D

Dalai Lama (The)

“The Dalai Lama is the hardest-working man in spirituality.” – SHARON STONE (Yup – herself.)

“I am what you want me to be. I am a screen saver for computers? People can use me as they want.” – THE DALAI LAMA     (Himself)           

Dance, (The, -ing)

“One only sees faces that are bored and bottoms that are enjoying themselves. In my day, we only did that lying down.” – GEORGES CLEMENCEAU  (to be fair, the old WWI leader was speaking specifically of the tango, when he said this....)

“Never give a sword to a man who can't dance.” – LLOYD EVANS (No, I don't get it either. But it sounds cool.)

“To move freely you must be deeply rooted.” -- BELLA LEWITZKY (American dancer,1916-2004)

"You should try everything once, except incest and folk dancing.” -- SIR THOMAS BEECHAM 

“I grew up with six brothers. That's how I learned to dance - waiting for the bathroom.” – BOB HOPE

"Most of the West's development is an increasing movement of the upper body over the lower body which eventually even eliminated drums and dancing itself. Of course everything down there belongs to the devil. It's part of the denigration of the feminine as well." -- ROY CAMERON (who knows about this stuff, because his wife does it professionally. In March 2023.) 

“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance." – GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

"(Dancing is) the greatest and most intense intimacy that is both allowed and takes place mostly in public." -- MARK HELPRIN

"Young people didn't dance any more, they stood around and shook." -- GUY BELLAMY (in 1979)

“What do women want? They want, evidently, to dance. Why? Why, in the days of my youth, did girls permit themselves to be seized and clumsily pushed about by sweating, overexcited, embarrassed boys? Not only did they permit it, they dressed themselves in taffeta and tulle and strapless bras to encourage its happening, and wept when it did not. For tears to be invoked, the importance of dances – school, country-club, Saturday-night, tea, square – as a means of gauging female desirability and mateability must be firmly established in feminine nervous systems.” – JOHN UPDIKE

“When happy, little boys jump and start hitting things with sticks; little girls do a dance.” – JOHN UPDIKE

"While it is inadvisable for white people to dance in the best of times, there should be official government strictures against any white person dancing past the age of forty." -- JOE QUEENAN

“I daresay you know these Fold Dance people, Corky. They tie bells to their trousers and dance old rustic dances showing that it takes all sorts to make a world.” – P. G. WODEHOUSE

"On the dance floor of life, we flash whatever advantages we have." -- RICHARD BROOKHISER      (delightfully poetic ... if a little pathetic. 18 Sept. 2024)

Danger/Safety

“Darkness is safety only on condition that all one’s enemies are human.” - GEOFFREY HOUSEHOLD (the delightfully-named Mr. Household, 1900-1988, was an English novelist most famous for “Rogue Male”.)

"Infectious disease experts are now warning people around the world to stay away from bats. Do you have to tell people that, really? You know which bats are not dangerous? The ones the Chicago Cubs use." -- JAY LENO

“The nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master and deserves one.” – ALEXANDER HAMILTON

“Living dangerously helps put death in the right perspective.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

"As soon as there is life, there is danger." -- RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

Darwinism (and “Social Darwinism”)

“Millionaires are a product of natural selection. If we find survival of the fittest distasteful, we have only one possible alternative, and that is the survival of the unfittest.” – WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER (Yale social scientist)

“Until we have a living and self-replicating cell, natural selection doesn’t enter the picture. Thus, natural selection does nothing to explain how life first evolved from non-living chemicals. Ben Stein asked Richard Dawkins how life began, and he replied that he had no idea. We still don’t.” – TOM BETHELL

“Darwinian theory is tautological. What survives is fit; what is fit survives. While such tautologies ensure the consistency of any arguments based on them, they could contribute little to an analysis of what patters of behavior and what ideals and aspirations were conductive to a good and productive society. Almost by definition, Darwinism is a materialist theory that  aspirations and ideals from the picture. As an all-purpose tool of reductionism that said that whatever survives is, in some way, normative. Darwinism could inspire almost any modern movement, from the eugenic furies of Nazism to the feminist crusades of Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood.” – GEORGE GILDER

