization starts with a society that cares for its dead.” – CHARLES MOORE

"When we fail to properly civilize people, human nature rushes in." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"A civilization is simply a story: the story the people tell themselves about themselves." -- JONAH GOLDBERG.                                         (Sounds nice, but I think he's completely wrong here -- his words here better describe a "culture", rather than "civilization")

“Civilization isn’t the opposite of nature, any more than a boat is the opposite of a river.” -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“Moral progress, or the story of civilization, is a scavenger hunt for categorical imperatives, a search for truths that are — or should be — true everywhere.” -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“Civilization is a verb.” -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"Western civilization is a work in progress because that’s what civilization means." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“You should understand that civilization is a battle against nature, specifically human nature.” -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation (sic). We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, as effectively as with bombs." -- KENNETH CLARK (the creator of the monumental TV series CIVILISATION)

“There’s no question that religion and ethnic passion are the enemies of civlised coexistence.” -- JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH

"Civilization is a construct." -- V. S. NAIPAUL     (well, ... yes....)

"The history of civilization is largely the history of weapons." --GEORGE ORWELL

“Civilization hangs on the principle that humans are ends in themselves. So much depends on that principle because there is no crime that cannot be, that has not been, committed in the name of the future against those who inhabit the present.” -- CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

"Western civilisation was basically the creation of the Church. It was believers such as Charles Martel in 732, Duke John in Lepanto in 1571 and Jan Sobieski in 1683 who defeated the invading Muslim hordes and safeguarded the Christian continent. Western civilisation was built on a Christian foundation, and the chivalric respect for women grew from the Church's devotion to Mary. The art that followed was the expression of that fate.' -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

“The modern primitive is no less primitive for having a smartphone.” -- KEVIN T. WILLIAMSON

“Someone once said that a civilization would always survive if everyday people did everyday things every day.” -- NELSON DE MILLE

“Civilisations, like their inhabitants, die of weariness, of self-disgust.” -- MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ (the Froggie “provocateur” novelist)

“Most people do not understand what makes a civilization...civil. Put really simply, lots and lots of bad people have to ride the lightning over and over again. That teaches everyone else to behave. Take that away, and you no longer have a ‘civilization’. It's not pretty.” -- JOHN JACKSON   (“pvtjokerus” on the Twoot)

"When nobody in the Labour Party can tell you what 'a woman' is, you know you are at the end of time for a civilisation, a state of utter derangement in which western society is in danger of disappearing with a shallow pphutt, way up beyond its own sphincter muscle." -- ROD LIDDLE (obviously, what goes for the UK Labour Party goes for the US Democrat Party. He said this is April 2022)  

Civilization, Western

 "Throw in the rule of law and the Magna Carta and a Judeo-Christian sense of the Golden rule and suddenly with banking and other stuff you're the most powerful people in the world. And you colonize out of that." -- ROY CAMERON (in July 2024, on X)

“Class”

“The basic principle of English social life is that everyone thinks he is a gentleman. There is a second principle of almost equal importance: everyone draws the line or demarcation immediately below his own heels.” - EVELYN WAUGH

"The classless society is no society at all." -- EVELYN WAUGH

«In America, people are judged by where they've ended up, whereas in Britain it's more about where you start.» – TOBY YOUNG

«Class itself is not a thing, it is a happening.» -- E.P. THOMPSON (Brit historian)

«That used to be a classic definition of class: the more you spent on your house, and the less you spent on your car, the grander you were.» – HARRY MOUNT (An English classics scholar and author of «Odyssey»)

«The class enmity at the heart of British leftism is totally healthy and not deranged.» – SOHRAB AHMARI (My and my family’s good Iranian-American pal. He was still at the WSJ when he wrote this, in April  2016, and it’s a sign of our debased times that I feel I should point out that he was being sarcastic, here.)

"We lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the 'lower classes' when we mean humanity minus ourselves." ~ G. K. CHESTERTON

"There are only three classes in England now, politicians, tradesmen and slaves. Now the politicians are in alliance with the slaves to destroy the tradesmen. They don't need to bother about us." -- EVELYN WAUGH                                                              (in "Work Suspended", in 1942)

«Like all people lucky enough to have been born at the top of their society’s pecking order, this guy had strong ideas about what was holding the lover classes down.» – PETER MOORE (The Australian travel writer, here referring to an Indian Brahmin with whom he was conversing, and who he didn’t like, much....)

«One must keep a dialogue of tension between the classes, otherwise how is one to distinguish between them? Socialists treat their servants with respect and then wonder why they vote Conservative. So unintelligent.» – TOM STOPPARD (from his 1966 play «Lord Malmquist And Mister Moon»)

«Sexual pleasure is for the rich. The upper classes have orgasms and the working class have babies.» – GUY BELLAMY

«What a curse these social distinctions are. They ought to be abolished. I remember saying that to Karl Marx, once, and he thought there might be an idea for a book in it.» – P. G. WODEHOUSE

"The working class finds nothing shameful about tourism. It is the middle class that has read and heard just enough to sense that being a tourist is somehow offensive and scorned by an imagined upper class which it hopes to emulate and, if possible, be mistaken for." -- PAUL FUSSELL 

Clergy, The

“When it comes to mountains of nonsense, bishops, like Marxists, are rarely far from the peak.” - ANDREW STUTTAFORD

"Fat, pink, kindly important bastards that run the world and heaven and hell to boot. Whoever gave them bastards charge of the world?" -- RICHARD McKENNA (through the words of Jake Holman, the protagonist of his epic novel "The Sand Pebbles", brilliantly played by Steve McQueen)

"It's one of the peculiar ironies of history that the people most eager to hang the priests are those most eager to replace them." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“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

"Nobody except missionaries knows anything, really, about the rest of the world." -- MARK HELPRIN

"Born in Dead Indian, Illinois, and abandoned at three minutes of age, he had raised in an orphanage run by the Bleeding Heart Sisters of Eternal Misery, and when you mentioned nuns to him, no sweet images grew in his mind of kindly penguins feeding the homeless and housing the hungry. No, what he visualized when he heard the word nun was a large, bad-tempered, heavy-shouldered woman with a very rough and calloused right hand, usually swinging. Or wielding a ruler." – DONALD WESTLAKE

“Well most vicars are loopy. You’ve got to be a bit loopy to think you know something that the rest of us don’t know.” – GUY BELLAMY

"He was a priest, half a man." -- V. S. NAIPAUL     (in his 1979 "A Bend In The River")

"He liked most clergy, for holding off the unthinkable while we dally through life." -- JOHN UPDIKE

“Any minister will tell you that somebody who has got religion is embarrassing to a cleric of sensibility as ‘poetry lovers’ are to a poet, and in much the same way. Besides being a nuisance they can be very time-consuming.” – PETER DEVRIES

Cleveland

“There are only three cities in America: New York, Chicago and... New Orleans. All the others are Cleveland.” – BRIAN WILSON (then of the WMAL, Washington D.C., morning show)

"Every country has that one city that everyone makes fun of, even Russia. In Russia, we make fun of Cleveland." - YAACOV SMIRNOFF                                (anti-Commie émigré who used to live in Krochrotski, USSR, and now lives in Branson, MO.)

Clichés

“Clichés begin arguments, they don’t settle them.” – JONAH GOLDBERG (Who wrote a whole bestseller on the subject, “The Tyranny Of Clichés”)

“Like most clichés,it is so deeply true that we cease to see its truth.” – A. C. GRAYLING (The author of “The Age Of Genius”)

"Clichés are clichés for a reason, my friends." -- CHARLES McCARRY 

"I have spent a great of my life discovering that my ambitions and fantasies, which I once thought of as totally unique, turn out to be clichés." -- NORA EPHRON (well, she was a liberal, so... yeah.)

“For what is more cliché-ed than a knee-jerk disdain for clichés?” – SUSIE BOYT (British novelist, daughter of Lucian Freud)

“Clichés are the common currency of the realm. After all, we can’t all go about all the time sounding like Eliot on his very highest occasions.” --DENIS DONOGHUE (the great Irish professor and literary critic who died in 2021)

Clinton, Bill

“The Clinton impeachment was a thing of manifold splendors, and it had no downside.  If sixty-seven senators said so, we were rid of a half-cracked slab of sophomorocism (sic), a moral midden heap, ethical slop jar, and backed-up policy toilet, a blabby, overreaching nooky-mooch and masher.  The dirty selfish pest would be removed from office.  If not, we were spared a busy, silly toad-eater puffed with all the bad ideas available at Harvard.  And if the Republicans got spanked in the voting booth, they’d get the hairbrush for the wrong offense, true, but they deserved the wallop on general principles.” - P. J. O’ROURKE (in THE CEO OF THE SOFA)

“A soft man for a soft age.” - RICH LOWRY (editor of NATIONAL REVIEW)

“One key to Clinton’s ability to endure in office, then, is that he didn’t seem to matter much.  He sought to bury his personal failings beneath his own inconsequence.  Mission accomplished.” - RICH LOWRY

“Clinton is now up there with Madonna, in the highlands that are even above talent. In fact, he and Madonna may, just at the moment, be the only ones way up there, problems having arisen with so many lesser reputations.” - LARRY McMURTRY   (he was referring to the Great Blowjob’s opus “My Life” and, apparently, he was serious….)

“Clinton is not the worst president the republic has had, but he is the worst person ever to have been president.” - GEORGE WILL (he said this while Clinton was still president.)

“The only leader I did not manage to have a proper conversation with was Clinton. I was speaking and he was looking at one of the walls, admiring the frescoes and paintings. He was not listening to me.” - POPE JOHN PAUL II (in 2001, and if ever there was any doubt that Clinton’s defining characteristic was self-centeredness, this has to be it….)

“Watching Clinton these last eight years has given me the same unbridled, childlike joy as watching a cartoon. Clinton was our first cartoon president. He ran off cliffs, was crushed by anvils, and flattened by turn-of-the-century trains. Yet moments later, we always saw him, just like Wile E. Coyote or Daffy Duck, completely reassembled and eagerly pursuing his next crazy scheme.” - CONAN O’BRIEN (the TV goofball who’s scarcely less of a cartoon than ” B.J.” Clinton was…)

“Mr. Clinton does not have the strength of character to be a war criminal.” - HENRY KISSINGER

“Bill Clinton is perhaps the most effective politician in the history of the U.S. but he is certainly the most reprehensible.” - WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR. (he went on to add: “He swore untruths, deceived Congress, the courts, the public, and however many ladies he left unattended. His contributions to statecraft are unrecorded because there weren’t any. The economy rose and fell and rose, as did threats of foreign disruptions. No detoxified area of the world owes its survival to an initiative of Bill Clinton, who presided over a foreign policy and permitted Osama bin Laden to gather strength undisturbed by any interference from the U.S. Marines or the Red Cross.”)

“Bill is an oleaginous people pleaser, a cross between Franklin Roosevelt and the guy looking for a free drink at the end of the bar. If he sidles up to someone who loves Tito Puente, he’ll be quick to say, “Oh, I’ve been listening to him for years!” If he meets someone who hates Tito Puente, he’ll shed a single tear and bite his lip that he just couldn’t get Puente’s albums banned, because of that awful Republican-controlled Congress.” - JONAH GOLDBERG

“Trying to make sense of Bill Clinton's words is like trying to figure out where the stairs in an Escher drawing lead: After five minutes it just gives you a headache and a strong desire to drink.” - STEPHEN SPRUIELL (campaigning on behalf of his business partner, the fearsome Mrs. Macbeth)

"Bill Clinton has plenty of charisma, but no sense of when to shut up." -- EDMUND MORRIS         (the biographer)

"(President) Clinton is a mediocre guy getting his kicks out of being the top politician in the land." -- DR. BERTRAM S. BROWN (the head of the National Institute of Mental Health, appointed by JFK, and he said this in 1995) 

"I've come to think that Clinton, a loose fish who has grown rich blowing bubbles at his eager co-generationists, may be the first -- and so far the only: Bush is too earnest, Obama too staid and fussy -- rock president." -- MATTHEW WALTER (A denizen of Washington D.C. writing in the AmSpec in March 2013)

«The Democrats place an extraordinary value on cleverness: They are the party of the student council, and Bill Clinton has spent 50-odd years proving to the world that he is the cleverest boy at Hot Springs High School, and his admirers loved him not in spite of his gross opportunism and dishonesty but because of those very things.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Clinton has no core beliefs – he's just all appetite.” – JESSE JACKSON

"There is nothing this man (Clinton) won't do. He is immune to shame. Move past all the nice posturing and get really down in there in him, you find absolutely nothing ... nothing but an appetite.” -- JESSE JACKSON 

"Bill is the greatest husband and father I know. No one is more faithful, true, and honest than he is." – HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON (in 1998)

“Many US presidents have turned out to be a great deal less reliable than they look. But Clinton has raised the status of the office to new heights of improbability. It’s the way he always looks as if he has just come from a rather good lunch – even at nine in the morning. It’s that slight smile that plays on his lips, even when he is imparting bad news, that makes me suspect that at any moment he is liable to switch his eyes away from the press corps, stare straight into the camera, and address the watching nation thus: ‘Eat, shit, sleep! What does it all mean?’ “ – NIGEL WILLIAMS               (in 1995)

Clinton, Chelsea

“Chelsea Clinton, most recently lionized on the cover of Vanity Fair, is a 37-year-old multi-millionaire who has never uttered an interesting word about any subject at any time during the course of her life.  Judging from the evidence of her public statements she has never had an original thought - it is not clear that she has had a thought at all. So for Pete's sake, stop it, have a little self-respect, Democrats. Stop trying to inflict this empty-headed, grasping, sanctimonious, risible, simpering, saccharine little twerp on American public life. It's stupid enough out there.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Chelsea seems to think that she has, in her genetic endowment, Bill’s gene for politics. Chelsea, if I may call you Chelsea, ignore this temptation. You are your mother’s child. You have her charm, her gift for couture, and so forth and so on.” – R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR.

"The positions Chelsea articulates on progress (pro), climate change (anti),and gauzy, inspirational, make-the-world-a-better-place-fror-girls-and-women (super-dupe pro) are verbal fentanyl. Everything she says is a platitude wrapped in a cliché washed down with a bromide. She's the dusty end of the greeting card section, the lite FM of famous-person chatter, a human press release. In short, Chelsea Clinton is becoming the champion dullard of our time." -- KYLE SMITH

Clinton, Hillary

“She has ideas about everything - education, minimum wage, earned-income tax credits, college tuition, Social Security, Medicare, the national debt, and making ‘a mean tossed salad’, just to mention a few subjects.  Hillary has ideas the way Arkansas has cars on blocks.  Ideas are to Hillary what sex is to her husband - something to be had indiscriminately and often and the results of which, thank goodness, go right down the drain.  And every time Hillary gets one of these ideas she starts exercising the smugness muscles with which the Liberal face is so richly endowed.  Her mouth compresses in a suck-purse grimace.  Her lips form a simper of sanctity.. - P. J. O’ROURKE

“Hillary Clinton’s life-long record of working for children consists mainly of saying she wants to.” - NOEMIE EMERY

“Even the people who like her hate her.” - ROB LONG

“Hillary is the kind of resentfully woozy woman Bolshevik who, were she a cop, would give speeding tickets to cars going through a car-wash.” - TAKI THEODORACOPULOS (He actually said this back in 1994, and I don’t think she’s improved with age…)

“Hillary Clinton’s notion of spontaneity is changing her brand of day planner without having a meeting about it first.  Hillary is about as impulsive as a pet rock.” - JONAH GOLDBERG

"It is painful to watch Sen. Clinton trying to act human." -- THOMAS SOWELL

“The reason Hillary Clinton’s a U.S. senator, the reason she’s a candidate for president, the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around” - CHRIS MATTHEWS

“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

"What exactly has Hillary ever accomplished — beyond bullishly covering for her philandering husband?"—CAMILLE PAGLIA

“Hillary is Hugo Chavez in a pant suit.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

"By the way, I hope people have realized who got us all screwed up over Syria. It was our next president, Hillary Rodham Clinton. She was secretary of state when the Syrian rebellion started. She was the one who told Obama to butt out when U.S. intervention in even a small way would have meant victory by moderate rebels. She made sure the struggle got so intense that at the end it was only the two last rats standing -- Assad and al Qaeda -- so that no choice was a good choice for the U.S. Hillary Clinton, architect of Benghazi, major liar before Congress, always looks a bit under the weather. The thought of her as president is terrifying. Obama is like Marcus Aurelius compared to Hillary." -- BEN STEIN

"Hillary Clinton is in a mental hospital of her own making." -- BEN STEIN                                                                                    (19 Sept. 2017)

"Gosh, Mrs. Clinton, you won the popular vote by three million Californians. You have legions of women and men who would die for you. You’ve had a life of fantastic achievement. No one will ever ask what it was. Give yourself a break. Benghazi was a long time ago. No one will remember those emails and your thousands of instances of obstruction of justice. As the Beatles said, 'Let it be'." -- BEN STEIN

“The fascination, the excitement, the thrill of Hillary Clinton is like a psychological potluck dinner for liberal Democrats and the Washington press corps: They bring their own. All she provides is the venue.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"Hillary Clinton is corrupt in countless ways, but her desire for personal profit is among the least of her transgressions. She didn’t stay in her thoroughly corrupted marriage for money, she didn’t set up her server for money, she didn’t fire the White House travel office for money, she committed these sins ― and myriad others ― in order to seek the power and status that she covets and feels she is due." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“Hillary has only two comfort zones: deep in a bunker or high on a pedestal. Drag her out of the former or knock her off the latter and she’s at sea.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"Hillary embodies liberal feminism better than almost anything except Ted Kennedy’s Oldsmobile." – KURT SCHLICHTER

“Hillary Clinton hates you. Her hate makes her stupid and her hate makes her dangerous.” -- KURT SCHLICHTER

“Hillary Clinton is the War On Women." -- KATHLEEN WILLEY

“ There isn't a shred of evidence because she shredded all the evidence.” -- SCOTT BARBOUR                                                      (a guy from Atlanta, on The Twoot)

“None of Hillary Clinton's political career makes a hell of a lot of sense if you think about it for three minutes. She's a feminist who has served as very little other than an extension of her traditionally patriarchic, manipulative hound dog of a husband, elected to the Senate as a tribute to him, like some sad little Ma Ferguson of the New York suburbs. Her record in office has run from mediocrity in the Senate to catastrophic as secretary of state. But she has some feelings she'd like to share, some adventures in High Herselfery.” -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Mrs. Clinton may be a retro throwback to the 1990s, a time when she was a retro throwback to the 1970s. Hillary isn't the 2016 zombie candidate; she's the 1965 Zombies candidate: She's not there.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

«Hillary’s like a toll booth – you put in your money and you can cross the bridge.» -- MARK SIMONE

«The only difference between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton is that Sanders wants to get us to the condition of Greece at 90 miles per hour and Clinton wants only 65 miles per hour.” – DAN MITCHELL (A Senior Fellow of Fiscal Policy at the CATO INSTITUTE)

«That babbling brook of prevarication.» – CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY

«Hillary Clinton, that driven leftist crook.» – MARK HELPRIN

«Hillary Clinton can make jokes. But every joke must wear a joke badge.» – MARTIN AMIS

"I can tell you this: if you were sitting where I am sitting and you heard what I have heard, at every dinner conversation, at every lunch conversation, on every long walk, you would say 'This woman has never been satisfied.'" -- BILL CLINTON                              (the night of her nomination, July 2016)

«Please help stamp out testifying under oath, America's leading cause of Alzheimer's Disease.» – DAVE «IOWAHAWK» BURGE (on Hillary saying «I cannot recall» 20 times while being questioned under oath.)

"The junkyard of bellowed, didactic banalities that constitute Mrs. Clinton's inventory of pronouncements..."-- WILLIAM VOEGELI (of Claremont-McKenna Institute and the Claremont Review of Books)

«Hillary wanted to be seen as warm, spontaneous to the point of being a little bit silly sometimes; someone who always has a twinkle in her eye whenever children are around. There's nothing more uncompfortable than witnessing someone straining to be natural.» – CAITLIN FLANAGAN (A journalist who covered Felonia back in the '90s)

"Everything HRC (Hillary Clinton) touches she kind of screws up with hubris." – COLIN POWELL

"Hillary Clinton is perhaps the biggest laughingstock in the history of American politics." -- KYLE SMITH

"Hillary is not just a liar but a lie; a phony construct of shreds and patches and hysterical, self-pitying, demagogic improvisations.” -- CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

"First of all, Hillary Clinton was the most corrupt serious candidate in history." -- ROGER KIMBALL (Editor and publisher of THE NEW CRITERION, writing in the Speccie, Feb. 2018)

"What was clear was that Mrs. Clinton couldn’t be bothered to make it appear as if she were telling the truth," - KEN STARR (In his 2018 book "Contempt: A Memoir Of The Clinton Investigation")

"She never would have done anything crazy because he was married. She could make even adultery boring. She's a real de-transgressor." -- PHILIP ROTH

"Hillary Clinton is Lisa Simpson without the cuteness." -- MARK GUSTAV (a Matre d'Hotel, on the Twoot)

“Hillary Clinton is Arthur Fleck in a pantsuit.”-- KYLE SMITH (in Jan 2020, referring to the character in “The Joker”)

"There’s no shame in lacking political gifts. What is shameful is that she continues to blame her personal failings on the rest of us." -- KYLE SMITH

“If that fucking bastard wins, we all hang from nooses! Lauer’s finished! And if I lose, it’s all on your heads, for screwing this up! You better fix this shit!” – HILLARY CLINTON                                                                                                                              (email to DONNA BRAZILE, 17 October S016)

“Felonia Hillary-Antoinette Evita Rodham Milhous Medici-Lardebutte Aubergine Défarge Grundy Borgia McAnkles-Macbeth.” — JACK JOLIS

Clintons, The

“I was born at 16 and I’ll always feel I am 16. And Hillary was born at age 40.” - BILL CLINTON

“My dog Millie knows more about foreign affairs than those two bozos.” - PRESIDENT GEORGE H.W. BUSH (in the 1992 campaign)

“We should be adhering to the ‘Clinton rules’. That is to say, the rules the Clintons exemplified: Mind your own business and keep your hands to yourself. Hillary, mind your own business. Bill, keep your hands to yourself.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

“No political couple – indeed, no political figure – in American history was caught lying, obstructing justice, or abusing power as frequently as the Clintons. Seven independent counsels were called in. The Clintons could not even leave the White House without causing further scandals – to wit, Pardongate, the trashing of the White House, and the pilfering of White House property. Time and again they got caught, and every time they were given a pass by the keepers of the Kultursmog.” – R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR.

"Bill and Hillary Clinton are the only ones on the planet who have scammed the Nigerians." – MARK STEYN

«The Clintons won't call terrorists terrorists, but they call their political opponents terrorists.» -- MARCO RUBIO

 “The Clintons are the penicillin-resistant syphilis of American politics" – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

«Clinton scandals, the background music of our politics for a quarter-century, are interrupted only by new Clinton scandals.» – ANDREW C. McCARTHY

«The Clinton marriage couldn’t be any more about convenience if they installed a Slurpee machine.» – DENNIS MILLER

«When Bill lied, it was like watching a jazz impresario scat. You could pull him off an intern, slap him in the face with a half-frozen flounder, and he could, without missing a beat, plausibly explain that he was just a gentleman trying to help push the young lady over a fence.

But when Hillary lied, which was often, it was like watching a member of the Politburo explain to a hungry mob of peasants that food-production targets exceeded expectations. Hillary never seemed to fully grasp that Bill’s lying skills did not become community property when they got married along with his collection of back issues of Juggs and that shoe box full of used pregnancy tests. There was music to Bill’s lying while Hillary deceived the way Helen Keller played the piano.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"You age in dog-years when you're married to Hillary Clinton." -- ANTHONY CUMIA (The Anthony half of the radio comedy team of "Opie and Anthony", speaking of an apparently doddering Bill Clinton, in June 2018)

"Isn’t it amazing that everything connected to the Clintons, big or small, miraculously gets Bleach Bit?" – DEBBIE ALDRICH (my good YouTube pal and collaborator, star of the Twoot)

"When I first arrived to work in the White House, my predecessor warned me. 'You can get away with pissing off Bill, but if you make her mad, she’ll rip your heart out.' I heeded those words. I knew the ramifications. Hillary's reputation preceded her. We used to say that when Hillary was gone, it was a frat party. When she was home, it was 'Schindler’s List'.” -- BUZZ PATTERSON     (Clinton's "military aide" and "nuclear-football"-carrier) 

“Closure”

"Any kid who says 'closure' I flunk. They want closure, there's their closure." -- PHILIP ROTH

“We never get over anything. That is the trouble with being alive. You do not get over it; all you can do is get on with it.” – JAMES HAWES (the English novelist)

Clothes

"I dress for women, and undress for men" – ANGIE DICKINSON

“At some point in my late twenties I discovered: whatever else we may have going for us, all guys are subject to immediate disqualification by reason of footwear.” – KYLE SMITH

“No one since Elvis has pulled off a white suit.” – HARRY MOUNT (I beg to differ. Although, to be honest, the high point of my own white-suitedness coincided with Elvis')

“I never wear socks, they are useless garments.” – ALBERT EINSTEIN (he agreed with the US grunts in Vietnam...)

“Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.” – HENRY DAVID THOREAU (I don't like Thoreau one tiny bit, but this was too amusing to leave out.)

"A dress has to be tight enough to show that you are a woman and loose enough to show that you are a lady” -- JACKIE KENNEDY

“We dress up not to succumb to down.” – HOWARD JACOBSON (I’m not sure this is even English, but he actually wrote it, as is – in a pro-suit and anti-”leisurewear” diatribe. And it sort of sounds portentous....)

"I can't wear beige because people won't know who I am." -- QUEEN ELIZABETH II

"Everybody should go to bed dressed like they have a date at the door." --KARL LAGERFELD

"Whoever wears running pants has lost control over his life." – KARL LAGERFELD

“Men don’t look at clothes like a treasure map that carries the secrets of a woman’s personality. Men are blind to colour, fabric, texture, cut and finish. The only quality they notice is tightness. Clingy garments are appreciated because they offer reliable data about their contents.” – LLOYD EVANS

“I recently met an English chap who stated in all seriousness that his main reason for emigrating to the South of France was to stop wearing socks and he hadn’t put a sock on for 30 years.” – JEREMY CLARKE

"Every time a woman goes out, she should first look at herself in a mirror -- and take one thing off." -- COCO CHANEL

"The item of clothing you're most likely to buy the closest to where you live are your shoes." -- GEORGES SIMENON (the Belgian author in the mouth of his creation, French detective Maigret)

“He felt more human with his boots on. A man can face the world with something on his feet.” – ROBERT HARRIS (In his 1998 novel “Archangel”)

“In this sad life you always have to dress up to do the things that you enjoy least... and vice versa.” – PETER USTINOV

“Headgear is an unnecessary indulgence, except when the temperature is below zero.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS (Reminds me of when I left the Army, I resolved never to run again unless I was late for a train/plane, it was as part of a sport I was involved in such as running with the bulls in Pamplona, or was being chased with ill intent –  and I also vowed never to wear any kind of headgear again unless I was skiing and my ears were cold, or it was raining and a cap was in lieu of an umbrella)

“Men should never wear shorts outside. No one needs to see men's legs.” – DON SURBER

CNN

“This (CNN) is not a respectable network. It's a whorehouse network.” – ROBERT DUVALL (yes, the actor...)

“CNN is not a news organization but a propaganda front. I do not get my my news from CNN for the same reason I do not eat out of the toilet.” – ROGER STONE

“If you’re a Democrat, is there any level of ethical transgression that might cost you a gig at CNN?” – KYLE SMITH (in May 2021, referring to Fredo Cuomo)

Coca-Cola

"The Coca Cola company is not happy with me – that's okay, I'll still keep drinking that garbage." -- DONALD TRUMP

Cocktail Parties

"The cocktail party -- as the name itself indicates -- was originally invented by dogs. They are simply bottom-sniffings raised to the rank of formal ceremonies." -- LAURENCE DURRELL (the author, of course, of "The Alexandria Quartet")

"Being a single man at a cocktail party where you know no-one and no-one wants to know you is a unique misery that goes right back to the locked room of dark childish horrors." -- A. A. GILL

Coercion

“There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.” – ROBERT HEINLEIN

“The government does not compel people to do stuff. The government compels people to do stuff at the point of a gun.” – BEN SHAPIRO

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

Coffee

“But if you don’t drink alcohol, what do you drink? Tea and coffee are fine things, but you can’t have them all the time without reproducing the effects of delirium tremens.” - ANDREW McKIE

“As everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring.” - HONORE DE BALZAC

“Only Irish coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups: alcohol, caffeine, sugar and fat.” - ALEX LEVINE (An author. Of scientific books, I think.)

"The virility of a society can be determined by the number of questions the men have about coffee. At the minimum, they should have two questions. 1) is there any? and 2) If not when will there be coffee? The more questions they have about coffee, the more the country has trouble meeting its recruitment quotas." -- JAMES LILEKS

“One of the things that does bother me the most about these kids today is the way they say so many foreign words when ordering a cup of coffee.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"Like many British towns, it has closed its factories and workshops, and instead is directing all its economic energies into the making and drinking of coffee. There were essentially two types of shop in the town: empty shops and coffee shops. Some of the empty shops, according to signs in their windows, were in the process of being converted into coffee shops, and many of the coffee shops, judging by their level of custom, looked as if they weren't far from becoming empty shops again. I am no economist, but I am guessing that that's what is known as a virtuous circle." -- BILL BRYSON

"Coffee is now the second most traded commodity in the world, after crude oil. They aren't so different: one is for machines, the other is for people." -- TANYA GOLD

"Fifty different kinds of coffee. Fifty different flavors of coffee. Fifty different ways of growing coffee. Fifty different containers for the coffee, all described in that weird hybrid of Italian, French and Spanish best known as Starbucks Esperanto. Plus cappuccino frothers. And thirty-five different kinds of chai tea." -- JOE QUEENAN (on the ubiquitous plague known as Starbucks)

Coincidence

“If coincidences didn’t happen, we wouldn’t have a word for them.” – DONALD WESTLAKE

"Randomness (a.k.a. chance) has been factored in, but coincidence violates the human craving for order." -- DONALD WESTLAKE (as a comic crime-writer, coincidence appears to have been, quite rightly, much on Westlake’s mind….)

"In our line of work, coincidences don't exist." -- ROBERT LITTELL (the line of work being espionage)

Cold War, The

“Mr. Gorbachev said at Stanford University that the Cold War is over – it doesn’t matter who won.  Ladies and gentlemen, only a loser would stand in the locker room and say it doesn’t matter who won.  We won.” -- JACK KEMP

“So the basic equation of the Cold War that meant most to individual ordinary people came into being: America - money; Russia - no money.” - HARRY MOUNT (British journalist and essayist, in 2003)

"(The Soviet defector) Golitsyn delivered a message that the CIA, MI5, SDECE, and other Western intelligence services had great difficulties in accepting. It was that the primary mission of the KGB had been changed in 1959 from conventional espionage, or stealing other nations' state secrets, to an extraordinary form of covert statecraft, where it used its agents and other hidden mechanism to help achieve the geopolitical goals of the Soviet Union." -- JAMES JESUS ANGLETON

 “The United States was our ally in the Cold War. The Soviet Union was our opponent. American support was the only reason why Moscow did not send the T-72s rolling towards the Channel. Nothing else. To think otherwise was plain naïve.” - JOHN WITHEROW   (the then-Editor of THE LONDON SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, in March ’95)

“To hear the blather about ‘Cold War consensus’, one would think that the Eighties never happened. At every turn, on every issue for which there presumably was one simple, knee-jerk, anti-Soviet answer: MX, el Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada, ‘Euromissile’ deployment - there was deep division. And practically every time, liberals, so wistful now for the ‘easy choices’ of yore, made the wrong choice.” - CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

“Yesterday, Cold Warrior was a liberal epithet. Today, everyone pretends to have been one. My father, who had a Frenchman’s appreciation for cynicism, had a term for this kind of after-battle résumé revision. Maquis d’après-guerre: resistance-fighter, post-war.” - CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

"A bumper sticker of my youth read 'I Would Rather Crawl on My Hands and Knees to Moscow Than Be A Victim Of A Nuclear Bomb'. Fifty years of the Cold War so decried by the Left kept the peace, and kept the nuclear bombs from being deployed. Had a sufficient number actually or figuratively crawled on their knees to Moscow (for example, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Susan Sontag, and the radical Left tout entier), had they ended our nuclear armament as they ended the Vietnam War, it is possible that Communism, rather than having fallen, would now be the law of the land in an America turned into yet another of their slave-states." -- DAVID MAMET

“They say, disapprovingly, that we were Cold Warriors. Yes, and a bloody good show, too. A lot of people weren’t Cold Warriors — and so much the worse for them.” -- ROBERT CONQUEST

“And the simple fact is that there are only two groups of people who learned nothing from the Cold War: those born after 1991, and communists. The former, at least, have a good excuse.” – KYLE PETERSON                                      (Managing Editor of the AMSPEC)

"The Soviets want to control Eastern Europe and we fight them over it, and block them and call them names. They are a poor backwards muddy nation while we have the Cadillac Coupe de Ville and Little Richard. No wonder they are angry." -- BEN STEIN

"I have just a hunch that Stalin doesn't want anything but security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything and will work for world democracy and peace." -- FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT                                                                                                                            (Ambassador William Bullitt said that FDR told him this unbelievable thing at the Yalta Conference. As reported in "Stalin's Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt's Government" by M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein)

“It made me want to do a little sack dance right there in the Cold War's end zone [Berlin]. We're the best! We're the greatest! The only undefeated socio-economic system in the league! I wanted to get up on the Wall and really rub it in: ‘Taste the ash-heap of history, you Bolshie nose-wipes!’ But there was nobody to jeer at. Everyone over there was in West Berlin watching Paula Abdul videos.” – P.J. O’ROURKE

“What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?” – ZBIGNEW BRZEZINZKI

“For all of his snide put downs of others for Cold War mindsets, Obama is actually trying to reprise the Cold War, only this time, we lose.” – MONA CHAREN

"An extraordinary conjunction put Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan in key positions at the same time, and together they had the courage and vision to do what the West could have done decades before -- to push the Communist dominoes until they fell over. I daresay historians will debate forever which of the three had the most impact. The truth is they fitted in together perfectly and turned the 1980s into a decade of astonishing Western self-confidence. To cap matters, the Soviet system produced a clever fool in Gorbachev, who honestly believed that Communism could be reformed and proceeded to push it into freefall." -- PAUL JOHNSON

"Our aim is to disarm the Americans and let them fall asleep." -- MIKHAIL GORBACHEV (in 1987)

“We're in a worldwide war. I don't think Korea sufficiently demonstrated that for us, or anyway our vision wasn't equal to the evidence. But since the Hungarian uprising, we've been willing to grapple with the realities of it. It's a covert World War Three. It's Armageddon by proxy. It's a contest between good and evil, and its true ground is the heart of every human.” – DENIS JOHNSON

“I certainly don't miss the Cold War. I miss the strong Western defense of the values of freedom and human rights that won the Cold War.” – GARRY KASPAROV

"The Cold War -- what do you need to know? It was the Commies' fault. We won." -- JAMES LILEKS

"The ramifications of the cold War were so many and so all-encompassing that virtually everything you say about it will be true of some part, somewhere." -- ALAN JUDD

“Conservatives spent the entirety of the Cold War pointing out that the Russians were undermining American life, and we got mocked and ridiculed for it by self-styled sophisticates who thought such concerns were little more than paranoia.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“The Cold War was won not because because of policies and politicians, but because ordinary Americans understood intuitively that communism meant slavery and that, despite its faults, America stood for freedom.” -- DR. ALAN CHARLES KORS (A history prof at U Penn – and a pleasant surprise to find such a bloke at such a place....)

“It's good to remember that the 'Cold' War comprised a couple of very hot major wars (Korea, Vietnam), some minor ones (Dominican Republic., Grenada) and lots of lethal skullduggery in between. The 'Cold War' was more War than Cold and though it's great that we won, it was miserable for many millions who fought and died for that victory.” – JACK JOLIS

"For war consisteth not in battle only, or in the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known. For the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together; so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is peace." – THOMAS HOBBES (1588-1679 – and here the old grouch and bane of my college career, such as it was, delivers a pretty prescient account of what we'd eventually know of as "The Cold War")

“The Cold War didn’t ‘end’ – it was won.” – GEORGE H.W. BUSH (this is fine but a bit rich coming from a President whose official “realist” foreign policy, as promulgated by his national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, looked upon the fall of Soviet communism with trepidation – as it would cause “instability”.)

“In the Cold War, it wasn’t just a side that lost but a whole understanding of how the world should work.” – JAMES KIRCHIK (of the Brookings Institution, and author of “The end Of Europe”. He wrote this in NR in May 2018)

“My theory of the Cold War is, ‘We win and they lose.’ What do you think of that?” – RONALD REAGAN (in 1977)

"The Cold War was history, but its shrapnel was everywhere." – MICK HERRON

"Though it was called a Cold War, it was a war nonetheless." -- TED GUP

 "When we were fighting Communism, the most useful weapons didn't explode – they had pages, a volume control, or a great personality. They still do." -- E. HOWARD HUNT                                                                                                                              (in 2006)

"You can't live in the Soviet Union -- especially after having lived in the United States -- and not realize it's the wrong side." -- ROBERT LITTELL 

“He did miss the Cold War. He was glad it was over, of course, in a way – glad the right side had won and all that – but at least while it was on, people like him had known where they stood, could point to something and say: well, we may not know what we do believe in, but we don’t believe in that.” – ROBERT HARRIS (in his 1998 novel “Archangel”)

"The Cold War deprived men of the infernal heroic options." -- JOHN UPDIKE (not quite, John .)

"If the Soviets had known that our elite avarice was the Achilles' Heel of America, we would have lost the Cold War." -- PETER SCHWEIZER (commenting on Red China having known and done exactly that, in April 2022) 

"Trillions of dollars in western aid don't buy hearts and minds in Africa, it turns out. Instead, Africans remember fondly the 36 million AK-47 assault rifles (sic) Moscow supplied for Africa's wars, plus the MiG jets, tanks and artillery. Africa's Cold War years were extremely hot, and by the time of the Soviet Union's collapse, millions were dead." -- AIDAN HARTLEY (in April 2022) 

Cold War, The New

"So it's happened before. The difference between now and then, if you're of a certain age, is this: During the Cold War, we didn't think it was a matter of if. It was a matter of when. It seemed unlikely Ivan would think, 'They were lulled into complacency by watching the antics of a sarcastic rabbit -- we must strike now, while they are distracted by the products of their decadence!' We feared that something would go wrong, a small thing would escalate, and before you knew it: The world's over before you got the chance to kiss a girl. Living under that possibility colors the way you grow up and look at the world, and when the USSR went out of business, it was like learning that some maniac who'd stalked you for decades had been hit by a bus. Today? No comparison." -- JAMES LILEKS

"When I first began talking publicly about the Second Cold War at conferences, I was surprised that no Chinese delegates contradicted me. I once asked one of them -- the Chinese head of a major international institution -- why that was. 'Because I agree with you', he replied with a smile." -- NIALL FERGUSON

"We are in World War III.  We did not have a pandemic... we had a biological attack." -- LTG  THOMAS G. MCINERNEY (of the USAF, retired – and he said this in 2021)

“Why are Americans sleeping? We aren't sleeping, we are spending our time teaching and assisting little boys how to become little girls. And, if we aren't busy doing that we have the Sec of Defense, responding to an order from the 'commander' in chief, designing stylish new uniforms for pregnant 'soldiers'. You're not going to win the battle for the 21st century if you are such silly people. And Americans are all silly people. Do you know who doesn't care that there's a stereotype of a Chinese man in a Dr. Seuss book? China, All 1.4 billion of them couldn't give a crouching tiger flying fuck, because they're not silly people. If anything, they are as serious as a prison fight. In two generations, China has built 500 entire cities from scratch and mostly cornered the market in 5G and pharmaceuticals. Oh, and they bought Africa.
In China alone, they have 40,000 kilometers of high-speed rail. America has none. We've been having Infrastructure Week every week since 2009 but we never do anything. Half the country is having a never-ending woke competition deciding whether Mr. Potato Head has a dick and the other half believes we have to stop the lizard people because they're eating babies. We are such silly people. Nothing ever moves in this impacted colon of a country. We see a problem and we ignore it, lie about it, fight about it with each other, endlessly litigate it, sunset clause it, kick it down the road, and then write a bill where a half-assed solution doesn't kick in for 10 years, Then the half-assed bill is forgotten. China sees a problem and they fix it. They build a dam. We debate what to rename it. It took ten years for a bus line in San Francisco to pass its environmental review and it took 16 years to build the Big Dig tunnel in Boston, compared to a 57-story skyscraper that China built in 19 days and Beijing's Sanyuan Bridge, which was demolished and rebuilt in 43 hours. We binge-watch, they binge-build. When COVID hit Wuhan, the city built a quarantine center with 4,000 rooms in 10 days and they barely had to use it because they quickly arrested the rest of the disease, They were back to throwing raves in swimming pools while we were stuck at home surfing the dark web for black market Charmin. We're not losing to China, we lost. The returns just haven't all come in yet. They've made robots that check a kid's temperature and got their asses back in school. Most of our kids are still pretending to take Zoom classes while they watch TikTok and their brain cells fully commit ritual suicide. Our teacher's unions are finding every single way to keep themselves on the payroll, but keep students out of the classrooms. Do you think China's doing that, letting political correctness get in the way of nurturing their best and brightest? Do you think Chinese colleges and universities are offering courses in 'The Philosophy of Star Trek, 'The Sociology of Seinfeld,' and 'Surviving the Coming Zombie Apocalypse'? Can this be real? Well, let me tell you, China is real. And they are eating our lunch. And believe me, in an hour, they'll be hungry again." – BILL MAHER (on his TV show in August 2021

Collaboration/Collusion

"It is one thing to face the music, it is another thing to dance to it." -- SAKI (real name: Hector Hugh Monro. A great English writer, 1870-1916, mostly of terrific  short stories. A closeted poofter , he was a reactionary Tory politically and enlisted in the British Army in WWI, although way over-age, and was killed in the trenches by a German sniper. His last words were "Put out that bloody cigarette!")

"Collaboration means, basically, you give me your watch and then I'll tell you the time." -- CORINNE LUCHAIRE (a young French actress who was, in fact a collaborationist -- the mistress of the Nazi Ambassador to France -- in   1940)

Collapse

“I’ll take a financial meltdown over a political one every time – because market confidence is easier to restore than national self-confidence.” – ROBERT PESTON (the liberal UK TV journalist)

Collectivisation (Collectivism; "Collective Will")

“The collectivist view that favors the rights of man over the rights of men has historically given rise to gruesome collectivization.” --  LIONEL CHETWYND (that rare thing - a Hollywood non-lefty. Producer/director of, among other things, “The Hanoi Hilton”)

“The gradual collectivist, under the banner of popular sovereignty, believes in the dictatorship of random aggregations of voters.” – WALTER LIPPMANN (In “The Good Society”, in 1937)

"An atavistic longing after the life of the noble savage is the main source of the collectivist tradition." -- FRIEDRICH HAYEK

                                                                                                                                                                                                                        "The collective will always and everywhere turns out to have a communities chairman behind it, on this planet and across the galaxy." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"What goes on in the home is a private matter, unless it isn't. Says who? Says the collective will, inevitably, which also has some keen insights about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 “The leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism. I am here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world. Rather, they are the root cause.” -- JAVIER MILEI    (President of Argentina at Davos, 2024)  

“In America, we have this strong bias toward individual action. You know, we idolize the John Wayne hero who comes in to correct things with both guns blazing. But individual actions, individual dreams, are not sufficient. We must unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations.” – BARACK OBAMA (to the CHICAGO TRIBUNE in 1995)

" 'We' is the most treacherous of the English pronouns." -- ANTHONY BURGESS

“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

"Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and Socialism are only superficial variations on the same monstrous theme -- collectivism." -- AYN RAND

"We believe in the collective!" -- KAMALA  HARRIS        (on C-SPAN, Aug.2024)

Colombia                                                                                                                                                       

"There were more terrorists per square mile in Colombia than in Iraq and Yemen combined, and no matter where they lived or which splinter cause they served, they all knew about one another and did one another favors as if they were a new unique nationality." -- CHALRES McCARRY

Colonialism

“We have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where they were.” - ROBERT GASCOYNE-CECIL, (LORD SALISBURY)              (British Prime Minister and one of the chief architects of the British Empire. I happen to be pro-colonialism, thinking it to have been, on balance, a Very Good Thing Indeed… but this quote istoo delicious to leave out…)

“A widespread belief stretched beyond the hard Left - Orwell was positively repetitious on the subject - that Europe enjoyed its comforts thanks to the exploitation of distant coolies. Then Europe shed its empires and prospered mightily, while the former colonies suffered terrible economic decay, relatively in many cases, absolutely in some, suggesting that empire had been burden more than blessing for the imperial powers.” - GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT (a not-particularly-right-wing English journalist and author)

“Post-colonial Africa has had more civil wars than wars between states.” - ANTHONY DANIELS (Like I’ve always said - colonialism consisted more in keeping, or trying to keep - the “nates” from killing each other, than anything else…)

“In hindsight, it appears that almost all African anti-colonial political leaders were engaged not so much upon a freedom struggle as on a power struggle.” – ANTHONY DANIELS

"But it would be willful and sentimental to dismiss colonialism in Central Africa. Here was a vast area that supposedly had been left untouched through the centuries, and perhaps it might have been well to have it left so; the local tribes had worked out a Stone Age system of life which was perfectly valid despite its brutality, uncertainly and suffering. But it had not been left untouched; Arab traders had gone in with no other object but private gain and they had grabbed out of Africa both animals and human beings in the same way as a miner would take rock out of the ground. By 1870 this primitive Eden had become soiled, debauched and finally vile." -- ALAN MOOREHEAD (the great Australian war correspondent and author in his splendid 1960 "The White Nile")

“We are trained to celebrate decolonization. But there is little in post-decolonization to warrant celebration.” - WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

“The moment the Union Jack raced up a colonial flagstaff, speech was free and habeas corpus the right of all”. --  WILLIAM MANCHESTER (the historian and Churchill’s  biographer)

“Are you sure you want to go ahead with this, old chap?” -- PRINCE PHILIP, DUKE OF EDINBURGH                                        (To about-to-become President Jomo Kenyatta, as the Union Jack was being lowered on the day of Kenyan independence in 1963)

“Decolonisation has not been a happy experience for Africa.” - JONATHAN SUMPTION (Ya think? Mr. Sumption, an ex British judge, writes for the UK Spectator.)

“It is nevertheless true that the people of Zimbabwe were free under British colonial jurisdiction in a way that they are not free today – and the same is true of almost all those African peoples who had the good fortune to be part of the British Empire.” – ROGER SCRUTON

"When Englishmen first arrived in Mashonaland (Rhodesia) in the 1880s, the civilization they encountered there had not developed currency, written language, irrigation, beasts of burden, the plough, or the wheel. From the moment the British and King Lobengula met, a colonial relationship was inevitable. Any relationship between two civilizations of such disparate attainments will be colonial, almost by definition. The best option, from that point, is for the relationship to be made as benign as possible." -- HELEN ANDREWS

“There's nothing quite like white liberal self-flagellation to create misery for all races – it's worse, in its effects, than colonialism.” – ROD LIDDLE

“Ethiopia serves as a riposte to the deluded, or lying, progressives who insist that Africa’s problems are largely or entirely the consequence of western colonialism. Ethiopia suffers from the same malaise as the countries in Africa which surround it. Appalling and often brutal governance, corruption, periods of starvation, the lack of an entrepreneurial class, riven by tribalism and semi-perpetual warfare. But here’s the point, of course – Ethiopia was never colonised.

And then there is Liberia, suffering exactly the same problems as those previously colonized countries  which surround it. Also never colonized.

All of which suggests very strongly to me that, objectively, colonialism is not remotely the cause of Africa’s problems, given that African countries which were not colonized suffer exactly the same depredations as those which were, nd that colonized countries outside Africa seem to be doing perfectly well.” – ROD LIDDLE (in Sept. 2021)

“The continent (of Africa) may be a blot, but it is not a blot upon our conscience. The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more.” – BORIS JOHNSON

"Acqua Town, Cameroon River

Dear Madam,

We your servants have join together and thoughts its better to write you a nice loving letter which will tell you all about our wishes. We wish to have your laws in our towns. We want to have every fashion altered, also we will do according to your Consul's word. Plenty wars here in our country. Plenty murder and plenty idol worshippers. Perhaps these lines of our writing will look to you as an idle tale. 

We have spoken to the English consul plenty times about having an English government here. We never have answer from you, so we wish to write you ourselves. When we heard about Calabar River, how they have all English laws in their towns, and how they have put away all their superstitions, oh, we shall be very glad to be like Calabar now.

We are, etc.

King Acqua,

etc." -- KING ACQUA (of the Duala people of southern Cameroon, real name Ndumbé Lobé Bell or King Bell,1839 –1897, in an 1883 letter to Queen Victoria asking to be colonized by the Brits) 

"The Kenya settlers are not cranks of the kind who colonized New England, nor criminals and ne'er-do-wells of the kind who went to Australia, but perfectly normal, respectable Englishmen, out of sympathy with their own age." -- EVELYN WAUGH      (in 1930)

“There is no advertisement for colonial government like post-colonial government.” – ANDREW MACDONALD (a Londoner writing to the UK SPECTATOR on 12 Feb 11)

"...the miraculous peace of the colonial time." -- V. S. NAIPAUL     (from his splendid 1979 novel "A Bend In The River", about a fictionalized Stanleyville {Kisangani}, D.R. Congo)

“In apportioning our guilt about the wrongs of colonialism, we do need to take account what went before. The older Africa was not a neutral, benign tabula rasa on which we scrawled our peculiar European obscenities. There were different obscenities already there.” – MATTHEW PARRIS (the poofter ex-Conservative MP and current author/columnist, who wrote this in Dec. 2021, was born in Rhodesia.  And while he’s a bit too much of a “wet” for me, he’s right about pre-colonial Africa – see P. N. Gwynne’s “FIRMLY BY THE TAIL”)

"Historically, colonization usually meant a more advanced civilization shoving aside, dominating and 'educating' a weaker, more backward one, and therefore it generally represented a civilizational advance, i.e., it was considered a 'good thing'. Of course, we're too squeamish to use such terms these days,... but I say Viva Columbus!" -- JACK JOLIS 

"Better than the English -- if you're going to be colonized, let it be by the French. Why? Because they liked us! They liked us for ourselves. They married our women. They had mistresses, black mistresses, lots of mistresses. They didn't make cricket clubs and snob clubs and bring their white women to Africa and set themselves apart. They even told us we were citizens of France -- and that was something, even if they didn't mean it. They liked us, they wanted to live here forever." -- MARCELLIN AGNAGNA     (a Congolese {Brazza} biologist and govt. official, to his friend Redmond O'Hanlon, quoted in 1996)

"I don't care about colonialism because I know what we were doing before colonialism got there" -- KEMI BADENOCH
(the splendid Conservative British government minister and PM candidate -- born of Nigerian parents and married to a Scot)

"Colonialism is the best thing that ever happened to the people who were lucky enough to be colonized. If you’re awesome, like America, you throw off your colonizers and become even more awesome on your own. If you suck, like most other countries, well, you still suck." -- KURT SCHLICHTER

Colors

"The color of pickled cucumbers, the favorite shade of the communist world." -- PETER HITCHENS

Colorado

"Denver has more sunshine and sons of bitches per square foot that anyplace else in the United States." -- ROSS THOMAS (the American thriller writer, in 1967)

Columbia University

"The Columbia ideal of a middle linebacker is Mohandas K. Gandhi" -- D. KEITH MANO (the conservative American novelist, and a Columbia alum)

"Even North Korea is not this nuts." -- YEONMI PARK                                                                                                                              (a young lady defector from North Korea about her alma mater, Columbia University, in June 2021)

Combat

“You’ll know what to do.” - GEN. GEORGE S. PATTON, JR. (to a scared solider who’d not been in combat before.)

“If you’re not alert, sometime a German son-of-an-asshole-bitch is going to sneak up behind you and beat you to death with a sockful of shit.” - GEN. GEORGE S. PATTON, JR.

“I don’t want any messages saying ‘I’m holding my position’. We’re not holding a goddamned thing. We’re advancing constantly and we’re not interested in holding anything except the enemy’s balls.” – GEN. GEORGE S. PATTON, JR.

"Sir, they've got us surrounded again, the poor bastards." — CREIGHTON ABRAMS                                                                        (As a Major, tank battalion commander, to his boss Gen George Patton, at the Battle of Bastogne  a.k.a. The Battle of the Bulge, 1945)

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” - G. K. CHESTERTON

“As a soldier, the thing you were most scared of was failing your brothers when they needed you, and compared to that, dying was easy. Dying was over with. Cowardice lingered forever.” -- SEBASTIAN JUNGER

“....war-fighting simply consists of carrying heavy loads uphill.” -- SEBASTIAN JUNGER

“To a combat vet, the civilian world can seem frivolous and dull, with very little at stake and all the wrong people in power.” -- SEBASTIAN JUNGER

“Why appeal to God when you can appeal to Apaches?” -- SEBASTIAN JUNGER

“Things are simpler, and they feel more important, in war.” – SEBASTIAN JUNGER

“When men say they miss combat, it's not that they actually miss getting shot at – you'd have to be deranged – it's that they miss being in a world where everything is important and nothing is taken for granted. They miss being in a world where human relations are entirely governed by whether you can trust the other person with your life.”-- SEBASTIAN JUNGER

“Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.” -- SEBASTIAN JUNGER

"War is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of."-- SEBASTIAN JUNGER

"Numberless soldiers have died, more or less willingly, not for country or honor or religious faith or for any other abstract goods, but because they realized that by fleeing their post and rescuing themselves, they would expose their companions to greater danger. Such loyalty to the group is the essence of fighting morale. Comrades are loyal to each other spontaneously and without any need for reasons." -- J. GLENN GRAY (in his book "The Warriors: Reflections of Men in Battle")

“We’re surrounded. That simplifies the situation.” -- USMC GEN. LEWIS “CHESTY” PULLER

“Life is black and white after combat – war is Technicolor.” – TUCKER SMALLWOOD                                                   (My multi-talented friend and good OCS and Vietnam buddy. He once called me “the only right-wing hippie I know”. Got damn near killed over there, but survived to become a terrific actor, and... he's alright.)

“A battle is very much like a ball: no two people will see the same thing or recall it the same way.” -- THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON          (I suppose it's necessary to point out that when the Iron Duke said “ball” he was referring  to a “large dance soirée”, rather than a spherical object.)

«The first time you blow someone away is not some insignifact event. That said, there are some assholes that just need to be shot.» – GEN. JAMES MATTIS, USMC (RET.)

“They were afraid of dying, but they were even more afraid to show it. They found jokes to tell.” -- TIM O'BRIEN                   (In his “The Things They Carried”. The guy was/is a lefty pain in the ass, but he's a pretty good writer and he served honorably as a combat grunt, three-striper in the Americal Division {Twenty-Third ID}, twice wounded, so he gets no shit from me.)

“In an odd way, there were times when I missed the adventure, even the danger, of the real war out in the boonies. It's a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn't felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid. When you're afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world. You make close friends. You become part of a tribe and you share the same blood—you give it together, you take it together.” -- TIM O'BRIEN

“It's a cliché, but it's true: you form friendships in war. And then suddenly circumstances change. I became close friends with two guys in the Guard unit, real good friends; I trusted them with my life. Today I couldn't tell you their names if my life depended on it.” -- CHRIS KYLE KYLE                             (He was absolutely right. I can remember some of the names of my pals – real comrades-in arms -- in Vietnam and Laos, but not others. It's maddening, but true – and this passage from AMERICAN SNIPER jumped right out at me.)

“All battles are fought by scared men who would rather be some place else.” -- JOHN WAYNE

                                                                                                                                                                                                                     «What really mattered in combat was what people were like when they were exhausted.» -- KARL MARLANTES

«The odds became meaningless when everything was at stake.» -- KARL MARLANTES

«Victory in combat is like sex with a prostitute. For a moment you forget everything in the sudden physical rush, but then you have to pay your money to the woman showig you the door. You see the dirt on the walls and your sorry image in the Mirror.» -- KARL MARLANTES

"The smell of cordite... the clatter of the helicopters... and the memory of the blood brotherhood that few, other than soldiers under fire, are lucky enough to know." -- HANNES WESSELS     (the Rhodesian special forces soldier-turned-big game hunter in his memoir "Strange Tales From The African Bush")

"It wasn’t like you were totally caught up with the news cycle. When you’re front-line infantry, you are the news." -- NELSON DEMILLE (the great American novelist from Long Island was also a decorated Vietnam vet -- haveing been an infantry platoon-leader in the 1st Air Cav)

 “Go in close, and when you think you are too close, go in closer.” – THOMAS MCQUIRE (A pilot in the “Lafayette Escadrille” those American pilots who went to fight for France in WWI before the US got into the war.)