"How similar to Marxism is Darwinism. Both are about lack of morality, about groups dominating each other just by strength and cunning, nothing about cooperation or kindness. Both are soulless. Both endorse violence as a means to power without regard to morality. And of course both say that there are superior and inferior species. To me, the road to Hitlerism and to Auschwitz leads straight from the Galapagos. If man is just a species, if some species of man are made (but by whom?) to dominate all other species, then man has no spark of the divine. If man is just a lump of clay that was set off by lightning (like Frankenstein!) then isn't man not at all responsible for his actions? Can't man just kill other men or enslave them or rape them if he feels like it? After all, he's just a lump of clay, isn't he?

How did life start? How did the rocks and swamps become living creatures? Darwin says nothing about it, and it is a mystery. And who made the rocks and swamps? These seem to me like adequate questions. I don't understand why the Darwinists won't let the issue be discussed. It's a lot like Nazism, where once the state has an idea, it can't be discussed any further." -- BEN STEIN 

“If science demonstrated in the Survival of the Fittest (Herbert Spencer's phrase), why did Darwin and his cousin Francis Galton need to invent eugenics to correct the (to them) unfortunate fact that the poverty-stricken drunken masses bred in larger numbers than the nouveaux riches like the Darwins?” --  A.N. WILSON

Data

"Information. Everyone just wants more information from everyone else. Your personal details aren't the new currency, but they are the new price of admission." -- WILL WILES (in 2015)

Dating

"Now 'date' is a strange word. I find it most peculiar when used as a verb -- as in 'Do you date?' A date itself covers a wide territory, and what lessons have I learned from a frenzy of lifelong dating? Many, but two stand out. Number One: Play Hard To Get. Be charming, congenial, witty -- but keep your distance. Number Two: Dress Up. Nice clothes have have a strange way of bringing out the poet in you. It also drives women crazy. And what is the ideal net result of dating, if not to drive women crazy?" -- ROBERT PLUNKET

"After a certain age, dates are like four-hour job interviews." -- G.M. FORD (The Seattle-based mystery-writer)

"That awful bachelor state -- making the phone call at six in the evening, 'Hello so-and-so, you don't remember me, but...'  Everybody ends up hating everybody." -- PETER COOK (the great, thrice-married, English comic)

Davos

“Men and and women who have a refreshing lack of interest in appearing to be good people. Well, that is not technically correct. They make all the right noises in Davos, but deep down they're all George Soroses: greedy, self-important transnationalists who see national loyalty as an obstacle to their financial ambitons to control everything and everybody. World government is what they seek, with themselves pulling the strings.

Can you, dear readers, imagine a worse scenario than to have your future decided by George Soros, Angela Merkel and Angelina Jolie, all three omnipotent in Davos, a resort that needs cleaning up more than the Augean stables ever did.

Yup, that's what Davos Man is all about, a hper-connected network of billionarires and Hollywood brain-drained celebrities suffering from too many colonic irrigations, both still delusional and both still believing in more and ore law-making. The EU mentality is their mother and George Soros's principles their father, and God forbid they ever get their way. They've already destroyed old Europe, and their next project is the world.” -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

"Davos is packed with insights hardly worth the bus fare, let alone the private jet fare." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY

Deadlines

“I so love the sound of deadlines whooshing by.” – DOUGLAS ADAMS (the author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy and, incidentally, a great fan of my favorite rock band, Procol Harum)

“That’s the thing about the eleventh hour. You never know when it’s a quarter to – you only know when it’s five after, and counting.” – NELSON DEMILLE

Death

“Most things may never happen: this one will.” - PHILIP LARKIN

“It is only death that gives life its meaning.” - LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

“I cannot forgive my friends for dying; I do not find these vanishing acts of their at all amusing.” – LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH (American essayist and critic, 1865-1946. Hmmm, he died the year I was born.)