“A man listens with changed interest when the direction of the balls is toward instead of away from him.” – GEORGE A. CUSTER

"You know when a guy knows what he's doing." -- ERNIE TUTEN   (A machine-gunner in Oliver North's Marine infantry platoon in Vietnam)

"Nothing teaches fire and maneuver in combat, like fire and maneuver in combat." -- JAMES E. PARKER, JR. (Combat -- the ultimate On-The-Job-Training. And Parker, of course was a decorated Army infantry platoon leader in Vietnam before becoming the CIA's "Mule" up in Long Tieng, northern Laos)

“You got to watch your karma in a time of war. You don't rape the women or kill any of the animals, lest you get fucked around by the karma. Karma is like a wheel. You turn a wheel below you, it turns a wheel above you. And I'm beside you. Your karma touches mine. You must not, no never, disturb any of the karma.” – DENIS JOHNSON

“He'd concluded that wanting something was generally less painful than hauling it.” – DENIS JOHNSON

 "I am ready to take up arms at a moment's notice. The legs we can take up later." -- W.C. FIELDS

«I don't ask you to be unafraid, simply to act unafraid.» – GENERAL CHARLES GEORGE «CHINESE» (Yup, the guy played by Charlton Heston in «Khartoum»)

"In the end of ends, the infantry is the deciding factor in every battle." --ERICH LUDENDORF (One of Germany's top generals in WWI)

 "We killed and bled and suffered and died in a war that Washington society, which seems to view service in the combat arms as something akin to a commute to the Pentagon, will never comprehend." -- JAMES WEBB   (The Vietnam USMC Vietnam platoon leader, author, & ex-senator -- in a 1979 article in THE WASHINGTONIAN against women in combat)

"You might not pick this up in K Street law offices or in the halls of Congress, but once you enter areas of this country where more typical Americans dwell, the areas that provide the men who make up our combat units, it becomes obvious. Inside the truck stops and in the honky tonks, down on the street and in the coal towns, American men are tough and violent. When they are lured or drafted from their homes and put through the dehumanization of boot camp, then thrown into an operating combat unit, they don't get any nicer, either. And I have never met a woman, including the dozens of female midshipmen at the Naval Academy, whom I trust to provide those men with combat leadership." -- JAMES WEBB   (in that same WASHINGTONIAN article)

“A soldier's skill is nine parts judgment.” – ALLAN MALLINSON (the author of a book on WWI called “Too Important For The Generals”)

“Battle brings men together, whereas inactivity separates them.” – ERNST JUNGER (in his 1920 bestseller “Storm and Steel”)

"Sometimes, I am at work, and I am sort of like, man, I wish someone would shoot at me. I am so fucking bored." -- JOSH WALKER (a 28-year-old Englishman veteran of fighting with the anti-ISIS "Syrian Democratic Forces", in July 2019)

“When you go to battle, you throw away the scabbard.” – ANDREW JACKSON

“We’re all scared. The only hope you have is to accept the fact that you’re already dead. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you’ll be able to function as a soldier is supposed to function.” –  1LT RONALD SPEIRS (of the 101st Airborne Div, one of the famous “Band of Brothers”, to a fellow soldier who was cowering under cover. Speirs was born in England, but naturalized a US citizen before WWII – like my own dad.)

“The only people more superstitious than men in combat are professional gamblers and baseball players on a hitting streak.” – DANIEL J. DANELO (in his excellent book on the Iraq War, “Blood Stripes”)

“Combat is filled with uncertainties, half-truths, bad information, changing directives from seemingly incompetent higher headquarters, and unexplained explosions. War is chaos.” – DANIEL J. DANELO

“A greedy combat leader on a medal hunt would destroy social cohesion.” – DANIEL J. DANELO

“No one ever forgot the plane ride home.” – DANIEL J. DANELO

“The war is over and the excitement is dead. I seem to have little or no interest in life.” – HARRY BIRRELL (A British battalion commander of Gurkhas in WWII)

“Something always hard to believe for those of us who’ve never been in combat: that the main reaction of some soldiers to the coming of peace is disappointment, or even despair.” – JAMES WALTON (the TV reviewer for the UK SPECTATOR)

"Everything you do in combat can get you killed -- including doing nothing." -- ROB O'NEILL                                                                         (the SEAL who killed Osama Bin Laden, on WABC radio'"Bernie and Sid" program, 30 June 2020)

“Waiting is 99 percent of soldiering. Sometimes it’s only waiting for chow, sometimes it’s waiting (for the enemy), but definitely too much waiting.” – WILLIAM WHARTON (in his 1982 war novel “A Midnight Clear)

“The delusion of immortality. I think that’s what it is, anyway. Without it, we couldn’t do the things we do.” – WILLIAM WHARTON

“They must be bored out of their minds; it’s one of the worst things about a war: you’re either scared shitless or bored to death.” – WILLIAM WHARTON

"There's things you pay a heavy price to know. And I resent people who think they can get it for nothing. Over lunch, you know. While we wait for dessert and coffee. 'Tell me Joe, what was it like over there.' I used to get that a lot   Not so much anymore, but for awhile there. There's all kind of greed, but that one's the worst in my book. The greed to get from me for nothing what cost me plenty to learn. I try not to, but I hate people like that." -- STEVE TESICH (Spoken by "Joe", a much-decorated Vietnam War vet in his 1989 play "The Speed Of Darkness")

"I know military glory is all nonsense, it consists of knocking off a lot of other human beings. But it is glorious not to run away, and fortitude is a virtue, and so is not letting one's side down." -- KINGSLEY AMIS (Who served as an officer in the Signal Corps, hated the military when he was in it, and saw no combat.)

“You go through a war, you’re never the same again. All those years, and I’ve never forgotten any of it.” – WILLIAM HOOD (actually, the words of a character, Brodsky, in his 1990 novel, “Cry Spy”.)

“Survival was not something one struggled for any more. I was already starting to realize that the only way to conduct oneself in a situation where bombs rained down and bullets whizzed past, was to accept the dangers and all the consequences as calmly as possible. Fretting and sweating about it all was not going to help.” – ROALD DAHL (from his fabulous 1986 autobiography “Going Solo”, on his air war against the Germans)

"Historians have determined that in battle, four thousand bullets are fired for every soldier hit." -- BING WEST

"You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live." -- J. D. SALINGER (who served extensively in WWII, as a Staff Sgt. in the 4th Infantry Division -- Utah Beach through the Battle of the Bulge)

“Yours to obey. The painful task of thinking is mine.” – ADMIRAL SIR GEORGE RODNEY                                                          (British naval commander, prominent during the US War of Independence and the Napoleonic Wars)

“He wondered what he would have been like in a real war. Most of the men he knew asked themselves that question, as if never having fought somehow made them incomplete – left a hole in their lives where a war should have been.” – ROBERT HARRIS                                                                               (in his 1998 novel “Archangel”)

“You get so you don’t mind anything.” – LARRY HEINEMANN                                                                                                          (in his excellent 1974 Vietnam War novel, “Close Quarters”)

“Everything got to work, hear? Got to have your shit together twenty-four hours a day. Got to have it piled around you so you can find it even in the dark. Especially in the dark. Fuck up and somebody is likely to catch their lunch, sell the farm, and go home, and then they’re square on your neck, like a goiter.” – LARRY HEINEMANN

                                                                                                                                                                                                                       “And I don’t care. I don’t care for anything except the dudes I can touch and talk to today, and going home is simple-ass wishful thinking. Nobody goes home from here.” – LARRY HEINEMANN

  “The silence didn’t last long – silence in war never does. One gets to discover that very early on.” – DIRK BOGARDE               (the English actor, about the Normandy invasion – of which he was a part.)

"We spent our time being bored or being terrified. There was no in-between." -- JOHN P. McAFEE (in his 1993 Vietnam War novel "Slow Walk In A Sad Rain")

"There's a wall ten miles high and fifty miles thick between those of us who went and those who didn't, and that wall is never going to come down." -- MILT COPULOS   (Wounded Vietnam veteran)

Combat, coming home from     

“When men say they miss combat, it's not that they actually miss getting shot at – you'd have to be deranged – it's that they miss being in a world where everything is important and nothing is taken for granted. They miss being in a world where human relations are entirely governed by whether you can trust the other person with your life.”-- SEBASTIAN JUNGER

“To a combat vet, the civilian world can seem frivolous and dull, with very little at stake and all the wrong people in power.” -- SEBASTIAN JUNGER          

“Life is black and white after combat – war is Technicolor.” – TUCKER SMALLWOOD                                                   (My multi-talented friend and good OCS and Vietnam buddy. He once called me “the only right-wing hippie I know”. Got damn near killed over there, but survived to become a terrific actor, and... he's alright.)

“In an odd way, there were times when I missed the adventure, even the danger, of the real war out in the boonies. It's a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn't felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid. When you're afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world. You make close friends. You become part of a tribe and you share the same blood—you give it together, you take it together.” -- TIM O'BRIEN

“It's a cliché, but it's true: you form friendhsips in war. And then suddenly circumstances change. I became close friends with two guys in the Guard unit, real good friends; I trusted them with my life. Today I couldn't tell you their names if my life depended on it.” -- CHRIS KYLE                              (He was absolutely right. I can remember some of the names of my pals – real comrades-in arms -- in Vietnam and Laos, but not others. It's maddening, but true – and this passage from AMERICAN SNIPER jumped right out at me.)

“No one ever forgot the plane ride home.” – DANIEL J. DANELO

"Finally I came back home -- that swift impossible conversion by jet plane from life in a rice paddy to the Oakland Army terminal -- in a kind of bum's rush with very little preparation for the transition." -- GEORGE PLIMPTON (heh "very little preparation" -- more like none at all. {But I never heard anyone complain!})

“The war is over and the excitement is dead. I seem to have little or no interest in life.” – HARRY BIRRELL (A British battalion commander of Gurkhas in WWII)

“Something always hard to believe for those of us who’ve never been in combat: that the main reaction of some soldiers to the coming of peace is disappointment, or even despair.” – JAMES WALTON (the TV reviewer for the UK SPECTATOR)

“You go through a war, you’re never the same again. All those years, and I’ve never forgotten any of it.” – WILLIAM HOOD (actually, the words of a character, Brodsky, in his 1990 novel, “Cry Spy”.)

"The older I get, and the more of my World War Two comrades die off, the better my war record gets." -- SENATOR BOB DOLE

"Civilians seldom understand that soldiers, once impressed into war, will forever take it for the ordinary state of the world, with all else illusion. The soldier thereafter dreams of war and remembers it when he might otherwise devote himself to different things, and he is ruined for the peace.

Soldiers who have been blooded are soldiers forever. They never fit in. Even when they finally settle down, the settling is tenuous, for when they close their eyes they see their comrades who have fallen. That they cannot forget, that they do not forget -- it is their way of expressing their love for friends who have perished. And they will not change.." -- MARK HELPRIN

"If a soldier were lucky enough to survive the war he would spend the rest of his life trying to figure it out." -- MARK HELPRIN                                                                                                                                                                               

“I have traveled to a place where the dead lie above the ground. Time has gone somewhere without me. This is not my country, not my time. My skin is drawn tight around my eyes. My clothes smell of blood. I bleed inside. I am water. I am stone. I have not come home, Ma. I have gone ahead, gone back. There is glass between us, we cannot speak. I hear voices. You beat your brains out, trying to make it home, but when you bump up against it, it doesn’t sound like you know it should. There is not that resonance, that solid ring.” – LARRY HEINEMANN

“Some people wonder why I’m such a homebody. It’s because, when I was 19, I was doing things you can’t imagine.” - ALFRED B. LUNA (Vietnam veteran)

"We are basically dead men. Most of us know this. It's why we fight so fearlessly." -- LT. ILIA SAMOILENKO (of the Ukrainian Army, from the ruins of the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol, in May 2022. I doubt if Lt. Samoilenko is still alive, as I type this, but I wanted to do my small bit to memorialize his brave words.)

Commerce

“Nothing is quite honest that is not commercial.” -- ROBERT FROST

“The world is full of people selling things. The problem is the buyer. Secure him and you’re off, and the only way to really secure a buyer is – you guessed it  – fix the buyer.” – PETER BIDDLECOMBE

Committees

«Put them in a room together and you understand why none of us is as dumb as all of us.» -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

«There are no monuments to committees.» – DAVID OGILVY

«I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.» – G.K. CHESTERTON

“The only good committee is a committee of one.” – KEN FOREMAN (the CEO of Attwoods, the UK’s biggest garbage Co. Reminds me of the old Pollock joke: a guy’s pushing a cart down a Polish town street yelling “Garbage? Any  Garbage?” And a woman leans out a window and yells “Yes please – I’ll take 2 bags, please!”)

Common Sense

“I note here what is to me a mystery. It is that people with lower IQs somehow tend, in our age, to have a greater apprehension of the meaning of things and the reality of life, than do our high-IQ professionals, who often seem, in areas outside their immediate field, startlingly dim. I don't know why intellectuals--or cerebralists or eggheads or IQ hegemonists--seem to miss the most obvious things, floating on untethered by common sense. If you talk to a brilliant scholar at a fine university about social policy, chances are he will say with honest perplexity that he cannot understand--really cannot understand--why people would not want men to marry men, or women women. I wish there were a name for this, for the cluelessness of the more intellectually accomplished, the simpler but truer wisdom of those who are often less lettered and less accomplished.” - PEGGY NOONAN

"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." - GEORGE ORWELL

“Common sense – stone age metaphysics.” – BERTRAND RUSSELL                                                                                           (Not that he had all that much – specially towards the end  of his long life....)

"As a rule, only very learned and clever men deny what is obviously true; common men have less brains, but more sense." -- WALTER T. STACE (An eminent British philosopher and writer of the first half of the 20th Century, who taught at Princeton in the 50s)

“Common sense is a superpower.” – CHRIS PLANTE (He said this on his radio program, 24 Sept. 2021)

“I’m not really conservative — I’m common sense.” — DONALD TRUMP (on 7 Oct ‘24, to Sid Rosenberg on WABC-77 radio)

Commonwealth, The (British)

“I daresay the only point of the Commonwealth Games is that they provide the sole raison d’etre for the existence of the Commonwealth itself.” - FRANK KEATING

"What was once a coherent family has become a weird gallimaufry of one-party states, bankrupt dictatorships, a few democracies, and many sanctimonious tyrannies." -- ANTHONY LEJEUNE (a conservative English writer from the 70s and 8Os, frequent NR contributor)

"Apart from the Queen, gin, bagpipes and short trousers, the thing that keeps the British Commonwealth together is cricket." -- GEORGE COURTAULD (in his 1995 "The Travels Of A Fat Bulldog")

"The Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regularly cheering crowds of flag-waving picaninnies." -- BORIS JOHNSON (obviously, long before he became Prime Minister) 

Communication

“It is listening to other people talk that you learn to appreciate silence. What higher praise of a man could there be than that he is taciturn? People have only to talk for a short time for it to become obvious that the greatest of human rights is not freedom of opinion, but freedom from opinion.  It is a mercy that there are so many languages that one does not understand.” - THEODORE DALRYMPLE

“The word ‘delete’ is misleading: it really means ‘hide, until such times as this may incriminate’. We’re living not just in the age of instant communications, but of the digital downfall. So there is a gap in the market for a tool ensuring safe, effective communications. What about the pen?” -- IAN OSBORNE (A contributor to the UK SPECTATOR, in 2015)

“Dozens of stupid people in a room who talk to each other will achieve far more than an equal number of clever people who don't.” – MATT RIDLEY

Communism

“The wonder is that Communism lasted so long.” – P. J. O’ROURKE (It still exists, Peejay. And always will – it’s a pathology of human nature.)

“I’ve been to your Communist countries. They are crap-your-pants-ugly, dull-as-church, dead-from-the-dick-up places where government is to life what pantyhose is to sex. Communism doesn’t actually starve or execute that many people anymore. Mostly it just bores them to death. Life behind the Iron Curtain is like living with your parents forever – literally in many cases.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

"The worldwide Communist enterprise murdered some 100 million people, and the American Left is hip-deep in that blood; there never has been a reckoning for that, no Nuremberg trials for the outrages of Communism." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“If there is anything we learned from the 20th century, it is that Communists love a parade.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“An anti-Communist is a dog.  I don’t change my views on this.  I never shall.” - JEAN-PAUL SARTRE                                        (One of this moral cretin’s more lucid pronouncements.)

“A Communist is someone who reads Marx and Lenin.  An anti-Communist is someone who understands Marx and Lenin”. - RONALD REAGAN

“Paradise is a place where people want to end up, not a place they run from! Yet in this country the doors are closed and locked. What kind of socialism is this?  What kind of shit is it when you have to keep people in chains?  Some curse me for the times I opened the doors.  If God had given me the chance to continue, I would have thrown the doors and windows wide open.” -- NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV                               (in 1968, surveying the Soviet re-invasion of Czechoslovakia.  And, by the way….can you believe this??...)

"In a noble effort to liberate the human race from violence and oppression we broke all records for mass slaughter, piling up tens of millions of corpses in less than three quarters of a century. Those who are big on multiculturalism might note that the great majority of our victims were nonwhite." -- PROF. EUGENE D. GENOVESE

“Under communism, all minorities dance.” – ANTHONY DANIELS (the real name of THEODORE DALRYMPLE)

"In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not 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 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

"Bolshevism and Fascism were heresies of socialism." – RICHARD PIPES

"Communism did not correspond to human nature and so self-destructed." -- DAVID PRYCE-JONES (Yeah, after killing over 90 million people along the way….)

"Socialism enjoys the power of example. It is necessary by showing by example the meaning of communism." -- NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV (man, old turnip-head was a real Nostradamus, wasn't he...)

“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 SOLZHENITSYN

“We know they are lying,

they know they are lying,

they know that we know that they are lying,

we know that they know that we know that they are lying –

but still they keep lying.” – ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN

"Look, everything the Communists say about capitalism is true, and everything the capitalists say about Communism is true. The difference is our system works because it’s based on the truth about people’s selfishness, and theirs doesn’t because it’s based on a fairy tale about people’s brotherhood. It’s such a crazy fairy tale they’ve got to take people and put them in Siberia in order to get them to believe it.” - PHILIP ROTH (in his novel “I Married A communist”.)

“Hatred is the essence of communism.” - V. I. LENIN (he actually said this…  strewth….)

“Lenin proclaimed that 'the basis of communism is hatred'. You cannot live like that: you can only die like that.” – CHRIS HARRIES (a letter-writer from Bristol in THE SPECTATOR, on 1 July 2017 – and excuse me, Mr. Harries, if I borrow this in the future...)

“Communism is necessary to the world.” – BERTRAND RUSSELL (Such genius.....)

“Communism failed not so much because we opposed it as becauseno one has ever been able to make it work - outside of celibate communities such as monasteries. The idea that society at large would prosper under Communism was a fantasy of 19th - century intellectuals.” - TOM BETHELL

"Communism brought nothing but murder, political oppression, cultural starvation and economic misery to the countries forced to suffer under its rule. No people have ever freely decided to live under communism or ever will if given a choice. On all these points we were not only opposed, but were sneered at, ridiculed and defamed." -- NORMAN PODHORETZ (as quoted by Bernard Levin, in his 1995 collection"I Should Say So")  

“How easy it was to be a Communist when you weren't living under Communism!” – JULIAN BARNES (In his novel “The Noise Of Time”)

"Getting rid of that Mickey Mouse system was no miracle. It was a matter of time. It was built to fail." -- POPE JOHN PAUL II (As quoted by Michael Novak, to whom it was apparently said. An amazing choice of words, considering the source -- not to mention the mountains of corpses caused by communism, of which the Pope, more than most, was certainly aware.)

"The difference between communism and capitalism had not been a difference between systems, but between nature and anti-nature. Capitalism was cruel but normal. The sin of communism is that it is abnormal." -- NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE

"Communism was the fabulous impertinence of renouncing the individual in favor of the mass." -- JOHN LE CARRE

"You cannot 'live and let live' your way out of communism. It has never happened and it will never happen. If you want these despicable people out of power, you’re gonna have to embrace some things now that make you uncomfortable." -- JESSE KELLY ("some things that make you uncomfortable" -- that's what the Frogues like to call "raison d'état" -- and something I'm all in favor of... ahem, judiciously applied, of course... and by the way, they never made me particularly "uncomfortable"....) 

“We are morally sick, because we have grown used to saying one thing and thinking another.” – VACLAV HAVEL

"Communism is a world of 'rear exits'". -- VACLAV HAVEL

"I am not interested in what you do with them (communists). You can throw them in jail, throw them out of the country, you can even kill them. As an economist, it does not interest me; but I have to tell you, if you don't eliminate them in government, in unions, in the streets, forget about economic development." -- ALBERT WINSEMIUS (a Dutch adviser from the UN, offering advice to newly-independent Singapore in 1967 -- and it's amazing that such a sensible chap worked for the UN, even then....)

“The difference between a liberal and a communist is that a communist admits it.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE (the English author and columnist for the UK SPECTATOR)

“Some time during this period, politics entered into my life in an unusual and exciting way. Coming out of the club one evening I was surprised to find myself surrounded by a bevy of very attractive (my definition of attractive was anyone with big tits and most of her front teeth) older women, about twenty or twenty-two years old. They were offering leaflets. I took one and one of the girls said mysteriously: ‘Read it and let us know if you’re interested. We’ll be back tomorrow night.’ What exciting proposition could this be, I thought as I walked home reading the leaflet.

From what I could make out I was being asked to join something called Young Communists. I knew it was a political party, I also knew that they were very keen on it in Russia and that it had been invented by someone called Marx. I knew the Marx Brothers from the movies so at least, I thought, it might be amusing. The leaflet went on to something really interesting: there was going to be a redistribution of wealth. I could not believe my luck! If they were going to do that, my family and I would have to come out ahead. The clincher for me, was that Communists believed in free love. I couldn’t credit that I’d found a political party that offered wealth and love: my two absorbing passions.

I couldn’t wait to get out of the club the next evening to meet the group of girls. I had a good look at them and picked the one that I wanted to have free love with the most. ‘I want to join’, I said. ‘Wonderful,’ she replied and dragged me off to a small dingy office a couple of streets away. ‘He wants to join,’ she announced and then she disappeared. I was left standing in a room with four men, all doing smile impersonations. I was instantly suspicious. Remembering what my father had told me about spotting untrustworthy men, I had hit the jackpot here. Two of them had beards, one was wearing sandals and another one had a bow tie. The only thing missing were the two-toned shoes. The object of my free love had disappeared and here I was with a group of guys who obviously so far had not done very well in the redistribution of wealth by the look of them. One of them put a form on the desk in front of me and told me to sign it and pay over my subscription of five shillings. I saw at once what a mistake I had made: the distribution of wealth was to be mine to them, not the other way around. I fled – and a lingering suspicion of Communism has remained planted in my mind forever. – MICHAEL CAINE                             (in the early '50s, when he was still a teenager and wannabe actor, still working with his father as a fishmonger in London's Billingsgate market. The "club" he refers to was some kind of half-assed "youth club" he would hang out in.... This passage is lifted from his 1992 autobiography, "What's It All About?")

"Communism is an evil thing that is the greatest continuing assault upon humanity in our time." -- RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS

"The acid test for any two competing socioeconomic systems is which side needs to build a wall to keep people from escaping. That's the bad one." -- ELON MUSK

"Stalin's destruction of the Soviet intelligentsia was piecemeal. And essentially retail. Mao murdered wholesale; Pol Pot was universal." -- TONY JUDT    (the late lefty Brit writer/journalist/historian, in his book "Thinking the Twentieth Century", and I think it would be news to, say, the millions of Russian kulaks, or, say, to the population of the Ukraine, that Stalin's murders   were "piecemeal" or " retail".)

"People who believe in Communism dream about the future. Those who experience it dream about the past." -- TOM BETHELL

"Communism works as long as everyone has the same last name; socialism works as long as everyone goes to the same church." -- PHILIP TISDALL      (A commenter to an article written by my daughter Anne Jolis in the Wall Street Journal in May 2012 about Sweden)

“Communism's final tally: 0 omelets, 100 million broken eggs.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

"Communism is kitsch with teeth.” – ROGER SCRUTON

                                                                                                                                                                                                                         “No one killed as many communists as the communists did.” – NICK COHEN                                                                                   (in the UK SPECTATOR, Oct. ’12)

"Communism is unreformable." -- POPE JOHN-PAUL II  (Karol Wojtyla)

"Communism would never have come up with concepts like breast implants or cheerleaders, yet some dillholes still advocate it." -- KURT SCHLICHTER

"Communists are just people who want to give working folks a fair shake. And then murder them." -- KURT SCHLICHTER       (in July 2024)

"Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff" – FRANK ZAPPA (at Libek Institute in Belgrade)

«Communists really love poor people. That’s why they created so many of them.» – JAMES TARANTO                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

“In the greatest hoax of modern history, Russia’s ruling ‘socialist workers party,’ the Communists, established them selves as the polar opposites of their two socialist clones, the National Socialist German Workers Party (quicknamed ‘the Nazis’) and Italy’s Marxist-inspired Fascisti, by branding both as ‘the fascists’. This spin of all spins has played havoc upon Western political discourse ever since.” – TOM WOLFE

"If you understood what communism was, you would hope and pray on your knees that we would someday be communists"-- JANE FONDA (She actually said this, to students at Duke University, in December,1970)

“If we really understood communism, we'd be down on our knees praying for it.” – JANE FONDA

“But the foot traffic, one could not help noticing in these Communist/non-Communist partitions, was South, or West, away from Communism. Why was that?” – JOHN UPDIKE

“All Communist countries were unhappy in their own way.” – JOHN UPDIKE

"Communists hate maps. Why is that? Why do they so instinctively loathe anything that makes for clarity and would help orient the human individual? Have there ever been before regimes so systematically committed to perpetuating ignorance?" -- JOHN UPDIKE (on the fact that during Soviet days, domestic road maps of Russia were considered "state secrets" and just didn't exist.) 

“Communism is Fascism - successful Fascism, if you will. What we have called Fascism is, rather, the form of tyranny that can be overthrown - that has, largely, failed. Not only is Fascism (and overt military rule) the probable destiny of all Communist societies - especially when their populations are moved to revolt - but Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful variant, of Fascism. Fascism with a human face.'' – SUSAN SONTAG (because she's a lefty herself, she adds that “with a human face” thing. Not me.)

“The reason to avoid communism is not because it is inefficient, but because it tries to be too intelligent. Communism might be able to build a boring bridge or lathe factory, but it could never have created Red Bull: no bureaucracy could ever must the level of insanity necessary to try charging £2 for a slightly disgusting drink in a tiny can. Its popularity defies explanation: it is the duck-billed platypus of the carbonated drinks world.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

"A los comunistas no se le puede dar ni un dedo, porque se lo meten en el culo." ("You can't give the communists so much as a finger, because they'll stick it up your arse.") -WINSTON CHURCHILL  (when he visited Cuba in 1946 -- quoted by my X-pal Francisco Fuentes)

“The important thing is that you should not argue with Communists. Whatever you say, they have ways of twisting it into shapes which put you in some lower category of mankind, ‘Fascist,’ ‘Liberal,’ ‘Trotskyist,’ and disparage you both intellectually and personally in the process.”  – F. SCOTT FITZGERALD (Who, despite being derided by Edmund Wilson as “having talent without a brain”, was perhaps the only member of the Lost Generation astute enough not to fall for Communism.)

“For over ten years, bombs rained down on every village and hamlet in South Vietnam, and no one budged. It took the coming of a Communist ‘peace’ to send hundreds of thousands of people out into the South China  Sea, on anything that could float, or might float, to risk dehydration, piracy, and drowning – everything” – GEN. VERNON WALTERS                            (a pal of my mother's, as it happened. They met when he was part of the Paris Peace Talks already in 1969. She even prevailed upon him to schlep some copies of  “Hara Kiri” to me in Saigon, which got me into near deep kimchee with the unhappy and dubious MACV Col. who was charged with delivering this stuff, which he thought bordered on “Pornography” – and he wasn't all that far off  – to me.  Extraordinary dude, old Gen. Walters  — spoke about 15 languages fluently.)

“Under a Communist Party government, South Africa will become a land of milk and honey.” – NELSON MANDELA (in 1961)

"No people, no country, in which a communist dictatorship has been established, ever found its way out of it." – VLADIMIR BUKOVSKY

"Actually, 'Communist needs' have been in the making for many years now, and although the process has had its setbacks, it has scored notable success in the field of spiritual (religious,  social, cultural) needs,  which have been cut back to a stunning near minimum." -- VASSILY AKSYONOV (nice, Vassily....)

"Yes, in the '30s, I was a communist, which is to say, a fascist." -- CLAUD COCKBURN (leftist English journalist, author and screenwriter, 1904-1981) 

"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 difference between Nazi and Communist is that when you say how horrible Nazis have been, they don't say, ‘Well, real Nazism has never been tried’." – FRANK J. FLEMING (author of “Superego”)

"The dividing line between socialism and communism has never been very clear. Most of the regimes we refer to as communist actually called themselves socialist. Karl Marx viewed socialism as a stepping stone to the more perfect world of communism." -- JAMES BARTHOLOMEW (a pal of my daughter's in THE SPECTATOR, in June 2017)

"Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy." – MAO TSE-TUNG

“All those who do not follow the line that I have set out will be smashed.” – HO CHI MINH (in 1946. Nice. The good old “agrarian reformer, who the OSS worked with”.)

“Communism – this horrible, bloody recipe, which aims for utopia yet always leaves the same catastrophic bloody mess.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY

 "I hate anything that limits progress or growth. I hate institutions that do this. I hope this doesn't make me sound like a communist. Communism is the most limiting factor of all today; if you really want to put the screws on yourself." -- JAMES DEAN (the young heartthrob actor, in the L.A. Times, 7 Nov. 1954 -- and of course he died in a car crash, at the age of 24, a year later)

“Communism was not a good idea that somehow went wrong or withered away. It was a very bad idea from the outset, and one forced into life – or the life of the undead – with barely imaginable self-righteousness, pedantry, dynamism and horror.” – MARTIN AMIS

“These are the communist ideologues; first in Moscow, then in Barcelona, now in Mexico, these credulous pilgrims pursue their quest for the promised land; continually disappointed, never disillusioned, ever thirsty for the phrases in which they find refreshment – they flock to wherever the present rulers have picked up a Marxist vocabulary.” – EVELYN WAUGH (about communists in Mexico, in 1939)

"I have known countless communists and not one of them was moved by anything remotely resembling compassion." -- EVELYN WAUGH (in "Work Suspended”, 1942)

"I wouldn't want you to breathe a word of this to anyone, especially to those IRA zealots who think they're to be the new commissars when Marxism comes, but between me and you, fuck communism." -- BRENDAN BEHAN (in 1952, spoken to his pal, confidante and drinking mate, J. P. Donleavy) 

"Communism avoided the whole question of its viability by killing everybody who wouldn't do things its way." -- IAN SHOALES 

"Communism, after a century of history, does not mean Hawthorne at Brook Farm. It is a revolutionary political movement aimed in theory at an ideal economic system -- as Marx said fishing in the morning, philosophy in the afternoon, etc (he left out torturing enemies whenever)." -- RICHARD BROOKHISER

"As the smell of Communism is compounded from boiled cabbage and damp serge so the smell of Capitalism is a combination of the warm scent of popcorn and the sour stench of pizzas." -- GEORGE COURTAULD (what "sour stench of pizzas"?)

"The Soviet Union didn't die, it moved -- to American colleges and universities." -- CHRIS PLANTE                                                                (on 22 March 2019)

“Communism is every negative human impulse brought to critical mass.” – JACK JOLIS

"Communism, like Leftism generally, is the Politics of the Ulterior Motive." -- JACK JOLIS

"Today's communism is a particularly noxious amalgam of the old manias and delusions, linked to sinister new technologies to control not so much 'the means of production' as 'the means of compliance'." -- JACK JOLIS (in 2022)

"Nobody ever 'thinks' their way into Communism (or any of its Leftist variations)  -- they invariably emote themselves to it." -- JACK JOLIS

"Communism is a denial -- and an enforced denial, at that -- of human nature. No tyranny gets worse than that." -- JACK JOLIS

"I am a good friend to Communists abroad, but I do not like them at home." -- SOUVANNA PHOUMA (the multiple and long-term "neutralist" Prime Minister of Laos -- in fact, he was in power when I was up there in 1970 -- so theoretically, I was fighting the North Vietnamese for his ass....) 

“Communists must be like a python upon a goat. They drop upon it from a tree and then, strangling it, grow into power on the nourishment of its flesh.” -- SAMUEL M’CHEYNE GLASSER

“Covid is the symptom. Communism is the virus.” -- SAMUEL M'CHEYNE GLASSER

"During the Soviet occupation, this bridge had been such an ideal rendezvous point for spies and counterrevolutionaries and subversive lovers that the secret police had planted microphones in the railings. Under Communism that had not been enough traffic noise to interfere with the mikes." --  CHARLES McCARRY

"The color of pickled cucumbers, the favorite shade of the communist world." -- PETER HITCHENS

“Systems that guarantee you a niche in life tend to cram people into slots they would not go if given the choice. Some carpenters live profoundly rich lives, full of earned success. But carpentry isn’t for everyone. Feudalism and Communism assign people their lot in life; they tell chefs to be carpenters for their own good.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“I live in the now. That’s why I was always against communism: people telling you that if you sacrifice the present for the future it’s going to be terrific. But how do they know it’s going to be terrific? Nobody knows.” – DAVID HOCKNEY (the famous British painter/artist)

"The mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.” -- GEORGE ORWELL

"Most people who read 'The communist Manifesto' probably probably have no idea that it was written by a couple of young men who had never worked a day in their lives, and who nevertheless spoke boldly in the name of the workers." -- THOMAS SOWELL 

“You can vote your way into communism but you have to shoot your way out.” – JARED DILLIAN                                                           (Editor of The Daily Dirtnap. author, Bloomberg Opinion columnist, Host of The Be Smart Podcast – in Dec. 2019)

 
"Behind every communist is a Porsche." -- JOSHUA STEINMAN (a USN vet, Trump National Security Council-type, and associated with something called "Galvanick" -- he said this in relation to Jihad-John Brennan getting paid Big Buck$ and, while I don't think it's quite accurate -- it's certainly punchy enough to make the cut here.)

"Communism has always been an excuse for psychopaths who have an unquenchable lust for power to find rationales for their ruthless exercise of power. Every major communist leader is a total psychopath responsible for the death of millions." -- ROY CAMERON (author of “The Catalyst” blog)

"Communism is a religion that when it dies leaves them with even more 'nothing' than they had going into it." -- ROY CAMERON

Communism, Future of

"The future of communism is totalitarian repression with aspects of capitalist efficiency grafted onto it out of necessity -- literally for the regime's survival. That doesn't make communism any more palatable -- it just makes the intolerable repression and tyranny all the more efficient." -- JACK JOLIS

“Communism Has Never Been Tried”

“When the full horror of what had happened in Cambodia was first revealed to the Western public in 1979, the left wing tried to suggest that the Khmer Rouge were not really Communists but Fascists. Yet anyone who has ever studied Communism can see that Pol Pot and Ieng Sary belong to the spirit of the Revolution first proposed by Rousseau, then put into action by Robespierre and reaching apotheosis in Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China. All these revolutionaries saw in terror, show trials, and the denunciation of parents by children, the means of destroying the opposition and evebn the thought of opposition to the totalitarian state.  Through fear of accusation, torture, prison and an anonymous death, the revolutionaries roused the people themselves to destroy all vestiges of the old regime, starting with noblemen, landlords, the middle classes, priests, mena nd women of learning, and at las the family. Having destroyed all opposition, the revolutionaries in France, Russia, China, Cuba and Cambodia started to torture and murder each other.” – RICHARD WEST (Bien parlé, patron. In 1996.)

“The Difference between Nazi and Communist is that when you say how horrible Nazis have been, they don't say, ‘Well, real Nazism has never been tried’." – FRANK J. FLEMING (Author of “Superego”. And I must say, this statement has always gotten a rousing reception whenever I’ve deployed it.)

Communism In America

"Your children's children will live under Communism. You Americans are so gullible. No, you won't accept Communism outright; but we'll keep feeding you small doses of Socialism until you finally wake up and find that you already have Communism. We'll so weaken your economy, until you fall like overripe fruit into our hands." -- NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV, (1959)

“We cannot expect the Americans to jump from capitalism to communism, but we can assist their elected leaders to give Americans small doses of socialism until they suddenly awake to find they have communism.” – NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV

"If you understood what communism was, you would hope and pray on your knees that we would someday be communists"-- JANE FONDA (at Duke University, 9 December 1970)

"The Soviet Union didn't die, it moved -- to American colleges and universities." -- CHRIS PLANTE                                                                (on 22 March 2019) 

Communism in Europe

“The most puzzling development in politics is the apparent determination of Western European Leaders to recreate the Soviet Union in Western Europe.” – MICHAIL GORBACHEV

“Community

“The real story is that our social safety net was supposed to be like one of those 'Take a Penny, Leave a Penny' tills that depend on the honor and neighborliness of a community. And we don't have that community. What we have is a fragmented mess of givers and takers who are not the same people.” – DANIEL GREENFIELD (a blogger who calls himself  “The Atheistic Conservative”)

 "The closest mankind can come to a complete community is slavery, and even then we have the differentiated class of the slavers, overseers, nomenklatura, and house servants, with each group forming a community of its own." -- DAVID MAMET

“Community Organizing”

"Community organizing isn't about organizing the community to build a barn, it's about organizing people to whine so loudly about the lack of federally-provided barns that the government comes in and does it for them." --JONAH GOLDBERG

Comparisons

“It was no use comparing yourself with those who’d never started, you had to compare yourself to those who went on.” – DAVID LODGE

Compassion

“How horrible it is to have so many people killed! And what a blessing that one cares for none of them!”. - JANE AUSTEN (in her defense, I should point out that this was after witnessing a theatrical battle)

“I could feel sorry for someone and still string ‘em up.” - RUDOLPH GIULIANI (in Dec. 2001, when asked by Maureen Dowd, of all people, if she didn’t think the “Orange County Jihadi”, John Walker Lindh, wasn’t a “poor soul”.)

“Compassion easily slides into contempt. The helpless are often not very appealing: It is all too easy to think the world would be better off without them.” - THEODORE DALRYMPLE

“I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means – except by getting off his back.” – LEO TOLSTOY (In his “What Then Must We Do?”, Chapter 16.)

“Those who live by the sword get shot by those who don’t.” - GEORGE TENET (Ex- Director of the CIA, in Jan. ’06)

“Each time the Democrats come up with a new exercise in “compassion,” we know from bitter experience that (a) their cost projections are vastly underestimated, and (b) the program, once set on its course, must and will by its own internal logic grow until it consumes all available revenue. And, as far as the nihilistic Left is concerned, that’s not a bug — it’s a feature!” – MICHAEL WALSH

“When politicians do the math of pathos, they never seem to come up with a limiting principle. Their thinking leads to a society that cares less about actually helping others than it cares about caring. Public compassion becomes an end in itself.” – WILLIAM VOEGELI

“We can’t help everyone, but everyone can help someone.” – RONALD REAGAN

“ 'Need' now means wanting someone else's money. 'Greed' means wanting to keep your own. 'Compassion' is when a politician arranges the transfer.” – JOSEPH SOBRAN

We have no compassion. We shall not make excuses for the terror.” – KARL MARX

“You are not ‘required to care’. If someone doesn’t care the way to show it is to not care or lecture others too strenuously about how they, too, should not care.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“The liberal bureaucratic mind-set seems to define compassion simply as spending more money on systems and policies that have made problems worse and keep the usual special interests happy. Compassion should be measured not by inputs but outputs. Spending trillions on poverty is beyond simply uncompassionate if you waste the money and make things worse. It's evil.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"He who undertakes for a wage to be compassionate for 40 hours a week will soon be so for no hours a week." – CLIFFORD ORWIN (a  Canadian "political scientist")

"Compassion represents the intelligent anticipation of one's own troubles to come." -- FRANCOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD             (17th Century Frogue "man of letters")

Competence

"One must not be too good at what one attempts to do else everyone is after you to keep doing it." -- J. P. DONLEAVY

Competition                                                                                                                                

“Unfortunately a lot of religious people are uncomfortable with the idea of competition. And they mistakenly think that the opposite of competition is cooperation. But the opposite of competition is not cooperation, but rather collusion.” – WILLIAM McGURN                                                                                                         (You’ll look in vain for this quote, because he didn’t write it, but rather say it – on WABC in NYC on 4 Jan 2014. And he was commenting on the fantastic codswallop that Pope Francis had recently spoken about economics and capitalism….)

"The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat." -- LILY TOMLIN

Complacency                                                                                                                                        

“There was surely some law of thermodynamics expressive not of chaos theory but of continuous reversion to comfortable stasis.” – ALAN JUDD

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

Complaining                                                                                                                                                 

"They're not called anything. Research shows that things without a name scarcely ever get complained about." -- MILES KINGTON

“I can only be funny when I am complaining about something.” -- EVELYN WAUGH

Complication - Complexity

“Just because we have the means to be complex, it does not follow that we should be complex. The Roman Empire lasted 700 years without complexity.” - PETER JONES (a Brit expert on Greece and Rome and the author of “Vote For Caesar”)

“The more complicated the situation, the simpler the solution.” (“Plus la situation est compliquée, plus la situation est simple.”) - CHARLES DE GAULLE

“Any intelligent fool can invent further complications but it takes a genius to retain, or recapture, simplicity.” - E. F. SCHUMACHER (German-born, English economist - author of “Small is Beautiful”)

“There is a variation of Parkinson’s Law: ‘Complexity increases in accordance with the number of people with time to promote it’. This law applies particularly to academia.” - PAUL JOHNSON

“Our complexity is much more likely to lead us astray than any simplicity we may follow.” – ROGER KIMBALL

"Crap is now our lifeline. As bureaucrats have always known, dealing in overcomplicated matters makes people feel important and powerful." -- FLORENCE KING (in 2006)

“The world is not naturally becoming more complicated. It's that government has an interest in making life more difficult to navigate without its help.” -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"Complexity is a subsidy.The more complex government makes society, the more it rewards those with the resources to deal with that complexity, and the more it punishes those who do not." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“I like a tricky situation. I feel the truth is hiding in it.” -- MELISSA KITE

"The more grandiose, ornate, or complicated your theory about how to organize society, the more likely you are to be proven wrong by reality." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"A complicated society should be governed by simple rules." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"I predict a bright future for complexity in this country. There's no limit to how complicated things can get, what with one thing always leading to another." -- E.B. WHITE (in the early 1930s, sometime.. Unclear, as I got it from an ancient edition of an anthology of his called "Quo Vadimus" that I picked up in a barn in Coxsackie, NY, of all places, during a lull in daughter Janie's wedding there)

"Most people don’t know anything about most subjects, which is exactly how it should be: The world is far too complicated for most of us to have anything more than a superficial familiarity with most subjects. " -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Williamson’s First Law: ‘Everything is simple when you don’t know a fucking thing about it’.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"It's always good to do things nice and complicated so that no one can figure it out." -- DONALD TRUMP           (In 1997)

"In any complex system--whether nation, city, or individual--deterioration sets in once growth stops. Only in the minds of planners does stasis exist." -- TOM BETHEL       (in his "The Electric Windmill")

Compliments

"Red Man, you're a real White Man!" -- W.C. FIELDS (to the Indian Chief under whose bed he was allowed to hide to get away from Mae West, in "My Little Chickadee" of 1940)

Compromise

"Compromise is wonderful, when the parties doing the compromising are basically decent. Compromising with objectively evil parties isn’t laudatory, it’s appeasement." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"When presented with a good idea and a bad one, there is no point in being a little bit stupid for the sake of compromise." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"One does not compromise with the silly people." – RUSSELL KIRK

"One does not compromise with the silly people, but rather overawes them or leads them into ways of wisdom." – RUSSELL KIRK

"Compromise, hell! That's what has happened to us all down the line - and that's the very cause of our woes. If freedom is right and tyranny is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as if it were a roll of bologna to be bartered a slice at a time?" – SEN. JESSE HELMS (1921-2008, writing in 1959 on compromise in politics.)

“Compromise is but the sacrifice of one right or good in the hope of retaining another – too often ending in the loss of both.” – TRYON DAVIS (19th century American theological, compiler of “A Dictionary Of Thought”)

“Them that travel the byways of compromise is the ones that get lost.” – PRESIDENT ANDREW JACKSON (quoted by John Updike in his “Memories Of The Ford Administration”)

" 'One must compromise' — Compromise is a word found only in the vocabulary of those who have no will to fight — the lazy, the cunning, the cowardly — for they consider themselves defeated before they start." -- SOHRAB AHMARI (he said this on 19 Jan 2020 on the twoot -- and he had it in quotation marks but I think they're his words)

“Compromises are never inspiring.” – SHIVA NAIPAUL (sounds kinda self-evident, but... I guess somebody had to say it.)

"When lunatics compromise with one another, the result can indeed be described as a 'compromise'. But that doesn’t make it sane." -- CHARLES C. W. COOKE (discussing the Democrats in October, 2021)

Computers

“It’s our rotten luck that computers have made glitz, superficiality and ignorance so convenient just as glitz,  superficiality and ignorance were coming into style in a big way on their own. Computers bring out the worst in us. That’s my theory.” - DAVID GELERNTER (he was a Professor of IT at Harvard, when the “Unabomber”  blew his hand off…)

"I considered the phraseology of computers deeply offensive. Besides, what did it mean? I found 'software' the stuff of nightmares, like boneless women or elastic chisels." -- NICHOLAS SALAMAN (in his novel "Dangerous Pursuits)

“Computers are useless, they can only give you answers.” – PABLO PICASSO (ass.)

"The problem, as usual, was that the entire thing was being handled by computer, and the one thing they still can't get computers to do is common sense." -- MELISSA KITE

“You can see the computer  age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” – ROBERT SOLOW (American economist whose specialty was economic growth)

“The most important rule of cyberspace – computers don't lie but liars can compute.” – TERRY HAYES

"Machines have no intuition, no mass of experience. Normal human illogic won't do for them. Nothing is obvious to them that isn't absolutely spelled out." -- JOHN UPDIKE

“All the computers in the world won’t help you if your unexamined and unconscious assumptions on the nature of reality are simply wrong in their basic conception. All the computers can do is help you to be stupid in an expensive fashion.” — WILLIAM IRWIN THOMPSON (American philosopher,\critic and poet, in 1971 – when I wouldn’t have thought they had all that many computers, but... well, there you are, then.)

"Computers are like Old Testament gods. Lots of rules, and no mercy." -- JOSEPH CAMPBELL     (The author of "The Hero With A Thousand Faces")

"All I want in life is for my printer to work" -- WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR. (as told to, and reported by, Jay Nordlinger)

"Concern"                                                                                                                                              

“You are not ‘required to care’. If someone doesn’t care the way to show it is to not care or lecture others too strenuously about how they, too, should not care.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

Concession (speeches)                                                                                                                            

"You may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas." – DAVY CROCKETT                                                                                                  (To his fellow Tennesseeans after they failed to re-elect him to Congress in 1834. He would, of course, die at the Alamo, as recorded by John Wayne….)

Confession

"As I waited I thought that there's nothing like a confession to make one look mad. Never confess! Never, never!" -- JOSEPH CONRAD

Confidence

"A timid question will always receive a confident answer." --CHARLES JOHN DARLING (A British lawyer, judge, and politician, 1849-1936)

"Empty phrases sound like philosophy if you say them with sufficient confidence." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON (channeling old man Darling, see above)

"What a delicate property is confidence." -- DAVID NOBBS

“I’ll take a financial  meltdown over a political one every time – because market confidence is easier to restore than national self-confidence.” – ROBERT PESTON (the liberal UK tv journalist)

"Confidence is the feeling you have before you know better." -- GUY BELLAMY

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." -- CHARLES DARWIN

Conflict

"The smaller the territory, the more intense the dispute.” - HENRY KISSINGER (He calls it “Kissinger’s Law”, and it certainly holds true, at least, in Gaza and Rwanda)

“We all began as sectarians: it's in our selfish genes. We've been squabbling since our Rift Valley days, wasting time and lives locked in clan-on-clan vendettas.” – MARY WAKEFIELD (one of the reigning princesses at the SPECCIE, in November 2014)

“Trust and c-operation do not arise naturally. They are not primordial attributes of the 'Noble savage' that get undermined by civilization. The evidence suggests precisely the opposite.” – PAUL COLLIER (in his book “Exodus: Immigration and Multiculturalism in the 21 Century”)

“Were we to eliminate conflict and huffs from our lives, we’d eliminate moral judgment.” – ROGER LEWIS (the prolific biographer of, among others, Peter Sellers.)

"In any existential conflict, the side that is willing to discard the rules will be the winner. This side will be that which understands, as a matter of course, that the rules themselves can be used against an opponent." -- DAVID MAMET

"All men have an instinct for conflict: at least all healthy men." -- HILAIRE BELLOC

Conformity

“Better to be on the fringe and right, than in the center of the herd running off a cliff.” - JONAH GOLDBERG

“If a program dedicated to putting the round pegs of humanity into square holes fails, the bureaucrats running it will conclude that the citizens need to be squared off long before it dawns on them that the State should stop treating people like pegs in the first place. Furthermore, in government, failure is an exciting excuse to ask for more funding or more power.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“The biggest lie lefties tell themselves is that they're against conformity.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

"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)

“If everyone is thinking the same thing then someone isn’t thinking.” – GEN. GEORGE S. PATTON JR.

"The opposite of courage is conformity, not cowardice." – GEORGE KENNING (my old Agency pal.)

"Do not conform yourselves to this age." -- SAINT PAUL (In his letter to the Romans, 8:31b-35, 37-39, apparently -- and I'm bound to say, the old boy had a point.)

“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)

 “Bohemian conformity can be just as stuffy and suffocating as any other type.” – JAMES WALTON                                         (the TV columnist for the SPECTATOR, August 2015)

"Whoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times." -- NICOLO MACHIAVELLI 

“Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.” ― JOHN F. KENNEDY

"Evil always needs its herd" -- ROY CAMERON

“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

 
"Only a dead fish swims with the current." ~ BISHOP FULTON J. SHEEN (1895-1979)

Confusion/Chaos

“Above all else confusion reigns --

and though I ask, no one explains….” -- KEITH REID (the “word”  writer for PROCOL HARUM, the greatest rock band ever).

“I’m quite happy to live with the chaos because then everyone will stick to the king – which is me.” – BORIS JOHNSON (as Prime Minister, as quoted by his erstwhile adviser, Dominic Cummings)

"If I'd have wanted you to understand, I would have explained it better." -- JOHAN CRUYFF                                                         (the celebrated Dutch soccer player and manager)

Congo, The                                                                                                                                             

“The vast, dark vortex of death and danger, corruption and pain; that trackless, lawless, murderous, limitless sink of cruelty and rapacity, that waster of the hopes of so many generations.” - MATTHEW PARRIS

"From one side of this vast country (the Congo) to the other, whether in the rainforest or on the river, whether in villages or cities, I heard the same message -- 'We don't need money, we need the rule of law’." -- TIM BUTCHER (Of the UK Daily Telegraph, and the author of "Blood River - A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart".

ME: Quite apart from distrusting anybody who calls the jungle "the rainforest", I seriously doubt if Butcher ever actually heard a Congolese utter the words "we need the rule of law" -- I mean, for starters, how do you even say "rule of law" in French, let alone Congolese "French"? - MUCH LESS the words "we don't need money", (!!!). But still, his sentiment is well-aimed. Elsewhere, although a standard journalistic liberal, he also goes on to pay a reluctant -- and rare -compliment to colonialism, even the rather notorious Belgian variety of colonialism: "Back in 1958, when my mother passed through Kalemie, known then as Albertville, the Belgian Congo was a going concern. Its tropical medicine was the envy of the world. Foreign businessmen invested there. Travelers no more adventurous than my mother, a graduate of a London secretarial college, routinely used a network of trains, riverboats, buses and ferries. When I came to (the) Congo, those connections had long since vanished. Since 1960, when Belgium officially ended colonial control, an almost-unbroken tide of war and rebellion has savaged the country. Today the once stately buildings of Kalemie are ghostly relics, with power lines connected to nothing and mains water pipes leading nowhere. As I traveled through what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo I found Kalemie's decay repeated in town after town."

I would only ask Mr. Butcher: What do you suppose was going on in the Congo BEFORE the Belgians temporarily took the place over?

“Once the experts leave, the projects collapse. Nobody runs in the Congo.” – PETER BIDDLECOMBE

"It isn't that there's no right or wrong here. There's no right." -- V. S. NAIPAUL    (speaking of a fictional un-named country in his 1979 "A Bend In The River" that was clearly the ex-Belgian Congo of Mobutu)

"Crime-ridden and corrupt, Russia is like Congo in the snow." -- AIDAN HARTLEY (In April 2022)

"When I told the tropical diseases guy that I was going to the Congo he just said, well, sure, why waste time? Why not jump in an open sewer and start drinking?" -- LARRY SHAFFER   (professor of animal behavior at SUNY Plattsburgh)

"Sweetheart, I hate to have to break the news, but this (the Congo) is a non-disposing society." -- LARRY SHAFFER

"The Congo? Education. That's all that's needed round here. Good teaching. Not by off-the-wall Marxists and post-breakdown missionaries full of news from the Middle Ages. Sensible teaching, by people like me. A little engineering. That's all." -- LARRY SHAFFER    

Congress, The U.S.

“Every once in a while, after exhausting every other plausible alternative, Congress does the right thing.” - STEPHEN MOORE (of the Club For Growth, ex-CATO Institute, and your go-to guy when it comes to wasteful Feddle Spendin’.  In the WSJ June ’06)

“We could certainly slow the aging process down if it had to work its way through Congress.” - WILL ROGERS

 "All of them had come here (to Congress) to take charge of the country as revenge for not being able to get a date in high school. And now they were all having a great big nerdy D.C. laugh like some kind of national chess club." -- KYLE SMITH     (a character in his 2006 "A Christmas Caroline")

“If we were to ask the US Congress to redesign a spoon, it would come out with 368 moving parts, a steam engine, 2,000 pages of operating instructions, and 3,000 pages of disclaimers.” – HENRY HAWKINS                                                                 (a letter writer to NRO, and if it was a Democrat Congress, it would 1/ outlaw all other spoons and 2/ pass a law mandating that all Americans buy one of these new spoons, and use tax dollars to subsidize purchases of the new spoons for the 51% of victimized, underprivileged and generally oppressed Americans -- including the 15 million   undocumented Democrat voters, i.e., illegal immigrants)

“A ‘do-nothing Congress’ is sort of like a ‘do-nothing arsonist’." – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

"'Gridlock in Congress' is usually defined by the media as 'Republicans won't agree to raise taxes'." -- VERONIQUE DE RUGY               (Veronique is a French-born recently-naturalized conservative number-cruncher. The girl knows her stuff.)

“One of the things that you do in hearings is sit there and look attentively at people you know have no idea what they’re talking about.” - (JUSTICE) CLARENCE THOMAS

"Congress, for its part, is so impotent and gormless that Republican senators couldn’t figure out how to take their own side in a fight — rarely has an institution had so little self-respect while displaying so much self-importance." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON                                      (In Feb. 2021. And nice use of "gormless".)

"The Senate's a country-club, and the House is essentially a truck-stop." -- NEWT GINGRICH (GOP Speaker of the House, from 1995-1999 -- he said this on 16 Nov 2021)

Connecticut

"Connecticut isn'ta state so much as it is a Venn diagram overlap of everything that is awful about New York and everything that is awful about New England. Connecticut is a backward place with a heavy public sector ― it has almost as many state agencies as it does towns ― and it is almost comically rapacious, if ploddingly so: I lived there for less than a year many years ago, and I'mstill getting Connecticut tax bills." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON (A Texan, from Lubbock -- Buddy Holly's home town, by the way -- who currently lives in Greenwich Village. About which he also has a few choice things to say....)

Connections

"My father knew everyone slightly but no one quite enough.» – ROBERT MORLEY          (the portly English comic actor, in 1978)

Conscience

"A conscience is what hurts when all your other parts feel so good." -- STEVEN WRIGHT                                                 (the American -- Bostonian -- comedian and actor)

"A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory." -- STEVEN WRIGHT

"There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball, and that is either to have a clear conscience, or none at all" -- OGDEN NASH

“Conscience is thoroughly well-bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it.” – SAMUEL BUTLER (writer, 1835-1902)

“I often wrestle with my conscience, but I always win.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

"The conscience, I suspect, is a vital organ. And when it goes, you go." -- MARTIN AMIS

“Consensus”

“If liberals believe that it’s such a wonderful thing to live in a united nation, why aren’t they more nostalgic for the 1950s or the 1920s? Well, we all know the answer. If the American consensus isn’t a liberal consensus, the, well, the hell with consensus.” - JONAH GOLDBERG

“Civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice.”  --  WILL DURANT (eh?)