“I went to a funeral the other day where I was almost the only man wearing a black tie. I still cannot abandon the mindset that dictates it is a mark of profound disrespect not to wear one. I hope my relicts will kick out of my funeral anyone who turns up dressed as if about to visit his bookmaker. When the time comes, one will be bloody unhappy to be dead, and one would like one’s friends at least to go through the motions of appearing bloody unhappy too.” - SIMON HEFFER (great perennially dyspeptic Conservative British columnist and commentor)

“Intelligence can be a mixed blessing. At some point in the last 100,000 years or so, human beings became clever enough to realize that death waits for us all. Since then a large part of our intellectual life has been spent trying to come to terms with the bad news.” - DAVID PAPINEAU (writing in the UK “Spectator” in 1995)

“There are so many things about death that are not too serious unless you count your own and even that will make the wintry, thin lips of friends and acquaintances distort into a smile.” - JEFFREY BERNARD

“I believe in God. I also believe in evolution. If death weren't around to "finalize" the Darwinian process, we'd all still be amoebas. We'd eat by surrounding pizzas with our belly flab and have sex by lying on railroad tracks waiting for a train to split us into significant others.” - P. J. O’ROURKE

“When you’re dead, at least you’re done with the dentist.” - RALPH WALDO EMERSON

“If the dead are garbage, then the living are walking garbage.” - FATHER RICK FRECHETTE (A good man in Haiti.)

"Dying isn't hard. Getting paid by Medicare is." -- ART BUCHWALD (These are believed to have been his last words. Strewth.)

"If a man says he is not afraid of dying, he is either lying or is a Gurkha." – JONAH GOLDBERG

“What could be more deadly than being unable to die?” -- JOHN GRAY (The English author of a book called “The Immortalization Commission”)

"We carry death within us like a stone within a fruit." -- JESSI JEZEWSKA STEVENS     (Cheerful, what.  From her 2024 collection fo stories, "Ghost Pains")

“We are all apprentices when it comes to death.” -- MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

“Learning how to die is unlearning how to be a slave.” -- MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE (I don't get it, but it sounds pompous and portentous enough, so I'll bung it in...)

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." -- CLARENCE DARROW

"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." – MARK TWAIN

“I had always supposed that the whole idea of the thing (death) was that others might make the obituary column but that I was immortal and would go on for ever. I see now that I was mistaken and that I too must in due season hand in my dinner pail. I am not sure that I like the new arrangement, but there it is.” –  P. G. WODEHOUSE

“Surely not talking about death is like being on a train and never mentioning the destination to your fellow passengers.” – MARK MASON     (who wrote “Last orders at the Death Café” for the UK SPECCIE in July '13)                             

“As I have not worried to be born, I do not worry to die.” – FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA

“You know what I read first in the papers each morning? The obituaries. Then I think, 'Good, that bastard's dead'.” – NORMAN TEBBIT

“There are better and worse ways to die, but there aren’t any good ones.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Being dead is the most boring experience in life, if, that is, one excepts being married or dining with a schoolmaster.” – OSCAR WILDE

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

“All stories end in death.” – ERNEST HEMINGWAY

“A day when one did something slightly unusual.” – W. H. AUDEN (His own poem pre-commemorating his own death)

"Dying is easy, comedy is hard."-- SIR EDMUND KEAN      (Great British Shakespearean actor on his deathbed, 1833)                                                                                      

“People die non-stop.” – DIANA MOSLEY (as quoted by Mark Steyn)

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

"Death is never easy when you know the people doing the dying." – LTC OLIVER NORTH

"To die alone is to die a perpetual death, forever unfinished like a straight course into the black of the sky. To die alone is not to have lived." -- MARK HELPRIN (in his excellent short story, "The Dove Of The East". Having said that, I’m not sure he’s quite right, here…) 

"It takes an entire lifetime to learn how to die." – SENECA

"Study death always." – SENECA

“Death is a long journey and you can’t take anything to read on it.” – DRUE HEINZ (a Brit-born American “patron of the arts, socialite, actress, and philanthropist”. Publisher of “The Paris Review”)

"When two or three people were dying together, it had a chance of becoming a comedy. Not a big chance, but some." -- LORRIE MOORE (the American novelist, in her 2023 "I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home") 

“Dying is the last favor we do the world, the last tax we pay.” – JOHN UPDIKE

“The dead teach this great lesson, which we are loathe to learn: we too will die.” – JOHN UPDIKE

“If we can’t take our memories with us, why go?” – JOHN UPDIKE

"Death solves all problems. No man, No problem." -- JOSEPH STALIN

"Madness was appropriate at the end." -- MARK HELPRIN

 “Cleaning up after the dead is worse than cleaning up after a party.” – KEITH WATERHOUSE

"Women can die gently. Men always die in torment. Why? Toward the end, men break the habit of a lifetime, and start blaming themselves, with full male severity. Women break a habit too, and start blaming themselves no longer. They forgive. We men can't do that." -- MARTIN AMIS

"The graves of the departed dead are never visited because they still live alive on your lips." -- J. P. DONLEAVY (also happens to be my philosophy in the whole morbid matter....)

“Only self-centered people fear death.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

“Living dangerously helps put death in the right perspective.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

“Death is the force that shows you what you love most.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

"Homes, Hospitals and Hospices, where people hexpire." -- GRAHAM SWIFT 

"But sooner or later there's a last time." -- GRAHAM SWIFT (early on in his excellent 1980 novel "The Sweet-Shop Owner", which then proceeds to be one long description of the "last time"....)

"It is important to think about death because it gives our lives meaning, shape and circumference." -- NIGEL FARNDALE (English author -- fiction and non-fiction, novel "The Blasphemer")

"Believe me life does no better job with dying than with living." -- WALKER PERCY

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

"Do you know the one thing dying people can't stand? It's not the fact they're going to die. It's other people, the undying, the so-called healthy people. Their loved ones. And after awhile, of course, their loved ones can't stand the sight of them, haven't a word to say to them, and they can't stand the sight of their loved ones." -- WALKER PERCY     (in his last novel, "The Thanatos Syndrome" of 1987)

"Death is absolutely safe, like taking off a tight shoe." -- RAM DASS (the "hippy psychologist")

"The cause of death is always the same: birth." -- DAVID HOCKNEY (the famous English artist-photographer)

"Learning how to live is learning how to die." -- MARK MASON 

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

"It was quite the thing to die, everyone was really nice to you." -- WILLIAM KOTZWINKLE (spoken by a kid at the funeral of a much-reviled-in-life young pal -- in the splendid and hilarious 1980 novel "Jack In The Box")

“Death does not interest me.” – NIKI LAUDA (the great Austrian racing driver, after his horrific near-death accident in Germany in 1976)

"A drowning man, it is said, sees the whole of his life parade before him. I can reveal that a dying comedian remembers all the doctor-jokes he ever heard." -- TERRY-THOMAS (the splendid English comic actor, who, sadly, died in rather squalid conditions in 1990)

 "After I'm dead I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one." -- CATO (THE ELDER)

"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." -- MARK TWAIN 

“Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily.” – FRANCOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD (1613-1680. The famous Frog writer of maxims. Nice work if you can get it....)

"All I want to know is where I'm going to die, so I'll never go there." -- CHARLIE MUNGER    (Warren Buffett's investment partner -- and I'd commend him to Bill Safire's comment under "DEJA VU" in this Compendium)

“In a sense, of course, people’s value only became clear when they were dead.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS   (I’m not even sure exactly what this means, much less if it’s true – but it sounds memorable enough to warrant inclusion here....)

“Dead people can’t answer back, can the? Dead people do just what they’re told.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS (or this...)