“I would rather fight a coalition than be part of one.” - NAPOLEON (That’s more like it…)

“To hear the blather about ‘Cold War consensus’, one would think that the Eighties never happened. At every turn, on every issue for which there presumably was one simple, knee-jerk, anti-Soviet answer: MX, el Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada, ‘Euromissile’ deployment - there was deep division. And practically every time, liberals, so wistful now for the ‘easy choices’ of yore, made the wrong choice.” - CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

“The Old Testament prophets did not say ‘Brothers, I want consensus.’” - MARGARET THATCHER

"Any sane person should be instinctively skeptical when all the smart people agree." -- MARK STEYN

"In my rather long political experience, when all parties are agreed on a policy, it is nearly always mistaken. There is a very clear reason why that should be. The existence of all-party consensus ensures that the policy in question is nevery properly debated or scrutinized. If the evidence shows that a policy is mistaken, it should be abandoned. It's as simple as that. -- NIGEL LAWSON (Margaret Thatcher's great Chancellor of the Exchequer)

"Consensus means no proper scrutiny, and that glaring flaws go unnoticed." -- NIGEL LAWSON

"The time to be fearful in politics is when a consensus emerges." -- (LORD) NIGEL LAWSON

“If you want to shift the consensus, you have to change your own side first.” – NICK COHEN (a tormented soft-lefty writing for the UK Spectator)

"Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something, reach for your wallet because you're being had." -- MICHAEL CRICHTON

“Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.” -- MARGARET THATCHER

"There is no such thing as 'consensus science'. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period." -- MICHAEL CRICHTON

“Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.” -- MICHAEL CRICHTON

"Unanimity in publis bodies, or of something approaching towards it, will destroy the energy of government." -- JAMES MADISON (In "Federalist #22")

“To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects. If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing.” -- MARGARET THATCHER

"The Swedes go along with their government too much, sometimes because they assume too easily that whatever is widely agreed must be right." -- DEIRDRE NANSEN McCLOSKEY

“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

"The worst decisions being made today have come from group-think." -- E. HOWARD HUNT

Consequences (and Unintended Consequences)

“Progressive policies are usually advanced by reference to their intended beneficiaries, without any reference at all to the social losses they create.” – MARIO LOYOLA

“History is a record of 'effects' the vast majority of which nobody intended to produce.” – JOSEPH SCHUMPETER                (The old Austrian economist -- he actually became Austria's Minister of Economics after WWI, and after all that dog’s breakfast dissolved into the famous Inflation Gotterdammerung-Geschplund he became an American citizen. Rather fittingly, somehow, he coined the term "creative destruction".)

"We are entering into a period of consequences." – TED CRUZ                                                                                                                (on 16 March 2014)

“A defining characteristic of this 'politics of kindness' is a strong preference for political stances that demonstrate one's heart is in the right place, combined with a relative indifference to whether the policies based on those stances, as actually implemented, do or even can achieve their intended results.” – WILLIAM VOEGELI

“It is amazing how fast people learn when they are not insulated from the consequences of their decisions.” – THOMAS SOWELL

"Sooner or later we all sit down to a banquet of consequences." -- ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

"It is the consequences of a behaviour that matter, not the motivation." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

“Conservation”

“Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between ‘conservation’ and the neutron bomb.” - MARK STEYN

Conservatism, (-ives)

“The facts of life are conservative.” - CHRIS PATTEN (ex- British Conservative MP, and the guy who gave Hong Kong to the Chicoms - making my daughter Annie cry at the time in the process.  Technically, a Conservative with a capital “C”, but, unfortunately, in recent years, not one enough with a small “c”. Also, I’m not sure if he said this before or after Mrs. Thatcher said it. They both said it – I’m just not sure who said it first.)

“The worst thing about being conservative is that it is so bad for the character.  This is because conservative political predictions are far more often correct than left-wing ones since they are grounded in pessimism about what politics can do, so one is proved smugly right.” - CHARLES MOORE (The ex-editor of the UK SPECTATOR)

“I don't much like the term 'right-wing' because it suggests a rigid ideological position. I prefer the word 'conservative', because it expresses a disposition, not a program.” – CHARLES MOORE

"That old friend of conservatives -- reality." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY 

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

"It is sometimes said, correctly, that conservatism is more an attitude than an ideology." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY

“Conservatism is the negation of ideology.” -- H. STUART HUGHES (This guy was an old Leftist egg-head pain in the ass, but not entirely wrong here -- and I speak as an anti-Leftist. Anyway, I’m confident that he stole this from Russell Kirk, see immediately below:)

"Conservatism is the negation of ideology. -- RUSSELL KIRK (This is why I don’t call myself a “conservative”, but rather an “anti-leftist” – and, at a pinch, a “reactionary”.)

"The conservative has an affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems.” -- RUSSELL KIRK

                                                                                                                                                                                                                         "No conservative wants things to get worse. We just know things will get worse." -- ERICK ERICKSON                                         (Mr. "Red State")

                                                                                                                                                                                                                        "The social liberalism always ends up burying the fiscal conservatism." – MARK STEYN

“The conservative does not despise government. He despises tyranny.” – MARK LEVIN

                                                                                                                                                                                                                           “A paleoconservative is a conservative who has been mugged by a neoconservative.” -- M. STANTON EVANS (Conservative American author, defender of Joe McCarthy, 1934-2015)

“You always hear that you’re supposed to start out liberal, then become conservative at some point. My view is, you should start out conservative, then get more conservative over time.” – M. STANTON EVANS

“Evans Law: When our people get into government, they cease to be our people.” – M. STANTON EVANS

“Of course I’m a conservative. I’ve got a house and I’m self-employed”. - KENNY EVERETT                                                       (The homosexual British pop singer)

"The great and constant dream of the conservative is to be left alone by his own government and by his fellow humans, as much as is possible." - ANDREW SULLIVAN (Then of The New Republic. Although the homosexualist Sullivan is a highly idiosyncratic kind of conservative - and not because he’s a poof - this is a pretty good description of conservatism. And, incidentally, to those who think that “right wing” means “fascism” - does this definition remotely sound like fascism?)

"Acknowledging the fact that human nature has no history is the first principle of realism, and realism is conservative." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“Conservatism is not popular. Say it out loud if you must, for it is something many conservatives are in deep denial about. The average American likes a lot more government than the average conservative. This will in all likelihood never, ever change.” - JONAH GOLDBERG

“The conservative movement is merely the ethical afterglow of feudalism”. - ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. (in 1955. And, by the way, fuck you, Arthur. Actually, I can speak this way because he was a WWIIOSS colleague of my father, who were he alive, would heartily second the sentiment…)

“American conservatism has been something of an orphan in historical scholarship.” - ALAN BRINKLEY  (maybe because most “historical scholars” are liberals? Ya think? Liberal Columbia U. history prof Brinkley?)

“A conservative is one who takes it for granted that human nature is constant.” - DAVID PRYCE-JONES

“Conservative people - in politics and out of it - are good-natured skeptics. They wish for the best, believe in the best and work for it. But they take a limited view of the possibility of perfecting human nature by political means, a wary view of all attempts to do so by legislation, a vigilant attitude towards the extension of government by revolution or by stealth, and a keenly - but not blindly - critical approach to all ambitions by government to take money from the citizen and spend it on his behalf. They have a particular belief in the benevolent motivating power of self-interest in the lives of individuals and families, and a certain robust willingness to allow people to fail.” - MATTHEW PARRIS (ex-U.K. Conservative MP, and a homosexualist. A liberal, but a sane one….)

“I am a Tory mostly because I am not a socialist, but also because the question ‘what’s the Government going to do about it?’ was provoking in me a fit of infant cholic when I was in my pram, drives me now into a wild irrational fury, and always will.” - MATTHEW PARRIS

"In the end, and in part of his soul, a good Conservative believes that nothing matters much, and it's all a game. Such people are super to work with. In a deep and (to me) admirable sense, these men are taking a pop at it. They do have ideals of course, they do care. They do love their country and they do have aims they hope to achieve; but if it all goes tits-up (a phrase they use often) they'll walk away. They have other things in their lives. This isn't all they ever wanted. They can give and take; they're allergic to entrenched positions; they tend not to take things personally; they can deal with the Devil himself, if they must." -- MATTHEW PARRIS

“Conservatism is enjoyment.” - WALTER BAGEHOT (as a conservative hedonist slacker myself, I’ll buy that….)

“Tories don’t have ideas - they have intuitions and those instincts are what matter when times turn tough.” - HYWEL WILLIAMS (British political scientist and author, in 2007)

"The facts of life are conservative." - MARGARET THATCHER

"Man is not only ruled by evil passions; but his rational capacity is severely limited as well. Without the warm cloak of custom, tradition, experience, history, religion, and social hierarchy—all of which radical man would rip off—man is shivering and naked. Free man from all mystery, demystify his institutions and his intellectual world, and you leave him alone in a universe of insignificance, incapacity, and inadequacy."  -- EDMUND BURKE 

"There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact. It affirms because it holds." – RALPH WALDO EMERSON

“Conservatives are never more pathetic than when they try to be cool.” – JAY NORDLINGER

"Ask a liberal what he is and he says 'I'm a liberal'. Ask one of us and the answer can go on forever. Neo-Con or Paleo-Con? Or you can be a Populist Con, a Compassionate Con, a Libertarian Con, a National Greatness Con and even a 'Crunch' Con. If you want to take it into the realm of unresisting imbecility you can claim to be a 'bleeding heart conservative'. If you identify as a Neo-Con you will immediately be asked 'What were you before?' because conservatives of both sexes have maiden names. Your answer may also require you to quote something. When I identify as a George Orwell conservative I end up having to explain what a Tory Anarchist is which takes me into Max Beerbohm. If identify as an elitist conservative I have to recite a T.S. Eliot bit." -- FLORENCE KING

"Conservatives have the advantage over the Left by being unembarrassed by history." -- CHARLES MOORE (Columnist for the {UK} DAILY TELEGRAPH and ex-Editor of the {UK} SPECTATOR, 22 March 2008)

“If it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.” - LUCIUS HENRY CARY (The “Third Viscount Falkland”, in 1649. And quoted in P.N. Gwynne’s 2021 novel, “Persona Non Grata”)

“The thing I like best about being a conservative is that I don’t have to lie. I don’t have to pretend that men and women are the same. I don’t have to declare that failed or oppressive cultures are as good as mine. Leftism has outlived its own failure by hiding itself within the most labyrinthine construct of social delicacy since Victoria was queen” - ANDREW KLAVAN (American - Hollywood! -- novelist and screenwriter)

 "I love how the traditional has become the new radical." -- MARK MILLAR (in October 2023)

“Conservatism is opposition to all forms of political religion. It is a rejection of the idea that politics can be redemptive.” - JONAH GOLDBERG

«The best definition of  'right-wing values' today is simply the refusal to comply with left-wing values.» – JONAH GOLDBERG

"The problem for conservatives is that any failure of the market leads to more government, and any failure of government also leads to more government." -- PHILIP KLEIN (writing in the AMERICAN SPECTATOR, April 2009. And forget about "conservatives", I'd say this is a problem for everybody...)

“Conservatism always has been and always will be a force to reckon with because it most closely approximates the reality of the human condition, based, as it is, on the cumulative judgment and experience of a people.” -- TONY BLANKLEY

“The Right is divided between those who are (in Irving Kristol's formulation) anti-left and those who are anti-State. Those who believe that the government is bad because it's working from leftist assumptions, and those who believe that the government is bad because it is the government. (Most conservatives share both outlooks to one extent or another, but usually fit more into one camp than the other. If you're wholly in the government-is-bad camp you're more properly a libertarian, but still on the right).” - JONAH GOLDBERG

"He is a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of a conservative." – G. K. CHESTERTON

"A conservative in America doesn’t conserve theocracy or monarchy. He conserves the institutions of liberty." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"Conservatism is a distant cousin of cynicism." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“I am a conservative because I think politics should infect as little of life as possible. And because I am a conservative I resent to the core of my being the fact that everything must either bend to the winds of the Left or be broken by them. The third choice is to become "right wing" which in itself is a kind of surrender because it accedes to the demand that everything become political. But it's the best choice we've got.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"The traditional conservative believes that man is fallen, sinful, flawed. Hence we understand that man cannot leap out of history, cannot begin at Year Zero, cannot create a heaven on earth. This does not mean conservatives cannot be idealists; it simply means we cannot be utopians." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“Conservatives have been wrong and will be wrong again. But at least conservatives wait for the truth to fully reveal itself, because we recognize the danger of overturning dogma without a good reason.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"Whenever anything old survives it is dangerous." -- RICHARD BROOKHISER

"How you win an election? You can never be too right-wing!" -- GEORGE STPHANOPOULOS    (this astonishing statement by the lefty Clintonista was quoted by ROD LIDDLE in the SPECTATOR on 9 Dec 2023)

"American conservatism, unlike its European cousins, is a middle-class philosophy." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Conservatism is an exercise in calculating the balance of human imperfections.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Conservatism is a hard sell at the best of times, and the agenda of self-reliance, work, family, discipline, and tradition has seldom set young people's minds ablaze. Persuading them will prove difficult and frustrating, because conservatism, unromantic disposition that it is, is in the end an exercise in calculating a balance of human imperfections.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“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

“Conservatives have a problem with women, in the same way that everybody has a problem with women.” – HUGO RIFKIND

“Conservatives are apt to recoil at the very thought of a group.” – JAY NORDLINGER

“Most of the time, conservatives can barely tolerate their leaders. Republican presidents are lucky if their own party doesn’t move to impeach them.” – ANN COULTER

"When a conservative tempers his social conservatism with libertarianism or when a Libertarian tempers his utopian tendencies with an appreciation of tradition, it's not called hypocrisy, it's called wisdom." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"It is a double bind that conservatives are always caught in. We're caricatured as morons in every aspect of life save one -- our capacity to orchestrate incredibly elaborate and sinister conspiracies." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed." -- SAMUEL JOHNSON

"A fairly simple definition of conservatism would be as follows. If it comes to a showdown between reason and instinct, you bet on instinct. And if it comes to a showdown between math and biology, you bet on biology." -- RORY SUTHERLAND                    (Vice Chairman of the Ogilvy Group, UK, and the technology columnist for the UK SPECCIE)

“Normal conservatives don't go on marches (the only use we have found for hand-held placards is to advertise golf sales), so when TV crews do report a rare right-wing demonstration it is disproportionately formed of the kind of people who name their children after Norse gods or own a suspiciously large collection of decommissioned military vehicles.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

“The ability to hold irrelevant things sacred, I think, a great intellectual defence of conservatism.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

"Space, car-ownership, home-ownership and affordable family-formation make people more conservatism. Economics alone do not explain politics. City dwellers, although they are well-paid, are effectively serfs in suits. They rent homes, can't drive, rely on the state to move them about, and can't afford to spawn. Hence they vote left. Give them a bit of space, a house and a motor, and they'll be conservatives." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

"Exit is a conservative principle." -- MATTHEW CONTINETTI (he was specifically referring to pulling out of "Obamacare", but it makes a good stand-alone soundbite)

“As is the case with so many useful conservative institutions, the Habsburg empire worked in practice rather than in theory.” – SAM LEITH

“What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?” -- ABRAHAM LINCOLN

“Conservative values are a belief in the maximum freedom for individuals, a recognition that wickedness should be countered by discipline not therapy, and an acceptance that the price of progress is a patchwork world.” – MICHAEL GOVE

“America was the one place where one could be a conservative and still be a champion of liberty.” – FRIEDRICH HAYEK                    (Whose book Margaret Thatcher slammed down on the podium in the House of Commons in 1976 and declared “This is what we believe.”)

"The fate of conservatism is to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing." -- FRIEDRICH HAYEK

“Conservatives have a propensity to use and to enjoy what is available rather than to wish for or to look for something else, to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be.” – MICHAEL OAKESHOTT

“Conservatism is always on the wrong side of history because it is innately opposed to profound social change. Social change is always good, you see, even when it is utterly calamitous or pointless or unnecessary.” – ROD LIDDLE

“Any ‘conservative’ who says ‘there oughta be a law’ isn't a conservative.” – GARY EATON (a conservative musician from Southern California on the Twoot)

“In a conservative world, people are allowed to disagree.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

«I am a Conservative: My trigger warnings involve actual triggers.» -- KURT SCHLICHTER

“Conservatism is not about leaving people behind. Conservatism is about empowering people to catch up.” – MARCO RUBIO

“The conservative does not despise government. He despises tyranny. That is precisely why the conservative reveres the Constitution and inists on adherence to it.” – MARK LEVIN

«Traditionalist conservatism and libertarianism are grounded in reality, not in abstractions or idealism.» -- JOHN HOOD (Of North Carolina, the Pres. Of the John William Pope Foundation)

«Everybody is a conservative when it comes to his own family.» -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"Conservatism is a philosophy that begins with the assumption that most public appetites will never be satisfied and that many of them shouldn’t be satisfied even if it were possible." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"Everyone is conservative about what he knows best." – ROBERT CONQUEST

"Conquest's Law: People start becoming right-wing or conservative about things they know most about." -- ROBERT CONQUEST

«Conservatives are a bit like car mechanics – practical people who fix things rather than excite.» -- DAVID CAMERON

“The essence of conservatism is recognition that evil and enmity are permanent and that no positive law, no progress can fully banish them.” – SOHRAB AHMARI

“Seriously. Conservatives own 200+ million guns, 12 trillion rounds of ammo. If we were violent, you'd know it.” – BOB OWENS             (The editor of something called Bearing Arms and generally a 2Amendment enthusiast. From Raleigh, NC)

"The definition of a conservative is: A defender of the small, the particular, the well-tried and the beloved against Utopian fanatics who cannot tell good change from bad." -- PETER HITCHENS

"Conservatives tend to be people who know where things come from." – MARK STEYN

“I’ve never liked the term 'right'; it reinforces the mythology that conservatism is even remotely aligned with fascism and Nazism. Such regimes, in their expansive power, have more in common with the Big Government of so-called 'progressives'. And nationalism is inconclusive; FDR was no shrinking violet, and it was JFK who urged 'what you can do for your country'.”– ARNOLD STEINBERG (in the AMSPEC Feb. 2017)

“Men are driven to conservatism by the shock of events.” – SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON (the prescient Harvard and Columbia political scientist who in '82 coined the notion of ”The Clash Of Civilizations”)

"A conservative is someone who doesn't consider himself morally superior to his grandfather" – JOHN HOWARD (the great ex-Australian conservative – called “Liberal” down there -- Prime Minister)

"As conservatives we don't care about the color of your skin, we care about the color of your flag." -- ALLEN WEST

“The longer I observe the conservative movement, the more I realize its motto is 'Seeking political solutions to cultural problems'.” – DAVID FRENCH

"Nothing more dangerous than a funny, likeable conservative character" -- TIM ALLEN (the American actor, on the cancellation of his hit TV show, “Last Man Standing”, by ABC-TV)

"The term 'far right' now means 'Normal people who want to live free and don't like sexual sickos messing with their children'." -- ANDREW KLAVAN     (on 16 January 2024)  

“Conservatism is the politics of reality.” – WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

"The instant conservatism becomes a movement, it ceases to be conservatism." -- WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR. 

"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)

“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

"These days, if you mock the prevailing fashion in the world of the arts or journalism, you’re called a conservative. Which is just another term for a heretic." -- TOM WOLFE (in 1980)

“Once identified as right-wing you are beyond the pale of argument. Your views are irrelevant, your character discredited, your presence in the world is a mistake. You are not an opponent to be argued with but a disease to be shunned. This has been my experience.” – SIR ROGER SCRUTON

“The essence of conservatism is that human nature has no history.” – GLENN LOURY (the Boston University economics prof.)

"Conservatives are defined more by a shared enemy than having similar programmes (sic) of their own." -- WILLIAM HAGUE (The UK Conservative Party leaders, 1997-2001)

" ‘Conservative’ has always struck me as a stupid -- and useless -- political label; (after all, the hardest-core communists are called ‘conservatives’ by their peers and by our Left-Mainstream Media). Instead, ‘anti-Leftist’ is much more useful -- and accurate. (Or, in a pinch, ‘Reactionary’).” – JACK JOLIS

“Conservatives abhor change not because they are content with things as they are, but because they know from every example since the first inventive Australopithecine man-ape picked up a knobbed femur and used it to smash an enemy’s skull that change ultimately causes disaster.” – PROF. JOHN GREENWAY (the late Gonzo Anthropologist from Colorado, in 1977)

“See the world as it is.” -- ALBERT JAY NOCK (the American libertarian, 1870-1945)

"There is no justification for public interference with purely private concerns."-- CALVIN COOLIDGE

 “Every Tory is a realist. He knows that there are great forces in heaven and earth that man's philosophy cannot plumb or fathom.” -- KEITH FEILING (British historian, 1884-1977)

“ ‘Conservatives’ fucked up so badly over the last couple decades that the only thing remaining to ‘conserve’ is a leftist socialist state run by an oligarchy of technocrats.” – JACK MURPHY (An ex-Claremont Institute podcaster, said this on 17 Nov “21)

"There's no reason to lie if you're a conservative." -- ERIC HARLEY (the one of the "Red-Eye Radio" pair who's from Texas) 

“Conservatism is not an ideology but an instinct.” – TIM STANLEY (the UK DAILY TELEGRAPH correspondent on American affairs)

“The real genius of conservatism is to effect change, all the while giving the impression that nothing has changed at all.” – TIM STANLEY (the author of “Whatever Happened To Tradition?”)

"If  there is a conservative failing, it is our noble, but long-term strategic failure to seed our federal bureaucracy with talent." -- R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR.

"Before you label something far-right, I kind of want to know what you think regular right is." -- FRANK J. FLEMING      (in June 2024)

"Want to be a rebel? Be a conservative. Today’s counterculture is conservative.": -- MARY FRANCES MYLER     (in the AmSpec in July 2024)

Conservatism, Black                                                                                                                               

“The friction here isn't about politics. It's about something more primal: control. Liberals want to give (black conservatives) every right except, it turns out, the right to think for themselves.” – RUBEN NAVARRETTE                                                     (author of “A Darker Shade Of Crimson: Odyssey of a Harvard Chicano”)

Conservatism, "Compassionate"                                                                                                     

"'Compassionate conservatism' is offering half of whatever financial benefits the Democrats offer." -- MICHAEL HOROWITZ                                                                                                                                                                                                         (of the Hudson Institute)

Conservatism, “Neo-”                                                                                                                            

“The Neocons are just utopians on steroids.” - JOHN HULSMAN                                                                                                             (an ex-“neocon” and co-author of “Ethical Realism”)

“The neocons were liberals who actually cared about the consequences of their actions, and ipso facto stopped being liberals.” – DAVID P. GOLDMAN (“Spengler” in PJMedia)

 Conservatism,"Social"  

"To those who say we should simply focus on fiscal issues, I say you would not be able to print enough money in a thousand years to pay for the government you would need if the traditional family collapses." – MIKE PENCE                               (Republican congressman from Indiana, in 2011)

Consistency

“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” - JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

"The only really consistent people are the dead." -- ALDOUS HUXLEY

"Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind." -- W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

Conspiracy (+ Conspiracy Theories)

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices”. - ADAM SMITH

"Conspiracy is fed by censorship." -- WILL CAIN (he'd been talking about the Lahaina fires, on 27 August2023, but the insight is a universal one) 

“It’s not a conspiracy theory once it’s proved. After that, it’s just a conspiracy.” – MICK HERRON (the English spy novelist)

"Patterns, as any spy worth his salt grasps, are the outer shells of conspiracies." -- ROBERT LITTELL

 “If you deny the existence of a plot, you will be accused of being a part of that plot.” – DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON

"The only time that people will believe a report of a conspiracy is if he ends up actually murdered." -- DOMITIAN (the Roman emperor who himself was murdered by a conspiracy of his own courtiers, in 96 AD)

"Some may condemn conspiracy theory, but I call it conspiracy therapy." -- MELISSA KITE

"If someone is so upset about a theory you’ve offered that they threaten to kill you over it, your theory is probably right. Nobody makes death threats over contentions that the moon is made of green cheese." -- JIM GERAGHTY                                            (specifically referring to the truth about the origin of the Red China Virus)

Constitution, The U.S.

“Now the Senate is looking for moderate judges…. What in the world is a moderate interpretation of a constitutional text? Halfway between what it says and what we’d like it to say?” - JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA

 
"The constitution is not a living organism, it's a legal document, and it says what it says and doesn't say what it doesn't say." -- ANTONIN SCALIA

“Looking at foreign law for support is like looking out over a crowd and picking out your friends.” - CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS

“While the Constitution protects against invasion of individual rights, it is not a suicide pact.” - ROBERT H. JACKSON (Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, in 1949. The same dude who’d earlier achieved fame as the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Trials.)

“Liberals have always felt constrained by the Constitution.” - ALFRED S. REGNERY (the famous publisher’s son, and a publisher in his own right…)

“Our political theory is based on the assumption of a virtuous people ― all the safeguards and roadblocks of the Constitution would be for naught if the people, after due deliberation and delay, still wanted to do the wrong thing.” – GEORGE CAREY                        (government professor at Georgetown U.)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                        "The U.S. Constitution -- a document based not upon the philosophic assumption that people are basically good, but on the tragic confession of the opposite view." -- DAVID MAMET

"The U.S. Constitution is the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man." -- WILLIAM GLADSTONE (crikey.)

"As the [UK] Constitution is the most subtle organism which has proceeded from the womb and the long gestation of progressive history, so the [US] Constitution is, so far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off by the brain and purpose of man." -- WILLIAM GLADSTONE

"The Constitution doesn't deny men's flaws, but relies upon them." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

                                                                                                                                                                                                                        "The Constitution is the 'how' of America. It's the operator's manual. The 'why' of American, who we are as a people, is in the Declaration of Independence." -- JOE CARTER                                                                                                                                    (an editor at FIRST THINGS)

"President Obama seems to understand the Constitution as a set of suggestions." -- DAVID MAMET

                                                                                                                                                                                                                        "The Constitution is an imperfect document, and I think it is a document that reflects some deep flaws in American culture." -- BARACK OBAMA

“The Democrats don’t believe in our founding principles. And the Republicans don’t believe in defending our founding principles.” – MARK LEVIN

“For all the misplaced and saccharine focus on the first three words, 'We the people', all of the most necessary and beautiful elements of the thing are anti-democratic in nature – or, at least, anti-majoritarian.” – CHARLES C.W. COOKE

“The First Amendment is, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, a blessedly anti-democratic feature of our republic that says, in short: ‘You idiots don’t get a vote on this.’” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"There isn’t a goddamned word about abortion or gay rights in the Constitution, and it is absurd to think that such rights had been hiding there, lurking in the ol’ penumbras, since the 18th flippin’ century, waiting to be discovered by a committee of progressive lawyers who somehow see the 'real' Constitution that went completely undetected by the men who wrote and ratified the document we actually have. That should be obvious even to people who support abortion or gay rights or other things that have been magically discovered in the Constitution." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“The Declaration of Independence tells us that governments are instituted among men to secure our liberties and to do little else besides. If new programs are violating those liberties, then they will have to go.” – CHARLES C.W. COOKE

"The genius of the Bill of rights lies in its protection of broad categories of human conduct, and by extension, whatever tools are necessary for their exercise. Bu design, there is no reference to Twitter or to typewriters or to churches in the First Amendment, no mention of muskets of AR-15s in the Second, nor to filing cabinets or hard disks in the Fourth. Those are the mere details -- the flesh on the bone. What matters in each case is the act in question: speech, dissent and conscience in the First; self-defense in the Second; privacy in the Fourth, and so on." -- CHARLES C.W. COOKE

“The U.S. Constitution has survived for so long because it was built on the understanding that man is imperfect and always will be.” – CHARLES C.W. COOKE

“The Constitution was written to restrain your government's behavior.” – RAND PAUL (don't much like the guy’s foreign policy, but he's bang on, here....)

“The American Constitution is remarkable for its simplicity; but it can only suffice a people habitually correct in their actions, and would be utterly inadequate to the wants of a different nation. Change the domestic habits of the Americans, their religious devotion, and their high respect for morality, and it will not be necessary to change a single letter of the Constitution in order to vary the whole form of their government.” – FRANCIS GRUND (A kind of German De-Tocqueville. 1805-1863)

“For many on the left, the Constitution is a hoary holdover, a ghoul-white hand of the past clamped over the brave mouth of enlightenment.” – JAMES LILEKS

“It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions.” – DANIEL WEBSTER

“There's no "flexibility" in the Constitution. If it's flexible, it's not a constitution. You want to amend it? Try.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

"The Constitution tells us what we may do; then, within its confines, we figure out what we should do." – ANDREW C. McCARTHY

“A Constitution is not meant to facilitate change. It is meant to impede change, to make it difficult to change.” - JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA

"If separation of church & state is good for religion (which it is), why won’t separation of arts & state be good for the arts?" -- DENNIS PRAGER

"The constitution is a radical document. It is the job of government to reign in people's rights." -- BILL CLINTON    (1993 – and this, for me, is probably the most objectionable thing this son of a bitch ever said)

“We’re sick and tired of the Constitution sitting in the National Archives, manipulating everything we do.” – SENATOR CORY BOOKER (on CNN, in January 2019)

“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)

"Democrats have always looked on the U.S. Constitution as the menu in a restaurant they hate, and in which they'd rather not be in the first place." -- JACK JOLIS

“Democrats look upon the US Constitution as though it were a menu in a restaurant they hate and are pissed off to have been dragged into in the first place.” – JACK JOLIS

"The FBI and Department Of Justice keep this democracy in check and "provide the checks and they provide the balances." -- REP. KWEISI MFUME (Democrat from Maryland, and.... SAY WHA', COMRADE?)

"The U.S. Constitution is the greatest document, second only to the Bible, that's ever been written." -- JOE DIGENOVA (7 March 2022)

“The Constitution was not written to restrain the citizens’ behavior. It was written to restrain the government’s behavior.” – RAND PAUL (Rand Paul has always been a fucking disaster on foreign policy, but this is pretty damn good. And spot-on.)

"Originalism is racist. Originalism is sexist. Originalism is homophobic. Originalism is just a fancy word for discrimination." -- SEN. ED MARKEY (Democrat of Massachusetts, in October 2020)

"Whether it is in the United States or in mainland Europe, written constitutions have one great weakness. That is that they contain the potential to have judges take decisions which should properly be made by democratically elected politicians." -- MARGARET THATCHER

"Our nation is built on three branches of government, not one with 'branch offices' in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street to sidestep constitutional constraints." -- VIVEK RAMASWAMY (author and entrepreneur from Ohio, but his name sounds Ceylonese -- in August, 2022) 

“My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways." -- JUSTICE KETANJI BROWN JACKSON

"White supremacy is weaved into our founding documents and principles." - LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD (anti-American Biden's anti-American American Ambassador to the UN)

"So spare me the bullshit about constitutional rights!" -- REP. DAVID CICILLINE (Democrat of Rhode Island, in Congress on 2 June 2022, in a debate about guns. And it sums up the Democrat Party of 2022 pretty well.)

“I don't care what the Supreme Court says." -- JOSH SHAPIRO (the wise-ass Democrat governor of PA, objecting to the Supreme Court’s granting limited immunity to the President of the US — in Oct. ‘24)

"The courts should be strictly judicial and not dabble in policy - except interpretation of the Constitution. It is not at all proper for courts to try to make laws or to read law school theories into the law and policy laid down by the Congress. We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. F.B.I." -- HARRY S TRUMAN      (in May 1945)

“Consultants”

“The route to consultancy, if you’re interested in a lucrative career move, is to get yourself fired or take redundancy, and then find an office where you can hang around jangling your loose change and making a nuisance of yourself.” - KEITH WATERHOUSE (author of, among much else, “Billy Liar”)

“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

“Consumerism”

“The point of life isn’t to become a more satisfied customer.” - ROD DREHER (of the DALLAS MORNING NEWS, and the founder-inventor-author of “Crunchy Cons”)

"My first rule of consumerism is never to buy anything you can't make your children carry." -- BILL BRYSON (my favorite liberal author. Easily. The man's a comic genius, and one of the most interesting dudes ever.)

“Consumer capitalism is the Galapagos Islands of human psychology. Just as you can learn about evolution from the apparently needless variations in the beaks of finches, you can learn about innate human needs through the study of strange things people buy.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

"People who express disgust at with consumerism have a tendency to disapprove of other people's while overlooking their own. Those who boast of buying less stuff are often not averse to the odd skiing holiday." -- ROSS CLARK 

Contempt

"As you know, contempt is not contempt if you have to take any trouble expressing it. It has got to be quite involuntary, and if possible, unconscious." -- WINSTON CHURCHILL                   

“Wrongs are often forgiven, but contempt never is. Our pride remembers it forever." — PHILIP STANHOPE (Lord Chesterfield, 1694-1773)

Contraception                                                                                                                                        

"Birth control is a predictable recurring expense. What moron wants it covered by insurance? It's like buying deodorant insurance." -- DAVE "Iowahawk" BURGE

“The best argument for free birth control is the people demanding it.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

“If birth control is ‘not your boss’s business’, why do you expect him to pay for it?” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“Families give their daughters birth control and send them down a rape path.” -- STEVE KING (former Republican congressman from Iowa)

Contracts                                                                                                                                                     

"I teach contract law at Harvard Law School and I can't understand my credit card contract." –ELIZABETH WARREN                        (the leftist false-squaw Harvard prof and Senatorial candidate, in 2009)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                  "Nothing builds wealth so much as trust -- the trust that permits parties to rely on each other in a joint project -- and nothing cements trust better than enforceable contracts. But contracts aren't really enforceable if one side gets to walk when things don't turn out as he likes." -- F. H. BUCKLEY

“Nothing is more set in stone than an unspoken understanding. It cannot be varied or called into question, both of which require speech.” – JON CANTER (in his novel “A Short Gentleman”, in which the main character is an uber-lawyer)

Contradiction                                                                                                                                         

"Half of humanity's troubles arise from the inability to see that contradictory propositions can be valid simultaneously." -- MARK HELPRIN

Control

"If everything seems under control, all it means is that you're not going fast enough." – MARIO ANDRETTI

Controversy

"I never discuss anything except politics and religion. There is nothing else to discuss." – G. K. CHESTERTON

"'Controversial', the wonder word that makes something innocuous sound criminal and makes something criminal sound innocuous." – DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE

“Conventional Wisdom”

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” - MARCUS AURELIUS

"If we had stuck strictly to convention, we would not even have reached stone age." -- DANNY DE BELDER (My pal the Sage of Flanders) 

“Worldly wisdom teaches teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.” – JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

"Conversation"

"Another word that is beginning to be denuded of its original meaning – i.e., a two-way discourse. But that isn't what is meant. What is meant is a one-way harangue at great length until the spittle is dripping off your chin." – ROD LIDDLE (in April 2018)

“I have told him many times, and will tell him again if necessary:  he should just shut the fuck up. Only then will we be able to proceed serenely.” – PHILLIPPE VILLENEUVE (the eminent French chief architect in charge of the rebuilding of Notre Dame, after the 2019 fire, about his “boss”, 5-star General Jean-Louis Georgelin, in charge of the commission to oversee the work.)

Conviction                                                                                                                                                   

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." – UPTON SINCLAIR

Cooking                                                                                                                                             

"Cooking is creating a big fucking problem and learning how to solve it." – CRAIG THORNTON                                            (pioneer L.A. “underground” restaurateur…)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                        "The high-end restaurant kitchen is probably the one place in civilian life where hierarchy and standards of discipline are as rigorously and unquestioningly observed as in the military." -- JAMES DELINGPOLE

“What was once a daily necessity is increasingly a spectator sport.” - JOE BENNETT

"We put the food in boiling water. Then we take it out." -- WILLIAM BULGER (Long-time Democrat State Senator of Massachusetts, and an ex-President of the University of Massachusetts -- on Irish cooking, as told to Richard Brookhiser)

«Do fish have loins? In a pretentious restaurant, I ordered a ‘loin of sea trout’. It looked like an ordinary piece of fish – a bit Small, as is usual in pretentious restaurants – on a plate sprinkled and drizzled as though the chef had perhaps coughed over it rather violently or vigorously scratched his head before giving it to the waiter. In Australia I was once offered a shoulder of some other fish, so I suppose one might even be able to enjoy a rump of whitebait or even a saddle of flounder. But generally speaking I don’t mind loin when applied to the loinless, and somehow a loin of fruitcake sounds appetizing, or even a loin of sourdough bread.» -- BARRY HUMPHRIES

"Nobody likes to cook for two. Too much work and too many leftovers." -- DENIS JOHNSON

“An unwatched pot boils immediately.” -- H.F. ELLIS                                                                                                                                (the Literary and Deputy Editor of PUNCH, in 1946)

"Roasting is for rich people." -- REDMOND O'HANLON (the English explorer-author)

“A French politician representing a somewhat backward district in Africa was found to have been eaten by his constituens. The journalist who discovered this used the phrase: ‘Je crois qu’il a passé à la casserole’ (I think he ended up in a casserole.) Clearly the Africans knew what they were about. For making a meal out of tough and intractable material, the casserole has no rival.” -- KATHARINE WHITEHORN (in her bestselling cookbook “Cooking In A Bedsitter” which came out in 1961, just when France’s African colonies were getting their independence – which explains the French politician and his hungry African constitutents.)

Coolidge, Calvin

“Counting out Harding as a cipher only, Dr. Coolidge was preceded by one World Saver and followed by two more. What enlightened American, having to choose between any of them and another Coolidge, would hesitate for an instant?” - H.L. MENCKEN

"Should the day ever dawn when Jefferson's warnings are heeded at last, and we reduce government to its simplest terms, it may very well be that Cal's bones, now resting inconspicuously in the Vermont granite, will come to be revered as those of a man who really did the nation some service." -- H.L. MENCKEN      

                                                                                                                                                                                                                       "Well, they're going to elect that superman Hoover, and he's going to have some trouble. He's going to have to spend money. But he won't spend enough. Then the Democrats will come in and they'll spend money like water. But they don't know anything about money. Then they will want me to come back and save some money for them. But I won't do it." -- PRESIDENT CALVIN COOLIDGE                          ("Silent Cal", to his chief Secret Service minder, Edmund Starling, during one of his morning walks, on his decision not to seek re-election -- which he easily could have won -- in 1928.)

"I think the American public wants a solemn ass as president and I think I'll go along with them." -- CALVIN COOLIDGE

“Coronavirus” (The Red China Virus)                                                                                                    

"If only it had been an earthquake! A good bad shock, and there you are! You count the dead and living, and that's an end of it. But this here damned disease, even them who haven't got it can't think of anything else."– ALBERT CAMUS                     (in his novel “The Plague”)

"We have to take care of the cure. That will make the problem worse no matter what. No matter what." -- JOE BIDEN             (on "The View" ABC-TV, 24 March 2020)

"China can stop reporting deaths at will, by shooting the guy whose job was to report deaths." -- BANSI SHARMA    (a guy on the Twoot)

“Social control is best managed through fear.” – MICHAEL CRICHTON                                                                                             (from his 1978 “Coma”)

“The inhabitant of the United States learns from birth that he must rely on himself to combat the ills and trials of life. He is restless and defiant in his outlook toward authority and appeals to its power only when he cannot do without it. At the same time, however, when some unforeseen misfortune strike a family, the purses of a thousand strangers open up without trouble; modest but very numerous gifts come to its assistance in its misery.” -- ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

“In all honesty, I have not seen this level of elite disdain for suffering people since the French Revolution. And listen, I was there and I can tell you: It did not end well.” -- ANDREW KLAVAN                                                                                                     (in 18 April 2020)

“The art of medicine consists in distracting the patient while nature cures the disease.” -- VOLTAIRE

“Doctors are men who prescribe medicine: of which they know little, to cure diseases, of which they know less, to human beings of whom they know nothing.” -- VOLTAIRE

“When really disastrous events happen they tend not to announce themselves as such.” – SAM LEITH

“The mainstream left-wing media is as complicit as hell in the latest fiasco, more concerned that no Chinese person feels insulted than with what the criminal commie government tried to conceal.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

                                                                                                                                                                                                                “Something good always emerges after a catastrophe: like never trusting the Chinese and outlawing the word ‘globalist’.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

"Just like a virus takes over a healthy cell, eviscerates it, and turns it into a factory to create more viruses, so the plague of experts has taken over all our systems of science, education, and even the arts, and turned them into factories to turn out more phone 'experts'." -- SARAH HOYT

"Well if it's war, and you're sticking it to your own people -- then you're doing it wrong!" -- MARK STEYN                                     (on 28 April 2020, referring to harassment in Maui against a the Maui Brewing Company making hand sanitizer)

“Perhaps the seeming urge to ban guns, assemblies, visits; to distribute surveillance apps etc is only partly driven by recommendations from 'models' but mostly the psychological result of the frustration of people who have been humiliated by events.” – RICHARD FERNANDEZ                                         (the columnist “Wretchard”)

"All those famously locked gates on the TITANIC which separated 3rd-Class areas of the ship from everyone else, and which subsequently provided rich material to filmmakers wishing to pass comment on British class divides? These had been installed to comply with US immigration lawto control the spread of disease on board (italics added)." – RORY SUTHERLAND            

“As is the case with many budding totalitarians—one thinks of the self-empowered governors of Democrat-controlled states south of the border—the coronavirus proved a crisis too good to waste, a veritable godsend to promote the consolidation of power. Keep it going.” – DAVID SOLWAY SOLWAY                                                      (A Canadian poet and essayist)

“We have long been advocates of blaming China for all things bat flu, even way back when our betters were assuring us that it was totally racist to do so. Some of us are funny, and were skeptical that a secretive communist dictatorship was being forthcoming with the rest of the world. Others are liberals, and tend to default to believing commies. Just ask any American liberal about healthcare in Cuba and strap in.” – STEPHEN KRUISER

“One of the things about medicine is that no matter how out of your depth you feel, there is always someone, somewhere, who has seen it before and knows what to do. No one has seen this before.” – DR. MAX PEMBERTON                                    (A Brit M.D., author and columnist for THE DAILY MAIL.)

“The chattering, clapping classes who champion the lockdown have no idea of the grinding poverty or bleak reality of people’s lives and the way the lockdown has compounded and crystallized the misery they experience. It’s not all banana bread and Zoom yoga.” – DR. MAX PEMBERTON (on 30 May 2020)

“Those of us who are still not communists can be made to look heartless whenwe point out that the economy should not be destroyed in the process of defeating the disease. We appear to be putting money before life. No, we are suggesting that the two tend to go together. The word ‘economy’ sounds technical. In fact, in its Greek origin and its early usage in English, it mean ‘The management of a family; the government of a household’ (Johnson’s Dictionary). It is the word for how we make life in society work. Communism is the word for how we make it collapse.” – CHARLES MOORE

“’Years from now, when the American public’s memory of the Wuhan virus craze has crystallized into something coherent, it’s a good bet most of us will see the economic shutdown that was the governmental reaction as the dumbest, most wasteful, and most abusive error made on this continent since a government not of the people passed the Intolerable Acts of the early 1770s and was shortly thereafter dispatched from the 13 colonies.” – SCOTT MCKAY                                                                 (in the AmSpec, 15 May 2020)

"On the upside... Many of us may discover that we look better in a face mask. I do. Maybe strict Muslims are onto something here. Perhaps this is the secret to the burka. Although they really ought to use it on the guys." -- P. J. O'ROURKE

"The pandemic will bring a change in social status. People who used to be the upper crust are looking more and more like nothing but a bunch of crumbs who stick together, hunkered down in their summer houses learning to live without domestic help. Former Wall Street "Masters of the Universe" are boning up on the Chapter 11 chapter in their old business school textbook. If you're used to having people bow and scrape to you, now is not the time to be an oil baron, CEO of J. Crew, or the captain of a Carnival Cruise Line ship. A new elite is emerging, a different kind of aristocracy that we all look up to and to whom we all owe the greatest respect and deference...'We're so proud of our son at Yale – he's studying to be a grocery store checkout clerk'." -- P. J. O'ROURKE

"I suppose we get the crisis we deserve. Before the coronavirus outbreak, our nation was deeply divided. Americans were becoming painfully separated by ideology and culture. It seemed as if we were losing touch with each other. A crisis is supposed to bring people together... And now we get a crisis that keeps people six feet apart." -- P. J. O'ROURKE

"Politicians always find it easier to take on new powers than to give such powers up." – BORIS JOHNSON

“They call it the ‘new normal’. We call it Communism.” – TODD L. GRIFFITH (my Twoot pal and “rabbi”, collaborator with Frank Gaffney and Debbie Aldrich)

“Coronomics, like any other kind of economics, is a study of scarce resources.” – KATE ANDREWS (in the UK SPECTATOR, 4 April 2020)

“It’s the first time in my adult life when it is possible to imagine totalitarianism in the west. Equally frightening is the strength of the panic-ridden ‘totalitarian outlook’.” – FREDRIK ERIXON (a Swede, writing in the UK SPECTATOR, 4 April 2020)

“There are many experts in epidemiology and virology who are highly critical of the lockdown strategy. Few are willing to talk on record. There are public health experts arguing that suppression methods will kill more people than the virus. But they struggle to speak plainly, mostly out of fear of the social media mob. Many economists think it is mad to close down entire national production. But they tiptoe around their message because such opinions are threatening the mood of national cohesion.” – FREDRIK ERIXON

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”  ― H. L. MENCKEN

"Has the left gone insane? I mean really. Menstruating people? Drag queens in every school? This is not normal behavior. Someone needs to check the Democratic Party. It's starting to seem like COVID was more like Mad Cow Disease. " -- JAMES WOODS (in May 2023)

"Censorship of scientific discussion permitted policies like school closures." -- JAY BHATTACHARYA    (a prof of medicine at Stanford) 

“The next time someone uses the phrase ‘the new normal’, I may well break my social distancing regimen and chin him.” – ROD LIDDLE

“The lockdown has come as a great boon to the police, who seem to be enjoying it immensely. Freed from the onerous duty of differentiating between criminals and the rest of us, they’ve adopted a fairly gung-ho approach.” – ROD LIDDLE

“The truth is we do not know. We don’t know and the experts don’t know. The epidemiologists are captured by their own paradigms and see only one small margin of what is a very large picture. Further, they change their tune with every day that passes. Fair enough – that is how science works. It is not pristine – it is practiced by fallible humans, however admirable its methodologies. And science is never never certain – something new always comes along, so we should always have our doubts.” – ROD LIDDLE

“Nothing about this small and unpleasant virus thing is ‘abundantly clear’; most of the statistics we have been given so far are close to meaningless.” – ROD LIDDLE (on 11 April 2020)

“Covid – the illness you get only once you are dead.” – ROD LIDDLE

“Covid has been adopted into the political armoury of the absolutist liberal left.” – ROD LIDDLE

“One of the problems in dealing with this pandemic is that it has now become as stalwart a participant in the culture war as transgenderism and throwing statues of white folks into rivers.” – ROD LIDDLE

"Lockdown was a time of government-enforced mass idiocy. An awful lot of what was once the Covid consensus has been proved to be tripe." -- ROD LIDDLE (in May 2023) 

“There was always one key flaw in our species. Which is that someone always shags a monkey. We humans are – perhaps always have been – as weak as our weakest members makes us. And if just one of us chooses of an evening to force themselves on one of our simian cousins, then before long people across the planet start dropping dead. I suppose the monkey-shagger rule will now have to be updated to take into account the fact that someone will always blend a bat.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY (in 21 April 2020)

"What I do know is that a way out of the current predicament becomes an economic necessity long before our world becomes risk-free." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY (in May 2020)

“What we do know is that the Chinese knew about the virus and the dangers of it while keeping the rest of the world in the dark.  They allowed people to continue to leave China and fly abroad long after the authorities locked down flights within their own country.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY (in December 2020)

“I was fascinated how, despite the apparent disappearance of white people from London, the capital keeps going, run by immigrants and the downtrodden. The rich are in their country cottages tweeting about social distancing and playing videos of cats playing violins – but my African brothers and sisters are running the supermarkets, fixing the roads and collecting the rubbish.” – AIDAN HARTLEY (the English farmer who lives in Kenya, when he got trapped in London, in April 2020)

“History shows that plagues tend to be bad for big empires with weak frontiers: ask the roman emperors Marcus Aurelius and Justinian.” – NIALL FERGUSON

“And in how many cases, if actually present, was Covid-19 responsible for death? Despite what you may have understood from the daily briefings, the shocking truth is that we just don’t know. How many of the excess deaths during the epidemic are due to Covid-19, and how many are due to our societal responses of healthcare reorganisation, lockdown and social distancing? Again, we don’t know. Despite claims that they’re all due to Covid-19, there’s strong evidence that many, perhaps even a majority, are the result of our responses rather than the disease itself.” – DR. JOHN LEE (and English professor of pathology, in the SPECCIE on 30 May 2020)

"Viruses have been chasing men since before we climbed down from the trees. Our bodies fight them off and learn in the process. We get sick. It's horrible, sometimes fatal. But viruses recede, our body's defences learn and strengthen. The process has been happening for millions of years, which is why more than 40% of our enome is made of incorporated viral genetic material. The spread of viruses like Covid-19 is not new. What's new is our response. Now we have new tools that let us spot (and name) new viruses. We watch their progress in real time, plotting their journeys across the world, then sharing the scariest stories on social media. So the standard progress of a virus can, in this way, be made to look like a zombie movie. the whole Covid drama has really been a crisis of awareness of what viruses normally do, rather than a crisis cause by an abnormmally lethal new bug." -- DR. JOHN LEE (in the SPECCIE in July 2020)

"We got the wrong advice from the wrong people: modelers and sociologists. The modellers were bloody useless because they didn't put the right things in their model. The sociologists were bloody useless because they thought people wouldn't put up with lockdown until there was a big pile of corpses." -- JULIAN PETO (Prof of Epidemiology at the London School Of Hygiene -- a school I must say I'd never heard of....)

“(Anna) Wintour will never catch the virus. Corona won't go near her." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

"What's remarkable about the COVID response is the way it combines dramatic overreach with utter toothlessness." -- JACOB SIEGEL         (a senior writer at THE TABLET magazine)

"Simply unreal. Unreal. Never in human history has a nation intentionally wiped out its own economy. And did so with the consent of the people. Staggering levels of immature, hysterical stupidity. And we are going to pay dearly for it. Lockdown a country. Lol. How stupid." -- JESSE KELLY (blogger and big man on the Twoot)

"Villainy wears many masks, none so dangerous as the mask of virtue." -- WASHINGTON IRVING

"It was a night of Schrödinger's virus -- she both had it and didn't have it." -- STEVE TOLTZ (in his 2022 novel "Here Goes Nothing")

"Lockdown was the greatest interference in personal liberty in our history." -- TOBY YOUNG (he means British history, of course.) 

“... rejecting herd immunity in famour of herd opinion...” – TOBY YOUNG

"I know more about biological warfare than most of you. We were trained. These dumb ass masks do nothing. Nothing." -- ROBERT J. O'NEILL

“The coronavirus has sent the world into a state of psychotic delirium.” – BERNARD-HENRI LEVY

“Viruses come from China like shortstops come from the Dominican Republic.” – BILL MAHER

“When future historians look back on 21st-century mortality statistics, they will struggle to find anything out of the ordinary in 2020. When they look at the economic data they could be forgiven for thinking we were hit by an asteroid.” – CHRISTOPHER SNOW (English journalist, author of “The Nanny State”, in Sept. 2020)

"You can't argue wearing a face mask. It just makes you sound like Hannibal Lecter." -- MELISSA KITE (she might have added that at best, it makes you look and sound ridiculous)

“No one in government seems to have stopped to think how one could control a virus even in theory. One might as well set out to control death.” – MELISSA KITE

"I just think COVID is God's gift to the Left." -- JANE FONDA                                                                                                          (7 October 2020)

"This coronavirus pandemic crisis is a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision." -- REP. JAMES CLYBURN (The black Democrat hack from South Carolina, in March 2022, and, along with Hanoi Jane's admission, above, it just shows that they don't even feel the need to make any effort any more.)

"This pandemic is small by historical standards. What's new, this time, is our reaction, not the virus." -- JOHAN NORBERG (author of "Open: The Story Of Human Progress")

"You can’t escape a virus once it is in the population. It must take its course. This is a scientific fact. This is why EVERY time a lockdown is eased we get more infections, and will ALWAYS get more infections, no matter how many lockdown iterations are imposed." -- DR. DAVID SAMADI, MD (NYC doctor, author, big Twoot presence)

"From the outset, there was only one solution to Covid: herd immunity. Yet that was a disastrous phrase. It made human beings sound like cattle. so why not call it 'collective immunity'?" -- BRUCE ANDERSON (The ex-Deputy Editor of THE SPECTATOR)

“The most significant and lasting change brought about by Covid is that it has woken the West up to the threat posed by Communist China.” – JAMES FORSYTH           (in Dec. 2020)

"Stopping humans from being humans will not stop a virus from being a virus." -- ROGER W. KOOPS                                           (U Cal chemist, as quoted by Mark Steyn on Rush's show)

“While there is no clear evidence to date that national lockdowns actually save more lives, there is plenty of evidence that lockdowns ruin lives.” – THE REVEREND DR. IAN STACKHOUSE (of Guildford, Surrey, England – in January 2021)

“The Covid-19 pandemic is like a crisis designed by introverts. Lockdown, of course, is the biggest mass house arrest in living memory.” – JENNY McCARTNEY

“If masks work, how come they don’t work?” – DAN BONGINO

 "We cover our faces with wisps of cotton, hoping to outwit a virus as ancients tied garlic around their necks to protect them from werewolves and carried clove-scented handkerchiefs toward off bubonic plague." -- DAVID MAMET

“The case for masks making a better than negligible difference to the spread of Covid-19 has always been crap. The whole masking theater amounts to pointless, gesturing obeisance.” – LIONEL SHRIVER (in May 2021)

“You can’t run a society just to stop the hospitals from being full.” – WILLIAM REES-MOGG (The Conservative Leader of the UK House of Commons, in 2021. Fun dude, in fact – goes around in a top hat.)

“Saint Francis of Assisi kissed the leper. It is easy to imagine the response if he tried to kiss a Covid patient today. He would probably be arrested.” – A. N. WILSON (in June 2021)

“COVID is becoming the Afghanistan of pandemics. Where, when and how does the burgeoning Forever Pandemic end?” – BENJAMIN WEINGARTEN (in NEWSWEEK, 23 September 2021)

“Masks are a sacrament of the new leftist Democrat religion. Other sacraments include abortion.” – NICK SEARCY (the American actor, on 30 Sept. 2021)

“Covid is the symptom. Communism is the virus.” -- SAMUEL M'CHEYNE GLASSER

“Covid isn’t all bad. After all, it seems to have cured the flu."-- SAMUEL M'CHEYNE GLASSER

“I find it astonishing that in 2020, a smile or a hug has become an act of revolution.”  - KARA D. SPAIN (the American pote)

"You should think less of the intelligence of any public official who really thinks mask mandates on airplanes do anything other than agitate normal people and empower smug neurotics." -- BUCK SEXTON (one of the "designated replacements" of Rush Limbaugh, on 24 Oct. 2021)

"Masks are about sending a message -- well I don't like the message!" -- SIR DESMOND SWAYNE (A Conservative Member of the UK Parliament, in 2021)

"Covid is critical because this is what convinces people to accept to legitimize total biometric surveillance. We need to not just monitor people, we need to monitor what’s happening under their skin” -- MAAJID NAWAZ (A prominent, London-based self-described "radical")

"The day our elected officials hid the efficacy of Hydroxychloroquine, it confirmed they would kill us to beat President Trump. Never forget the evil we are fighting." -- ROBERT JAMES RICHIE (KID ROCK)

"I do not believe the CCP intentionally unleashed COVID-19on the world as a bioweapon, though I could be wrong." -- MIKE POMPEO      (I think you are wrong, Mike....)

Coronavirus, “Gain Of Function”

“The purpose of all these virus hunts and experiemnts was to predict and avert the next pandemic. At best they failed in that; at worst they might have caused it.” – MATT RIDLEY (in May, 2021, and that’s putting it too politely. There’s a lot of blood on a lot of hands out there, ahem, Dr. Fow Chi....)

"The purpose of this highly risky experiment, by the way, was to test how dangerous newly discovered viruses were on human beings (in the Wuhan lab), the virological equivalent of looking for a gas leak with a lighted match." -- MATT RIDLEY (in June 2023) 

Coronavirus Vaccine, The

“Why take a vaccine that’s maybe only 95% effective for a virus that has a 99.98% recovery rate?” – SAMUEL M’CHEYNE GLASSER

“Fake vaccines for a fake virus that caused a fake election.” – SAMUEL M’CHEYNE GLASSER (I think my old pal Sam is exercising poetic license here, but it makes a great soundbite nevertheless.)

"Oh dear. We have just lost our excuse for everything." –  IVO DAWNAY (A British journalist on the phone to his friend P. J. O’Rourke, on the introduction of the vaccine.)