“Maybe dying is the only honest thing we do.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS  

"If this is dying, I don't think much of it." -- LYTTON STRACHEY (1880-1932, the author  of "Eminent Victorians", his last words, on his deathbed.)

"For myself, if anyone attending my funeral is not dressed in black, I shall haunt him through all is waking nights, dressed in South Sea Island shirt and Bermuda shorts and howling like a banshee." -- AUBERON WAUGH (Evelyn’s son)

Death, “Right To Die”

”The right to die may become the obligation to die.” — NIGEL FARAGE (after Parliament passed the “Right To Die” bill in Nov. ‘24)

Death, (Speaking Ill Of)

“You know what I read first in the papers each morning? The obituaries. Then I think, 'Good, that bastard's dead'.” – NORMAN TEBBIT

“It is to the living that we owe respect. To the dead, we owe only the truth.” – VOLTAIRE

“You should never say bad things about the dead, only good... Joan Crawford is dead... Good." – BETTE DAVIS

Death Threats

"They have been trying to send me to the hells since 9/11." -- PERVEZ MUSHARRAF     (The ex-Pres. said this upon his return after 4 years of self-imposed exile from Pakistan, of the deluge of death threats he's received from Jihadists of all stripes. And the good general's vernacular is clearly of the Joe “What’s Thee Heck!” Nadel school of English usage.…)                                                                 

Debate                                                                                                                                                           

“You are entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts.” - DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN      (Everyone quotes this, but few know who uttered it.)                                   

“Let us begin by setting aside all the facts, because they do not affect the question.” - JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

“For most of us, most of the time, talking for victory (even if only in the form of discomfiture of our interlocutors) is more important than finding the truth.” - THEODORE DALRYMPLE

“When they call you a Nazi, you know you’ve won the argument.” - JACK DUNPHY     (the pseudonym of an active-duty L.A. cop who contributes to NRO, PajamasMedia, etc.)                                                                       

“When lefties 'discuss' issues, a lot of their so-called 'discussion' amounts to nothing more than rationalization about how and why some person should be excluded from further discussion. “ – MORGAN FREEBERG     (conservative blogger)                            

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

“ 'Playing into the hands of' is a phrase too often used as a sort of charm or incantation to silence uncomfortable truths.” – GEORGE ORWELL

“A man with only one book is dangerous.” – THOMAS AQUINAS 

"Anyone who cites his own education to support an argument usually turns out to be an idiot or a moron." -- DAN BONGINO

“We have one 'national conversation' after the next – typically about our need to have a national conversation rather than about the subject of that conversation itself.” – LUKE THOMPSON (head of something called the “Applecart Political Consultancy”, in September 2016)

“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.” – PHILIPPE 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.)

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

" 'Unsafe': that is the term the liberal left uses to close down debate and in some cases to insist that debate is harmful. It is of course a travesty of the meaning of the word 'unsafe'." -- ROD LIDDLE

Debt

"It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes, a principle which if acted on, would save one-half the wars of the world."  THOMAS JEFFERSON

“Regarding the debt showdown, the key to the whole situation is the word trillion, which used to be a fantasy word― Lex Luthor will drop a trillion A-bombs on earth unless Superman stops him ― but now is D.C. ho-hum. The Tea Party is a reaction to that development.” --  RICHARD BROOKHISER

“The difference between the debt and the deficit, I quite often find myself telling people, is like the difference between your overdraft and the gulf between what you earn and what you need. Even if you could reset the former to zero, somehow, the latter would still be there, however, dragging you down.” – HUGO RIFKIND

“There’s nothing like lending somebody some money for waking you up to the bloke’s moral shortcomings.” – KINGSLEY AMIS

Decadence

"To be wrong, and to be carefully wrong, that is the definition of decadence."
-- G. K. CHESTERTON

“There's a hidden, dark side to technological progress. Effortless comfort has made us fat, lazy and increasingly in ill health.” – SCOTT CARNEY (in his book “What Doesn't Kill us: How Freezing Water, Extreme Altitude and Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Our Lost Evolutionary Strength”)