“This is the first time in history that the ineffectiveness of a medicine is being blamed on those who haven’t taken it.” – DR. ROBERT MALONE (the inventor of something called “mRNA technology”, in December 2021 – after he’d been booted from the Twoot, for heresy against Leftist orthodoxy)

Coronavirus “Variants”

“More important than the particulars is the knee-jerk impulse to restore restrictions, whatever they are, when restrictions don’t work, and at some point this gestural fiddling with what we can and can’t do in the face of a pathogen whose progression is out of our hands has to stop. Omnicron is ‘of concern’? Then sit around being concerned.” – LIONEL SHRIVER (in Dec. 2021)

Corporations/“Corporatism”

“If corporations aren't people, what about governments?” – JAMES TARANTO

                                                                                                                                                                                                                   "Within companies there are no profit centers, only cost centers. Whether a particular cost yields a profit is determined voluntarily by customers and investors." -- PETER DRUCKER

                                                                                                                                                                                                                    "Sooner or later, if you scratch deep enough, you'll discover that every corporation in the world is owned by Sony Polygram." -- JAMES JOLIS                                 (and, in his defense, my sainted rock ‘n’ roller brother said this in the mid-late 80s, when it still did seem to be the case....)

“ ‘Corporation’ assumes ‘people’ the way ‘hive’ assumes ‘bees’.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Most things don’t exist. The Ford Motor Company hardly exists. It’s just a time-saving expression for a collection of financial interests.” – JESSE ARMSTRONG                                                                                                                                     (the screenwriter for the final Episode 10 of Season 2 of the TV blockbuster series “Succession”, as spoken by the   patriarch tycoon Logan Roy.)

“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of the state and corporate power.” -- BENITO MUSSOLINI

Corruption

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

“People in positions of responsibility who simply steal money probably do less harm than teachers who propagandize their students, media who slant the news, or politicians who sell out their country’s interests in order to get reelected.” - THOMAS SOWELL

"He that accuses all mankind of corruption ought to remember that he is sure to convict only one." - EDMUND BURKE

"How small should government be? Small enough that it is not worth corrupting." -- JAMES PETHOKOUKIS

“The biggest source of corruption isn't money, but friendship.” – SIDNEY GOLDBERG (Jonah’s dad)

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

“Every mass movement in America becomes a racket in the end.” – ERIC HOFFER

"'Corruption' is a subtle word, because it describes a process rather than an event. It does not merely mean bad behaviour; it means behaviour that becomes rotten out of something which was once good. That is why it often afflicts high-minded organisations more than ordinary businesses. People who think they are collectively moral are more self-deceiving than the average market trader." -- CHARLES MOORE

"Until Goldman Sachs has a navy, a nuclear weapon, police, or prisons, we probably should consider political corruption and incompetence much more dangerous and consequential than its corporate counterpart." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“It was illegal for them to give, but not for me to receive.” – EDWIN EDWARDS (Former jailed-Governor of LA,)

“I just received the following wire from my generous Daddy: Dear Jack, Don't buy a single vote more than is necessary. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for a landslide.” -- JOHN F. KENNEDY (He actually said this. And he was referring to well-founded accusations of hankus-pankus in the Democratic primary in West Virginia, but may I add this: There may have been crooked elections before Kennedy's victory over Nixon in '60, but until that time none had been as blatant as what went down in Illinois – Mayor Daley's Cook County – and Lyndon Johnson's Texas that year, which gave him the whole shebang -- in fact, it was so in-your-face that the  Democrats never even bothered much to deny it... Now, of course, the monstrous Democrat election-heist of   2020 dwarfs all that....)

"The political allocation of wealth and opportunity is not merely susceptible to corruption -it IS corruption."-- GEORGE WILL

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

"Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder." -- GEORGE WASHINGTON

"I am not corrupt, I have been corrupted by corruptees." -- JACOB ZUMA (outgoing president of Souse Efrika, in Jan. 2018)

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

“When corruption becomes the norm, the legal system will be rigged to ignore it… and a moral code will evolve which glorifies it.” – SAMUEL M’CHEYNE GLASSER  
"When the state was most corrupt, laws were most abundant." -- TACITUS

Cosmology

“The sun is a star. God is a man. Humanism said Man is a god. Today the sages say via such Jainist  cosmologies as string theory and the inflationary hypothesis, that everything is nothing. The cosmos is a free lunch, a quantum fluctuation.” – JOHN UPDIKE (in the immortal word of “Fawlty Towers”’ Manuel, “Que?”)

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. 'Spontaneous creation' is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist." -- STEPHEN HAWKING (and I'm bound to say that I never in my puff -- as P. G. Wodehouse would say -- ever heard any more pluperfect horseshit than this....) 

“Cosmopolitanism”

“It used to be that cosmopolitanism was largely the attitude of philosophers and critics of society – outsiders. Now a broadly cosmopolitan sensibility infuses our elite in government, academia, and business.” – RICH LOWRY (in Nov. 2019)

"But you’d be surprised how very little worldly people know about the world, and how much of our political discourse consists of 'I went to Copenhagen once and it was really nice so let’s have socialism.' It is bananas." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"He who lived the world over lived nowhere." -- MARTIAL (the Roman satirist, full name Marcus Valerius Martialis, 38-102 AD)

"He lives in-between, neither resident nor tourist: a man less than local but far from lost." -- FRANK LAWTON (an English journalist, and I specially like that "...a man less than local but far from lost" -- it sounds like it could be the title of a Joe Walsh album....) 

Costa Rica

“Costa Rica: Land of the Wanted and Unwanted" – ROGER HARRISON (author)

Counterculture

"Want to be a rebel? Be a conservative. Today’s counterculture is conservative.": -- MARY FRANCES MYLER     (in the AmSpec in July 2024)

Counterinsurgency

"The best way to quiet a country is a good thrashing, followed by great kindness afterwards. Even the wildest chaps are thus tamed," - SIR CHARLES NAPIER (Viceroy of India, and one of my favorite imperialists)

"The reason that counter-insurgencies rarely win - particularly third partyinterventions - is structural, not strategic. It has little to do with what the counter-insurgents did, but rather who they were … More generally counter-insurgencies rarely win because it is easier to blow up a school than to build one, and because while government forces are expected to provide a range of services, insurgents get credit for any services they provide. Insurgencies, once established, run downhill. Counter-insurgencies, always, run uphill." -- BERNARD FINEL (of the American Security Project and Georgetown U.)

"The nation's keenest cultural anthropologists, most hands-on social scientists, and best foreign-aid society (are) the United States Army and Marine Corps. A counterinsurgency requires understanding human motivation and the particularities of a situation and culture; abstractions are useless." -- RICH LOWRY

“A maturely executed counterinsurgency campaign is something like chemotherapy: It is an intensive attack on the entire body politic carried out in the hopes that the healthy organs survive and the tumor does not.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

Counterintelligence

"Counterintelligence is like playing chess blindfolded."-- ROBERT BAER

 "Fortunately for me, and unfortunately for everybody else, counterintelligence, it turns out, is a growth business." -- MIKE CASEY     (the head of American counterintelligence -- the NCSC -- in April 2024)

Counterterrorism

“Because terrorism is such an enormous problem-it takes place constantly, all over the world, in conflict zones and in big cities, in more and less developed countries-one can find an example of just about every anti-terrorist tactic working (or failing to).” --  NICHOLAS LEMANN (a Columbia journalism prof)

“Just as there is nothing rational about terrorism, so there is nothing rational about counter-terrorism" – CHARLES COGAN (ex-big deal in the CIA, later a professor at Harvard. A liberal – natch – and I think he’s wrong here – both terrorism and counter-terrorism can indeed be perfectly “rational” – but it makes for a nice aphorism

“Sometimes, stopping terrorism is about seeing what is there in front of you.” – JONATHAN HALL QC (The Brit “Independent Reviewer of Terrorist Legislation” – whatever that is when it’s at home.)

Countries                                                                                                                                             

“Greece belongs to the category of nations/ethnicities that are their own worst enemies, a category in which I’d include Ireland, Italy, the Arabs, and China. Compare, say, the Japanese, Israelis, and Turks, who, whatever their internal disagreements and dysfunctions, turn as one body to face the outside enemy.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

“You cant be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.” – FRANK ZAPPA

"Never judge a country by its airport road." -- IVO DAWNAY (Boris Johnson's brother-in-law, and a chap who calls himself an "Anglo-European freelance journalist, boulevardier and curmudgeon". And he was referring to the country of Georgia, here, but it applicable to anywhere)

The smaller the country, the longer the memory." -- ANDREW MARR (The BBC's version of Bret Baer, here talking about Croatia -- specifically of a massacre conducted there by invading Ottoman Notmuslims against the locals in the  14th century, but he could just as easily be speaking of Belgostan...)

Countryside, The

“There is nothing good to be had in the country, or, if there is, they will not let you have it.” - WILLIAM HAZLITT (I suspect what the old grouch was referring to was “fun” of any kind, rather than “the country”…)

 “Personally I like to live where I can hear the birds cough.” – SIMON BRETT

“That's the trouble with these countryside moments: they don't last. Reality tends to stick an oar in.” – SEBASTIAN FAULKS (in his Wodehouse tribute “Jeeves And The Wedding Bells”)

“In town, people know exactly how well you’re doing by where you live, what you wear, how recently you’ve done up your home. But in the sticks it’s much harder to gauge. People with enormous houses may in fact be skint; people who look like peasants may own acres worth many millions. Either way, it really doesn’t matter. And this is another thing I’ve learned since the days when I imagined that it was all about class: people judge you much less than you’d think: if you want to kid yourself that you’re a country squire then, damn it, you are a country squire. Everyone’s far too busy concealing their own dark weird secrets or flaunting their own eccentricities to worry much about anybody else’s.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

“The one thing, I concede, that the countryside does very well and that is dew.” – STEPHEN FRY

"You knew the countryside was a bunch of pesticide-sodden fields joined together by motorways and subject to an everlasting planning ruction, a tree-filled suburbia and backdrop for estate agency where nothing of interest has happened since the Creation. So why did you go?" -- STEPHEN PILE (the author of the "Heroic Failure" series of books) 

“Landscape, for Americans, is still something you travel through to get somewhere else.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS

Courage

“Happiness depends on freedom and freedom on courage.” - PERICLES (they certainly don’t make Griks like they used to….)

“Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at its testing point.” – C.S. LEWIS

"Everyone senses something is wrong, but no one has the courage or energy to set it right." – ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

“Like most people, she didn’t have the courage to say she lacked the courage.” – TOM WOLFE

«Courage is being scared to death... and saddling up anyway.» - JOHN WAYNE

«A man of courage never needs weapons, but he may need bail.» -LEWIS MUMFORD (a lib writer and philosopher and famous «city planner», 1895-1990, and while his little utterance here may be cute, weapons sure help....)

"Modern secular America is producing a generation of wingless chickens." -- FLANNERY O'CONNOR

«Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live, taking the form of a readiness to die.» --G.K. CHESTERTON

"True courage will do without witnesses what others may do in front of all the world." -- PETER O'TOOLE (in his 1991 autobiography "Loitering With Intent")

"A hero isn't braver than ordinary men, he's just braver five minutes longer." -- RALPH WALDO EMERSON (I always took this guy, with his "transcendentalism" and whatnot, to be a bit of an airy-fairy blowhard -- not to mention I was always getting him mixed up with Oliver Wendell Holmes -- but here, I gotta admit, he's getting, as Tony Joe White liked to say, closer to the truth.)

«I don't ask you to be unafraid, simply to act unafraid.» – GENERAL CHARLES GEORGE «CHINESE» GORDON (Yup, the guy played by Charlton Heston in «Khartoum»)

«Courage is very close to stupidity.» – SIR STIRLING MOSS (The legendary English Formula 1 champion from the late 40s to the early 60s)

"The deed is all, not the glory." -- EDWARD C. BYERS JR.,                                                                                                                       (Navy SEAL, MOH recipient)

«Bravery is the capacity to behave properly even when scared half to death.» – GEN. OMAR BRADLEY

«Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision.» – WINSTON CHURCHILL

"Sir, they've got us surrounded again, the poor bastards." — CREIGHTON ABRAMS                                                                        (As a Major, tank battalion commander, to his boss Gen George Patton, at the Battle of Bastogne (The Battle of the Bulge), 1945)

"It is comparatively easy to be brave when you have the entire establishment behind you." -- ROD LIDDLE

"Courage is not constant. Even the stoutest warriors need encouragement." -- BING WEST

Courtesy

"We no longer understand the meaning of the word 'respect', which has spawned wokeism in all its forms. The truth is we owe courtesy, we earn respect and we give love. The sooner we talk about courtesy again, the better it will be for everyone." -- MORAG CUMMINGS (A letter-writer to the SPECTATOR from Durham, England, on 13 Sept. 2022)

Cowardice

“Silence is not golden, it's yellow!” – TERRI HILL (A patriotic lady Tweeter from Texas)

"If the highest aim of a captain's were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever." -- SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS 

"A coward  is more dangerous than a cruel man." -- AZIZ BINE-BINE (A Moroccan political prisoner, here describing his jailers, in his book "Tazmamart")

"Cowardice is contagious." -- LIONEL SHRIVER 

"Cowardice is a stronger moral force than conscience." -- DONALD WESTLAKE (it's odd to think of cowardice as "a moral force", but... whatever....)

Craziness

"Your theory's crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true." - NIELS BOHR (to a fellow physicist)

Creation(ism)

“In the beginning there was nothing.  And God said, ‘Let there be Light.’  And there was Light.  And there was still nothing, but you could see it better.” - LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN (this, I supposed, is what passes in philosophical circles as a witticism. It’s not, but you can always impress somebody with a  Wittgensteinism, I suppose….)

"I must admit that we simply do not know how the universe can come into being without intervention." -- PETER ATKINS (Professor of Physics at Oxford University, and a reluctant convert to this conclusion)

Creativity

"Creativity is the foundation of wealth." -- GEORGE GILDER

“The very nature of creativity is that it always comes as a surprise to us. If it didn’t we could predict it and plan it.” – GEORGE GILDER

"Creativity always comes as a surprise to us." -- ALBERT HIRSCHMAN (A Princeton economist)

"As Princeton economist Albert Hirschman has put it, 'creativity always comes as a surprise to us.' If it were not surprising, we could plan it, and socialism would work." -- GEORGE GILDER

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

"Creativity is intelligence having fun." – ALBERT EINSTEIN (Sounds good, but I’m not sure how universally true it is – I don’t know how much fun Michelangelo had painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel… nor, come to think of it, was it much “fun” writing my novels….)

“Pioneers make history, not money.” – KEVIN BROWNLOW (Sometimes yes, and sometimes no. But it's a snappy epigram. Brownlow, by the way, is an English author and cinema expert)

"Intelligence is a function of Curiosity while Creativity is a function of Imagination." -- JACK JOLIS

“(During the decline of the Roman Empire), bizarreness masqueraded as creativity.” – EDWARD GIBBON

"For every electrician who could mend a fuse there were ten people who wanted to play Lear. Just as there are dozens of people who can write books and remarkably few who can do something useful and difficult like setting up type or correcting proofs. Somewhere or other along the evolutionary line process, something went wrong with humanity." -- PHILIP THODY (the British professor of things French, in 1979) 

Credentials/“Credentialism”

“She identifies as a ‘doctor’, having completed a PhD in Specious Twatter at some dimbo college in Canada.” – ROD LIDDLE

“Four years into most jobs, nobody gives a damn what degree you have.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

“No man should, in my judgment, accept a degree he cannot read.” – MILLARD FILLMORE (Upon refusing to accept an honorary degree from Oxford University, on the grounds that he knew no Latin.)

"This problem, of substituting the credential for the competence, is everywhere."-- SARAH HOYT

“If everyone had one fewer degree, workers would be ranked in exactly the same order, and little of value would be lost.” – BRYAN CAPLAN (author of the book “The Case Against Education”, and this is a simply brilliant insight.)

“Facts and data are independent of your credentials.” – AARON GINN (Silicon Valley tech and co-founder of the disgusting “The Lincoln Project”)

"The logical endpoint of the cycle of credential inflation is janitors and babysitters requiring PhDs." -- DAVID GOODHART (author of the book "Head, Hand And Heart: The Struggle For Dignity And Status in the 21st Century")

“Oddly enough, as ill-educated as we are these days, we have never had more people with more degrees.” – DON SURBER (yeah, “oddly enough”. Anyway, he said this on 23 August 2021)

"If a book lists the letters 'Ph.D' after the author's name, be wary. The author needs those letters to signal his importance. It usually means the author is not used to interacting with peers, is appealing to the gullible, or is making questionable claims. Stephen Hawking does not use those three little letters." -- TYLER COWEN (the author of "Big Business")

"You got your piece of paper and yet you know nothing. That’s progressivism in a nutshell. Credentials and failure." -- KURT SCHLICHTER (23 July 2022) 

“Credentials are no longer the proxy for knowledge that they once were; the internet has removed the gatekeepers of even the most specialized information.” -- JOSH KRAUSHAAR (of the NATIONAL JOURNAL, in Jan. 2022)

"If printing money could end poverty, printing diplomas could end stupidity."-- JAVIER MILEI       (President of Argentina) 

             
Credulity/Credibility

“I did not tell half of what I saw, for I knew I would not be believed.” – MARCO POLO

Cricket

“Cricket is organized loafing.” - WILLIAM TEMPLE (a former Archbishop of Canterbury)

“Cricket is a game invented by the English who not being a spiritual people needed something to give themselves a concept of eternity.” -- JONATHAN AITKEN (the former British Conservative MP, friend of Nixon, and born-again Christian.)

"Watching cricket is like watching a man collecting stamps." -- PROF. JOHN GREENWAY

"Apart from the Queen, gin, bagpipes and short trousers, the thing that keeps the British Commonwealth together is cricket." -- GEORGE COURTAULD (in his 1995 "The Travels Of A Fat Bulldog")

“Some very strange things pass as entertainment today.” – E.W. SWANTON (A British journalist in the middle of watching the third day of a 5-day cricket match.)

“Other games have rules, but cricket has laws.” – ALEX MASSIE

“Cricket helped make England a civilised country.” – MIKE BREARLEY (an ex-cricket star – captain of England, actually. And something of an intellectual – author of “Spirit of Cricket”)

“If the French aristocracy had played cricket with their peasants, the Revolution might have been deemed unnecessary.” – G.M. TREVELYAN (English historian – 1876-1962)

"There is nothing in world sport, nothing in the history of the human race, that can remotely match the passions that surround Indian cricket." -- RAMACHANDRA GUHA (An Indian author and cricket writer, and before you dismiss this as TOTAL hyperbole, remember that the   population of India was, when he wrote this, some 1.4 billion -- and they're all mad cricket fans.)

Crime

“The criminal justice system has got it all out of kilter.  We treat the motorist like a pariah and the burglar like a victim.” - GLEN SMYTH (of the British Police Federation, in 2001)

“The fact is that crime pays - for the professional classes called upon to deal with criminals.  The worse the populace behaves, the more money they make.  It means that evil is the root of all money. “ - THEODORE DALRYMPLE

“It is fear of painful retribution, not intellectual argument, which is the most powerful deterrent to crime.” - NORMAN TEBBIT (an ex- British Airways pilot, now a curmudgeonly Lord,” Tebbit” - as he signs his letters - was Maggie Thatcher’s “hard man enforcer”.  He talks painfully good sense, and he was always my favorite Thatcherite.)

“Have you noticed how whenever there's a news story about some crazed (alleged) killer, his neighbors always describe him as "nice" and "quiet"? It really makes ME glad the people who live near ME are loud jerks.” - JAMES TARANTO

“Crime problems are not ‘solved’, they are managed.” - ANDREW C. McCARTHY

"The chief inspector didn't like alibis. Innocent people rarely had much in the way of an alibi." -- LIONEL DAVIDSON 

“It is curious - is it not? - how everyone has at least one kind of criminal offence that he wants to see punished most severely, perceiving with perfect clarity the logic of long imprisonment as preventive for that particular type of crime. But he cannot see that precisely the same logic must apply to all other forms of crimes.” - THEODORE DALRYMPLE

“The truth is that it is not so much unemployment that causes crime as a culture that denigrates or discourages employment, making crime seem more normal and desirable than work.” - GERTUDE HIMMELFARB

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

"The protection of the population from crime is not an optional extra for the state once it has paid for the sex-change operations of those who want them, etc., but comes very close to the state's whole raison d'etre, and rulers who fail in this regard are no longer legitemate, but parasites upon the body politic." -- THEODORE DALRYMPLE

"The amount of crime in this country greatly exceeds the supply of punishment." -- MIKE ROYKO (the late crotchety old Chicago oracle)

"The most effectual way to prevent greater crimes is by punishing the smaller." -- WILLIAM WILBERFORCE (the same fellow who abolished slavery.)

"When it comes to a criminal record, it is better to have a past than a future." -- ALAIN JUPPE (a fellow French presidential candidate, to Sarkozy in 2016)

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

“Nobody's ever been arrested for a murder; they have only ever been arrested for not planning it properly.” – TERRY HAYES

"You never do anything illegal unless you have The Law on your side." -- SALVADOR VILLASENOR (A successful California bootlegger, advising his son victor, who was trying to enter the business)

“One of the few things I feel entitled to guess about kidnappers is that they do not go to all the trouble of grabbing a customer only to find themselves with an overdraft to pay off.” – ALAN COREN (in 1975)

"Successful kleptocrats tend, perversely, to favor the rule of law, so as to protect what they have stolen." -- MARK GALEOTTI (the author of "Putin's Wars") 

“Making a getaway by (NYC) subway is not good for the nerves. The train just barely gets rolling pretty good when it slows down again, and stops, and the doors slide open in a very ominous way.” – DONALD WESTLAKE                                                      (in 1965. Though things haven’t changed much on the subway since then – certainly not on the R train in Brooklyn!)

"Sailer's Law of Mass Shootings:

If there are more wounded than killed, then the shooter is likely black.

If there are more killed than wounded, then the shooter is likely not black." -- STEVE SAILER

"It is vital to always keep open that little possibility that it was all an accident, to unnerve any accuser, since no accuser can ever be 100% sure." -- JAMES HAWES

"Funny how there were laws against people who stole your money but no legal redress of any kind against people who stole your time." -- PHILIP THODY (I agree -- with knobs on -- specially inasmuch as more often than not, time is more valuable than money. Anyway, Professor Thody said this in 1979)

" 'Bail Reform Laws' -- that's the euphemism for 'Democrats Putting Criminals Back On The Streets As Quickly As Possible'." -- CHRIS PLANTE (Sept. '23)

Crime, (“hate”)

“Hatred is never a crime. The ‘hate crime’ label speaks of a society that is already on the road to forgetting that we claim the power (in this free land) to police your actions, not your emotions.” - DAVID HOROWITZ (ex-“New-Leftist”, now raging anti-Leftist, fighting the good fight, specially in The jungles of American academia…)

"The word 'hate' in the criminal context, now officially refers only to hatred of minority groups. This gravely limits its meaning." -- CHARLES MOORE

Crime (Prevention)

“Instead of trying to correct the intolerable way some people behave, we’d do better to correct the weakness of character of the people who let them get away with it.” - NICOLAS-SEBASTIEN CHAMFORT (a wise but unfortunate French gentleman  who was pursued to his death by the Revolutionary Terror. 1741-1794 — his life, not the Terror).

“There is something pathetic and perverse about demands for cod rape crisis centers, security bolts and self-defense classes from those doing their best to promote the very social conditions which necessitates such services.” - PATRICIA MORGAN (A British “criminologist”, and one of the very few sensible ones I’ve ever heard from.)

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

"The DA’s role has really no impact on crime.” --  PAMELA PRICE (the Alameda County, California, Demo☭rat District Attorney -- in July 2023.  And this really is "One For The Ages" -- akin to Angie Motshekga's, over in "Education" ) 

Crisis (-es)

“No two crises have anything in common except human nature.” - DOMINIC CROSSLEY-HOLLAND (A British economist and TV producer)

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

“There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.” -- HENRY KISSINGER

"Crises generate platitudes." -- WILLIAM SAFIRE     (the old Nixon speechwriter, in his NY Times "On Language"  column)

«I’ll start believing it’s a crisis when the people who tell me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.» -- GLENN REYNOLDS                                             (The «Instapundit» on the Interwebs, and by day he's a Law Professor at the Univ. Of Tennessee)

Critics, (Criticism)

“A bad review can spoil your breakfast, but you shouldn’t let it ruin your lunch”. - KINGSLEY AMIS (especially when, as in his case, they were both more often than not liquid…)

“’Criticism’ is the disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world and to protect it from the onslaught of philistine barbarians.” - MATTHEW ARNOLD     (bah gum, you don’t hear the likes of THAT much anymore….)

“The commonplace critic is like the chap who believes that truth lies in the middle, between the extremes of right and wrong”. - WILLIAM HAZLITT

“Which brings us back to critics. It is deeply funny that people who cannot write dialogue, and who  cannot direct or act it either, are appointed to pass judgment on those who can. But the reason is obvious – no one with creative abilities wants to be a critic. So the job has to be done by people who are both unqualified, and apparently in desperate need of the very small sums of money it brings.” – JOHN CLEESE

"To all those fuckpigs of multiplicites who have attempted to molest and denigrate these plays, who tried to stop or shift them off the stage, who panned them, who hated them, who coughed during the tender moments, who left before the final curtain, or came late for the first and not least for those who don't know they exist, I hereby dedicate the content which still bring me and mine so much gold." -- J. P. DONLEAVY

“We are not trying to entertain the critics. I’ll take my chances with the public.” – WALT DISNEY

“I always cheer up immensely if criticism is particularly wounding because I think well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.” – MARGARET THATCHER

“If my critics saw me walking over the Thames they would say it was because I couldn't swim.” – MARGARET THATCHER

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

"If you aren't being criticized, there's a good chance you aren't doing anything."– DONALD RUMSFELD

"How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct." -- BENJAMIN DISRAELI

“There is only one way to avoid criticism: Do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.” –  ARISTOTLE

"A fraudulent, irrelevant cacophony perfumed by one unfamiliar with the inherent majesty of the cacophone" -- MIKE MORRISON (in the UK Spectator of 12 November 2022)

“An impresario looks at a critic just as you or I might look at a small child holding a loaded Uzi made of solid gold. If you handle the negotiation successfully you can walk away with a lot of loot. But if you blunder you’ll end up with your brains all over the wall.” – LLOYD EVANS

“When reviewers call a work ‘important’ they mean ‘boring’ and ‘earnest’.” – LLOYD EVANS

"Basquiat is a sulky, self-destructive pea-brain, incapable of original thought or creative inspiration, (and) looking at his canvases is as much fun as inspecting a demolished ironworks." -- LLOYD EVANS

“Critics are kinda like eunuchs, they can watch, critique, condemn and defame, they can rebuke and bluster But they can never, ever participate” – CHARLIE DANIELS (the late country-rock godfather – and outspoken conservative)

«Bad to the point of being laughable, but not to the point of being enjoyable.» -- SUSAN SONTAG

«I had written a punitive review that would have driven them out of business if anyone thought I knew what I was talking about.» -- JAMES LILEKS

“The food was a horror show. The Plaidburger was just that – strips of whitish cheese, limp green peppers, exhausted strips of red peppers, and some lurid yellow extrusion, the general effect looking like a melted pile of crayons. The sort of pattern found on Reagan's jackets. Pouring ketchup on it made it look like a murder scene at a Miami Beach shuffleboard center. “ -- JAMES LILEKS (in his otherwise sadly rather impenetrable novel, «Mr. Obvious»)

"It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death." -- MARK TWAIN (about Jane Austen)

“What I shit is better than anything you could ever think up!”– LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (In response to criticism of his “Wellington's Victory”, which he knew wasn't really up to scratch, but he wanted to make his point about critics anyway....)

“While many critics are failed writers, so are many writers.” – T. S. ELIOT

"I don't read my reviews, I measure them." -- ARNOLD BENNETT (in 1908)

 «As everyone who reviews books knows all too well, most of them can be judged quite easily by their covers.» – TERRY TEACHOUT

"I really don’t think that it’s appropriate to attack comedians. We’re on the right side of things. We’re important people." -- JOY BEHAR (A particularly egregious panelist on a daytime TV program by women, for women, called "The View" -- and I fear  she hasn't quite grasped the essence  of this exotic thing, "comedy")

"Since then I've been masquerading as a literary critic, but criticism isn't real -- it's not a real thing." -- DENIS JOHNSON

"If someone isn't riled by what you write, you aren't writing truthfully enough. Hate mail is what happens when you do." -- WILLIAM GIRALDI     (author of the collection of essays "American Audacity")

“No review is a good review. If something is bad, I will let you know.” – HEATHER WILHELM 

"Wagner has some good moments, but some bad quarters of an hour." -- GIOACHINO ROSSINI (now we know why Rossini, like Cher, is only known by his one name) 

“I never read a book before reviewing it, because I find that doing so prejudices my opinion.” – SYDNEY SMITH

"And it stank! It was the world's ninth worst story, the other eight being in Walloon --" -- DENNIS GUNNING (in his quite amusing, if extremely obscure, 1989 novel "Good Stuff")

"It was one of the weirdest things I've ever read (and I've been in regular correspondence with the Belgian tax authorities since 2007)." -- EMMA BEDDINGTON      (an English lawyer, writer and journalist -- here reviewing a book in 2024)

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." -- WILLIAM FAULKNER (about Ernest Hemingway).

"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it." -- MOSES HADAS (the American 20th century classics-scholar)

"You know what I'd do with a voice like that? Become a janitor." -- PRINCE (PRINCE ROGERS NELSON) (referring to fellow singer, the Irish blowhard "Bono")  

“Criticism and theory make neither a good ruler nor a good artist. One has to be able to do it.” – RICARDA HUCH (A German poet, commenting on her communist rulers in Bavaria in 1919)”

“A wind storm of assertion indiscernible in its parts and knowable mainly through the damage it leaves behind.” – SARAH RUDIN

"He (John Simon) reviews movies in the sense that pigeons review statues." -- WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.

“Susan Sontag – this needy, unreadable, voluntarily difficult, overrate, under-read individual whose (diminishing number of) admirers (in the orbit of the New York Review of Eachother’s Books) mistake incomprehensibility for profundity.” – STEPHEN BAYLEY (The art critic of the UK SPECTATOR)

Croquet

"The day the Englishman can no longer cheat at croquet in his own back garden is the day this creases to be a land fit for heroes." -- SAM LEITH

Crowds

“The future belongs to crowds.” – DON DELILLO (Oh great. In his novel “Mao II”)

“A noisy Crowd, Like Women's Anger, impotent and loud.” -- JOHN DRYDEN (Well, ol' John lived in London from 1631 to 1700, and while his comment might have been accurate back then, I think he'd be astonished, not to say dismayed, to discover the state of play in the twenty-first century.)

“Classically, there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence ― religious meaning ― apart from God as revealed through the cross of Jesus: through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, through the ecstasy of crowds. Church leaders frequently warn against the drugs and the sex, but at least, in America, almost never against the crowds.” -- EUGENE PETERSON (American Protestant clergyman and author)

"Like all crowds, our wishes were patently absurd and often inimical to the individuals who make up our unit." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS 

“I don’t like crowds. I don’t trust them. Good things rarely come from them. Not all crowds are mobs, but all mobs start as crowds, and I’m a little allergic to the vibrations within in them.” -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"Everyone wants to share his own method, hoping for strength in numbers." -- MARK HELPRIN

"In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule." -- FRIEDRICH NIETSCHE

“The greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do.” -- ALDOUS HUXLEY

"Crowds are the last to know or understand anything." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

Cruelty

"Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into the pig Tate's stomach! Wild!" -- BERNARDINE DOHRN (The unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist girlfriend -- now wife -- of unrepentant terrorist -- now professor -- Bill Ayers, speaking at the time of the Charles Manson murders of Sharon Tate and company -- and the reference to Sharon Tate's stomach is that she was pregnant at the time --- these, by the way, are Barack Obama's great friends in Chicago...)

“You cannot unsay a cruel word.” -- WILL ROGERS

Crusades, The

"The Crusades could more accurately be described as a limited, belated and, in the last analysis, ineffectual response to the jihad -- a failed attempt to recover by a Christian holy war what had been lost to a Muslim holy war." -- BERNARD LEWIS (the dean of all writers on Islam and the Middle East)

"Now put this down in your notebook, because it will be on the test: The crusades were in every way a defensive war. They were the West's belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of the Christian world." -- THOMAS MADDEN (distinguished American historian, and a big cheese at St. Louis University)

"The Crusades -- Too little, too late." -- JACK JOLIS

Cruz, Ted

"Off-the-charts brilliant. And you know, liberals make the terrible mistake, including some of my friends and colleagues, of thinking that all conservatives are dumb. And I think one of the reasons that conservatives have been beating liberals in the courts and in public debates is because we underestimate them. Never underestimate Ted Cruz. He is off-the-chart brilliant. I don’t agree with his politics.” – ALAN DERSHOWITZ

"Ted Cruz is the most talented Republican politician I've seen in 30 years. He ain't squishy." -- JAMES CARVILLE

"So give me 'nasty' Cruz. We don’t need deals. We need transformative change. And as President Obama has demonstrated, nasty works." -- BEN SHAPIRO

“I don't want to watch Cruz make speeches. I want to watch Democrats watching Cruz make speeches. In fact, I hope Ted Cruz's acceptance speech begins: 'Alright, you bastards . . .'." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

Crying

“Laugh, and the world laughs with you. Weep, and the world laughs at you.” – JIM TARANTO

"If the London Olympics do not go down in history as the Crying Games, I will perform a sex act on Vladimir Putin in Piccadilly Circus as the clock strikes 12 next New Year's Eve. Olympic winners' tears made the place look like Niagara Falls at times, and with the floods up in Scotland I feared for the safety of cattle and animals. Winners cried much more than losers, which makes the Devil laugh, according to an old proverb." -- TAKI THEODOCOUROPOLOS

"A man who cries is capable of any evil." -- ROBERT CRICHTON                                                                                                         (author of the novel "The Secret of Santa Vittoria")

“You take somebody that cries their goddamn eyes out over phony stuff in the movies, and nine time out of ten they're mean bastards at heart.” -- J.D. SALINGER                                                                                                                                                  (actually, it was Holden Caulfield in “The Catcher In The Rye”)

“I'd been enjoying our argument.  But tears meant the argument was over. One can't argue with blub.” – JON CANTER

"I want to say two things about crying: 1/ It's a highly overrated activity; and 2/ Beware of men who cry." -- NORA EPHRON (roger that on both counts, lady)
                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

"Rot. And dammit, Babs, don't blub. If you think you're old enough to be in love, you're old enough not to blub." -- EVELYN WAUGH (Actually, Basil Seal to his daughter Barbara, in the short story "Basil Seal Rides Again", 1963)

"You cry like a woman, for what you didn't defend as a man" -- AIXA (The mother of the last Muslim king of Spain, Muhammad XII of Granada, known to the Spanish as “Boabdil", to her son after his final defeat at the Battle of Granada, in 1492 -- his surrender to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, by the way, was attended by, among many others, Christopher Columbus.)

“Never promise anything or agree to anything while a woman’s crying.” – KINGSLEY AMIS

Cuba

“Dealing with Cuba is like trying to conduct a polite conversation with a squirrel on your lap.” - JOHN HAY (U.S. Secretary of State at the time of Cuban independence, 1902)

“Everyone in Cuba likes Castro.” - TED TURNER (Strewth. The blithering lunatic said this to THE WASHINGTON POST in 2001)

“Cuba in our time has become the largest country in the world. Its government is in Havana, its administration is in Moscow, its army is in Africa, and its people are in Miami.” - WILLIAM J. CASEY (The Man.  In 1986)

“I think there ought to be a damn sight closer scrutiny of the sweeping assumption that a noble purpose is being served just because someone is reciting our favorite catchwords while he goes around butchering people. . . . You mention, for example, the brutalities of the Batista regime and Castro’s killing of ex-Batista men. . . . In fact, the shooting of ex-Castro men is a far more significant development as an indication of what this regime is and where it is going.” - THOMAS SOWELL (in 1962.!)

"I don't care anything about Cuba. The island would not be worth anything unless it was sunk for 24 hours to get rid of its present population." -- RICHARD F. PETTIGREW (a senator from South Dakota who started out as a Republican and ended up as a left-wing socialist pro-Bolshevist. He said this during the Spanish-American War.)

"They have gun control in Cuba. They have free health care in Cuba. So why do they want to come here?" -- PAUL HARVEY (The ex-radio commenter extraordinaire for a long time the 50s  and 60s, along with Fulton Lewis Jr., the only non-liberal voice in political affairs on the American radio airwaves.)

“What’s the difference between France and Cuba? Cuba does not have strikes.” – PATRICK CHAMOREL (A Frenchman of the Hoover Institution, in 2006)

“Judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail. We execute based on revolutionary conviction.” – CHE GUEVARA                (in 1959)

"Releasing political prisoners in Cuba is an oxymoron. You're just going from a small prison to a large one."– VAL PRIETO (Cuban-American dude, on the Twoot, after the Corpseman's betrayal)

“In a Cuban-American family, there are only two political parties: the Republican party and the Communist party.” – TED CRUZ

"Castro was a hero to progressives because he understood that to make an omelet, you have to nationalize the chicken industry, implement Soviet egg-production techniques that consist of making the chickens watch films of Stalin inspecting farms, imprison the chicken-farm managers who report a 65% drop in output, divert the reduced production to the military, erect enormous posters that blare the phrase SOCIALISMO O HUEVOS so people will inform on neighbors who have eggs. Counterrevolutionaries! Hoarders of the Yanqui Ovals! Then, if you still want to make that omelet, you have to break 5,000 eggs to instill party loyalty in all the other incubating eggs, and then you have to attempt to make an omelet, fail, and purge and execute the top 10% of all the chefs on the island. Final step: Print a week's worth of stories in Granma about increased egg production, complete with pictures of Fidel enjoying an omelet. Run it with a story about blacks in America facing firehoses for trying to get an Egg McMuffin at a segregated McDonald's. End result? Some chefs escape to America and set up an omelet restaurant, and progressives try a genuine Cuban-style omelet and say, 'This is awesome, I can't wait to go to Cuba for the real thing'." -- JAMES LILEKS (My favorite all-time writer from Minnesota)

"One of the greatest benefits of the revolution is that even our prostitutes are college graduates." – FIDEL CASTRO (in 2003 to the egregious sycophant Oliver Stone)

“Fidel Castro created hell on earth for the Cuban people. He will now become intimately familiar with what he wrought.” – TOM COTTON (Senator from Arkansas, At Castro's death in 2016)

"I'd like to get to Cuba just after all the people who have to get to Cuba before Starbucks gets to Cuba have left Cuba." -- BEN STANLEY (Of the University of Sussex, England, in March 2016)

"Conversation in Cuba has to be clever. That's all they have." -- NELSON DEMILLE

"There were four prisons when the communists took over Cuba, now there are two hundred." -- GEORGE COURTAULD (in 1995)

"Poor old Cuba, the people are exceptionally gifted, whether in the arts or sport, but talent and innovation is being crushed under the iron press of socialism." -- GEORGE COURTAULD (the English author and civil servant, in 1995)

"Cuba is basically Denmark with palm trees and life rafts made out of 1958 Edsels." -- DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE             (Uh, for those with no sense of irony, he was being ironic here.)

"Castro's jails are full of dissidents, his graveyards are full of patriots, and his government is full of thugs." -- DONALD TRUMP                   (in 1999. And good on ‘im.)

Cults

“A cult is a religion with no political power.” – TOM WOLFE

“Cultural Appropriation”

“Societies are emergent properties full of other emergent properties.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“Cultural Imperialism”

“Cultural imperialism is no bad thing. Many of us could do with more rather than less of it.” – SHIVA NAIPAUL (in his essay “India And The Nehrus”)

“Cultural Marxism”

"When they realized that the 'proletariat' and the 'means of production' were obsolete and bored everyone to tears, the world's Marxists shitcanned  economics and replaced it with 'culture', i.e., anti-white race-war, 'man-caused' GlobWarm, and sexual weirdnesses of every flavor -- and they've been laffing ever since." -- JACK JOLIS

 "Cultural Marxism is a giant turd that appears to be able to circle the toilet bowl without ever going down." -- ROY CAMERON

"It may well be that Marxism, as an economic system, has been exposed as fantastically inefficient, cruel and soul-destroying, and exists as a force in only one of the world's 196 countries. But boy, does it hold sway when we are discussing social issues, despite the fact that its shibboleths and injunctions here are every bit as lumpen and misguided as are its economic imperatives." -- ROD LIDDLE

Culture

“The mark of a cultured person is the length of time between stimulus and response.” - MICHAEL LEDEEN

“The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.” - DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN (One of only two Democrats I ever voted for - U.S. Senate, against a RINO called Roy Goodman - and, while I’m not so sure about the second part of this nice-sounding thesis of his, he was a great dude….)

“In a religious or culture war, there is no peaceful coexistence.” - PATRICK J. BUCHANAN

"Culture -- that tawdry, cowardly anti-nature." -- JOHN UPDIKE

“A man’s honor rests between the legs of his daughters and sisters. This is culture?” - AYAAN HIRSI ALI (the brave Somali lady who was chased out of Holland to come to rest in the good ol’ USA. Hereasking a pretty logical question of “Islamic” culture….)

“The problem that really interests me is not multiculturalism, but what may justly be called aculturalism. It seems to be the triumph of our technological age to have raised a generation with no discernible culture whatever.” - THEODORE DALRYMPLE

“Human beings are equal, cultures are not.” - AYAAN HIRSI ALI

“Once we distinguish race and culture, the way is open to acknowledge that not all cultures are equally admirable, and that not all cultures can exist comfortably side-by-side.” -- SIR ROGER SCRUTON   

“Not only did Western collections of the art and literature of alien lands long precede Western imperialism, but many imperialisms have existed that never collected anyting: On the contrary, they devoted much more energy to destroying the artifacts of other cultures than to collecting, preserving, or studying them” - THEODORE DALRYMPLE

“We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh, we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on those faces there is no smile.” - HILAIRE BELLOC

"What saddens me above all are the clear signs of rot and decadence germinating within American society-- a rot and decadence that are no longer the consequence of liberalism but are the actual agenda of contemporary liberalism. It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other. It cannot win, but it can make us all losers." -- IRVING KRISTOL

“ The worst thing about the triumph of trash cultureis that people start to forget that it is trash” -- JAMES BOWMAN

"All culture begins with commemoration of the past and honor rendered to the dead." -- JAMES BOWMAN

“Culture exists to protect us against nature.” - SIGMUND FREUD (uh…. OK. You could say the same thing about civilization, actually, but nevermind….)

“Amusingly, the people most outraged by the notion that there is an American culture are often the people most eager to lecture their fellow Americans about the richness, delicacy,; and permanence of nearly every other culture in the world.” - JONAH GOLDBERG

"I’d have so much more respect for the progressives who control the commanding heights of our culture if they had the courage to admitthat they control the commanding heights of the culture and that they’re in the business of imposing orthodoxy." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“Culture is sometimes the way we describe differences in time.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“It is very hard to criticize a musical idiom without standing in judgment on the culture to which it belongs.” - THEODOR ADORNO (the Twentieth Century German philosopher and musicologist)

“Culture is just customary collective behavior. If I ask: "Why do people in this place behave in this way?" and you reply, "Because of their culture," you are asserting that they behave in this way because that's how they behave. "Culture" is a sort of phlogiston or luminiferous æther that sounds as if it's explaining something, but actually isn't. I'd advance it as a good candidate for a word that should be banned from serious social and political discussions.” JOHN DERBYSHIRE

“The new, digital barbarism is, in its language, comportment, thoughtlessness, and obeisance to force and power, very much like the old. It would be one thing if such a revolution produced Mozarts, Einsteins, or Raphaels, but it doesn’t. It produces mouth-breathing morons in backwards baseball caps and pants that fall down; Slurpee-sucking geeks who seldom see daylight; pretentious and earnest hipsters who want you to wear bamboo socks so the world doesn’t end; women who have lizard tattoos winding from the navel to the nape of the neck; beer-drinking dufuses who pay to watch noisy cars driving around in a circle for eight hours at a stretch; and an entire race of females, now entering middle age, that speaks in North American chipmunk and seldom makes a statement without, like, a question mark at the end?” – MARK HELPRIN

"Then there are young people with earphones in their ears and trances on their faces. I wouldn't mind so much if I thought they were listening to anything worthwhile; but they are going deaf from bad taste. Their suffering will be merited, but it will be suffering nonetheless." - THEODORE DALRYMPLE

"Culture, like cod-liver oil, is probably good for you, but it's devilishly painful to swallow." -- PRESTON STURGES (the American playwright, screenwriter and director)

"That there's cultural decay in a declining West is hardly worth arguing about. Nor can one deny that a powerless and increasingly cretinised citizenry has been brainwashed into a state of conformity comparable to domesticated animals, with their lives totally controlled by technology and non-elected bureaucrats." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

"It is not the absence of government, but the rejection of culture which leads to anarchy." -- DAVID MAMET

"American culture is now dominated by envenomed prigs." -- DAVID MAMET (in 2022)
 

“It’s true that culture is more important than politics. You could impose Sweden’s laws on the Middle East tomorrow, but you’d be well-advised not to hold your breath waiting for the Saudis to turn into the Swedes of the Arabian Peninsula.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"I'd trade the whole Acropolis for one American bathroom." -- H.L. MENCKEN

"If Hollywood's liberal, if the newspapers are liberal, if the pop stars are liberal, if the grade schools are liberal, if the very language is liberal to the point where all the nice words have been co-opted as a painless liberal sedative, a Republican legislature isn't going to be a shining city on a hill so much as one of those atolls in the Maldives being incrementally swallowed by Al Gore's rising sea levels." -- MARK STEYN

"The Left understands where the real victories are won: Politics is battle, but culture is the war." -- MARK STEYN

“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

"From the culture, not from Congresses, come values, norms, truths, understandings as to how we must live, and what we must accordingly do/ Government's task is more modest: namely, finding what the people value, then protecting or promoting it." -- WILLIAM MURCHISON (A Texan. Here writing in the Am Spec, in March 2013)

“It is often said that an anthropologist is someone who respects the distinctive values of every culture but his own.” – ROGER KIMBALL

"Our cultural institutions are run by people who hate our culture and our history more broadly." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY (3 December 2022)

“Many are the things on which one opinion is not as good as another, and culture is among them.” -- JOSEPH EPSTEIN

«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 is downstream from culture. Way downstream.” – ANDREW BREITBART (This has become something of an iconic war cry, among us anti-leftists. And rightly so.)

“News is simply what the culture allows. Culture is the lead. That’s the dog. The news is the tail.” – GLENN BECK

"The festival requires style. If those of modern times have lost their cultural value, it is because they have lost style." — JOHAN HUIZINGA (the Dutch historian, in 2014)

“You can't have conservative government in a liberal culture, and that's the position the Republican party is in.  Liberals expend tremendous effort changing the culture. Conservatives expend tremendous effort changing elected officials every other November – and then are surprised that it doesn't make much difference. Culture trumps politics. Liberals understand that it's the 729 days in between elections that you win all the prizes that matter, on all the ground conservatives have largely abandoned.” – MARK STEYN

“You can't have conservative government in a liberal culture.” – MARK STEYN

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” – RAY BRADBURY

“If time travelers from the 1950s were to arrive, I think they'd be surprised how low the bar has been dropped for the title of ‘Diva’." – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

"We know that poetry, literature (novels) and films cause alcoholism and smoking." – RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN (the latest insight from the increasingly Islamist PN of Turkey and, no one should be surprised, just about the only important Sunni friend of President Corpseman, most of whose other Muslim friends are Shia)

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

“ 'Culture' begins with 'cult'.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Culture is a place where you can take psychological risks without incurring physical penalties.” – BRIAN ENO (the “avant-garde” musician is a left-wing bore and pain in the arse, but this sounds quotable....)

“First of all, you're not allowed to despair. You're not allowed to surrender. Hannah Arendt wrote once, you know, that there's certain kinds of surrender that's not to be tolerated in the presence of the young. And one of them is that you don't surrender your country and you don't surrender your culture.” – WILLIAM BENNETT

"If separation of church & state is good for religion (which it is), why won’t separation of arts & state be good for the arts?" -- DENNIS PRAGER

"Although the right reads the left, the left rarely reads the right. Why should it, when the left owns American culture? Nearly every university, newspaper, TV network, Hollywood studio, publisher, education school and museum in the nation. The left wrapped up the culture war two generations ago. Throughout my own adult lifetime, the right has never made one significant move against the liberal culture machine." -- DAVID GELERNTER

"The Left acts as if the Right regards cultural shifts like a TV weatherman hanging on a lamppost in a hurricane report." -- JAMES LILEKS

"Western music (ED: referring to classical music, not cowboy music) is something unique, which has no equal in other cultures." -- JOSEPH RATZINGER (POPE BENEDICT XVI) (who was quite the musician himself...) 

“It requires huge balls, massive intellectual security and bravura precocity for a teenage to articulate genuinely right-wing positions, because the current of the culture is so against them.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

"I happen to be a big fan of Western civilization; I think it beats the hell out of tyranny and starvation." -- JORDAN PETERSON

"Culture eventually becomes politics, and the private eventually becomes the public." -- CHARLES C.W. COOKE

"If the culture is fallen, the democracy will be too." -- CHARLES C.W. COOKE

"Those who say that all cultures are equal never explain why the results of those cultures are so grossly unequal." -- THOMAS SOWELL

“I was taught at school that animals can only ever pass on things through their genes, but we humans can pass things on by example and by teaching – in short, by culture.” – SIMON BARNES

“Culture is the training of tastes.” – SHIVA NAIPAUL

"There is more power in blue jeans and rock 'n' roll than the entire Red Army." -- REGIS DEBRAY     (the old Frog commie, in his salad days of 1968)

"There is more than a smattering of masochism in any folk culture." -- PAUL THEROUX

"To understand a culture, a people, a civilization, it helps to know what they prohibit, and what they eagerly poach and serve with pak choi.". -- SEAN THOMAS    (a British author and journalist)

"It's a common delusion among the overeducated that high culture has to involve pain. The more it hurts, the more profound it must be." -- LLOYD EVANS (the esteemed theatre critic of the UK Spectator, in June 2022) 

“I define culture as anything based on the Symbolic Process; there are other definitions, but since they are indefensible, I pay them no mind.” – PROF. JOHN GREENWAY (The late Gonzo Anthropologist from Colorado)

"You can vote whatever way you want to, but you'll still be left with the patronizing and progressive BBC, advertisers who think we all live in mixed-race families and adore rap music, corporations desperate to pretend they are right-on ("woke"), a judiciary which feels more sorry for the perpetrator than the victim (unless the perpetrator is right-wing), a bone-headed teaching establishment which embraces critical race theory and a post-rational approach to biological sex , mon-cultural (i.e. left-wing) universities, and arts trusts and foundations which loathe everything about our country, especially the culture of THE white folk who live in it." -- ROD LIDDLE

Culture, “Counter”

"Counter-culture only works if you have a culture to rage against."-- MARK STEYN

“Intellectual surrender is confused with cultural revolution.” – SHIVA NAIPAUL (in 1978)

Culture War 

“All this gets complicated. In culture wars, everything is connected to everything else.” – BENJAMIN MARKOVITS (writing in the SPECCIE in November 2018, about the writer Saul Bellow)

"No one ever thinks he’s won a culture war." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“In a religious or culture war, there is no peaceful coexistence.” - PATRICK J. BUCHANAN

“The so-called 'culture war’ is even more important than our economic crisis, because it has been a sustained assault by a tiny elite of progressives which has damaged the fabric of our society, sowed division just when those divisions had been healed, and subjected all of us -- but especially our children -- to absurd and odious propaganda, virtue signalling and an insistence that our country is responsible (or at leas the white folk in it are) for every sin existing in the world." -- ROD LIDDLE (in July 2022) 

"The culture war is important -- rather more so than most of our politicians seem to think -- because it is totalitarian, perverse and leads to a kind of de-enlightenment, a post-rational society founded on division and hatred." -- ROD LIDDLE

"The utopian fervor tends to be accompanied by a sense of infallibility and lack of compromise, and it's a strand that runs from Robespierre, through the Bolsheviks, to Islamic State and the Antifa nutters in Portland." -- TIBOR FISCHER (the British novelist, in April 2022, commenting on Douglas Murray's book "The War On The West")

Cunning

“Luck or cunning were the most effective attributes in this world and cunning, though a worked more slowly, was the more reliable.” – DAVID LODGE (rather amusing English novelist)

“Cunning is a pathology of intelligence.” – BEPPE SEVEGNINI

Cuomos, The

"A sad-sack vibe runs in the Cuomo family." -- DANIEL J. FLYNN (of the AMERICAN SPECTATOR)

“What exactly is it Andrew Cuomo is good at? Choosing his parents?” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“This current crop of Cuomos are just pathetic punks -- what you get when you elect kids who pull wings off insects to run ‘student government’. (And the ‘sainted’ old man, Mario, was no great shakes, either. Different, but no better. A sanctimonious, overrated Leftist gasbag.)” – JACK JOLIS (On 11 Jan 2021)

“Andrew Cuomo — Fredo the Elder — crawls out of the cave where he spends his days pulling wings off of flies and smelts participation trophies for his handling of the pandemic in his state to remind us that he is perhaps the worst governor in America. I only said “perhaps” because who knows what the governor of California will do this week?”-- STEPHEN KRUISER                                                                          (On PJMedia, 12 Jan 2021)

“The entire Cuomo family is a bunch of sleazoids – they’re like Uday and Kusay Hussein, and that whole mob.” – CHRIS PLANTE (on his WMAL radio program, on 28 Sept. 2021)

Curiosity

“The gratification of curiosity rather frees us from uneasiness than confers pleasure.” – SAMUEL JOHNSON

“Curiosity is the first and simplest emotion we discover in the human mind.” – EDMUND BURKE

“Curiosity is the essential catalyst for human intelligence – and intelligence is impossible without it.” – JACK JOLIS  (upon observing the wonderment of his Central African foreman at seeing a pedometer, and his subsequent “Ah la la, vous, les blancs-la!”)

"Intelligence is a function of Curiosity, while Creativity is a function of Imagination." -- JACK JOLIS

“Curiosity is little more than another name for hope.” – AUGUSTUS HARE                                                                                         (the 19th century English theological writer)

“It is the insatiable curiosity of the modern European and American mind that, more than anything else, distinguishes it from all others, and wonder is the name for the primary emotion that accompanies this impulse.” – WILLIAM MCDOUGALL (influential Harvard professor of psychology, at the beginning of the 20th Century)

"Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography" – EVELYN WAUGH

"Curiosity has its own reward. You find out shit that you coulda gone all day without knowing. On the other hand, it kills the cat." – BRIAN J. CAMPBELL (my grate pal, the Sage of Rhode’s Island) 

“Tell people they can look, and of course they don’t bother.” – MICHAEL FRAYN

"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity." -- DOROTHY PARKER

“Customer Service”

«If I’d known being nicer to customers was going to work so well, I’d have started many years ago.» -- MICHAEL O’LEARY (The notoriously blunt and high-handed Irish boss of Ryannair, on his company’s unexpected profit of  £750 million in the year after it had dropped its self-declared policy of «unnecessarily pissing the customers off».)

“Cyberwar”

« ‘Surely we can keep ahead of a few fanatic Arabs – it’s not as if they invented the computer like we did.’ ‘No, but they invented zero, as you may not know. They don’t need to invent the computer to wipe us out with it. It’s called cyberwar. That’s what we’re in, like it or not, cyberwar’.» – JOHN UPDIKE

"Cyber warfare has the rare property of being both terrifying and undramatic." -- JAMES WALTON (the SPECTATOR's TV critic, in July 2022)

Cynicism

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

«'Cynic' is a word invented by optimists to describe realists.» – MICHAEL GRAHAM

«A cynic is an optimist mugged by reality; A Pessimist is an experienced cynic.» – DAVID VANCE (American political commentor and editor)

«There is something peculiarly levelling about British cynicism, which takes the view that, deep down, absolutely everyone is a bit of a twat.» – RORY SUTHERLAND

"How hollow is the heart of man and how full of shit!" -- BLAISE PASCAL                                                                                          (in "Pensées", 350 years ago.)

"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.")

«Cynical is the name we give those we fear may be laughing at us.» – STEPHEN FRY

Cyprus

"The Mediterranean island best known for a ramshackle blend of tourism and Russian money laundering." -- MATTHEW LYNN (The British thriller writer.  And he's not the only thriller writer who said the same thing about Cyprus: "Cyprus – the KGB's favorite foreign financial satrapy", p.221, PUSHKIN SHOVE by P.N. Gwynne, 1984)

Czech Republic (ex-Czechoslovakia)

"Czechs loved their country not because it was glorious but because it was unknown; not because it was big but because it was small and in danger" -- MILAN KUNDERA (In honor of the Czech Legion which fought valiantly in WW I.  The Legion was supported by Japanese and American Troops in Siberia.)

“Prague, it is a fact, is still the most Ruritanian of the capitals of Europe.” – LIONEL DAVIDSON (He wrote this in 1960, and when I visited the place in 1991, it was still true.)