“The curse of every ancient civilization was that its men in the end became unable to fight. Materialism, luxury, safety, even sometimes an almost modern sentimentality, weakened the fibre of each civilized race in turn; each became in the end a nation of pacifists, and then each was trodden under foot by some ruder people that had kept that virile fighting power the lack of which makes all the other virtues useless and sometimes even harmful.” – THEODORE ROOSEVELT

“Decadence, like destruction, has this to be said for it: it frees men up.” – JOHN UPDIKE

"He knew he had what everybody else wanted, but he didn't really care anymore about having it." -- ROSS THOMAS (the American thriller writer. And I couldn't decide whether this should go under DECADENCE or WEALTH -- so I put it under both.)

"America is decadent nation. Both tribes are decadent. Democrats just happen to like decadence more." -- JOHN ROSSOMANDO (a conservative commenter on geopolitics, in Dec. 2023)

Decades

“I miss the 90's nostalgia for the 70's revival of the 50's.” --  DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

“The twenties were a failed experiment at having a sixties.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

“Liberalism's assumptions about economics are stuck in the 1950s (and conservatism's assumptions about culture are stuck there as well.).” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"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)

“Democrats want to go back to the 1950s so they can work there. Republicans want to back to the 1950s so they can live there.” – AMITY SHLAES

“If you can remember the Sixties, the old gag goes, you weren't really there; if you can remember the Seventies, chances are you aren't here.” – MARK STEYN

"The dominant themes that would ravage America throughout the eighties and nineties: lawyers, lawyers who play racquetball, lawyers who play racquetball who marry women named Jennifer, lawyers who play racquetball who marry women who like to masquerade as poor people, and of course, ice skating." -- JOE QUEENAN

“The 70s were America’s suicide attempt.” – PAUL JOHNSON

“What had been unthinkable under Eisenhower and racy under Kennedy had become, under Ford, almost compulsory. Except that people were going crazy, as they had in ancient Rome, either from too much sex or from lead in the plumbing.” – JOHN UPDIKE (in his “Memoirs Of The Ford Administration”)

“(The fifties were) a climate still furtively hedonist, iN a country still too overtly threatened from without to be ruthlessly self-abusive.” – JOHN UPDIKE

"The Fifties had been a boom time for noble savages, more or less modeled on Henry Miller, before the Sixties brought in such a slew of them that they became a politically demanding mob." -- JOHN UPDIKE

“The 1950s began well and then went on for ages.” – DAVID TOMLINSON (the British actor who was “Mr Banks” in “Mary Poppins”)

“It was a lot cooler being 20 in the 70’s than being 70 in the 20’s” -- JOE WALSH       (one of my favorite American rockers...) 

Deceit

“War is deceit.” – MOHAMMED (Yeah, him. Sneaky bugger....)

Deception

“Institutions often appear at their most formidable when they are actually well into decline.” - BRUCE ANDERSON

“Deception is a state of mind and the mind of the state.” ~ JAMES JESUS ANGLETON      (Head of CIA Counter-Intelligence 1954-1974. A colleague of my dad’s in the OSS, and an friendly acquaintance of my friend Edward Jay Epstein.)                                                             

"A deception is a complex organism -- to maintain it, the deceiver needs feedback. He must enter the mind of the victim." -- JAMES JESUS ANGLETON (A guy who knew. As quoted by his friend -- and mine -- Edward Jay Epstein, in his excellent eponymous 1979 book "Deception")

 “It is difficult to look for a black cat in a dark room, especially when there is no cat. All the more so if the cat is smart, brave and polite.” – SERGEI SHOIGU (The Russian Defense Minister in May 2014 trying to explain away how those Russian troops in eastern Ukraine weren't really Russian troops. And although this is filed under “Deception” it probably more accurately belongs in the “Bullshit” section.)

"The essence of a lie is the intent to deceive." -- ALAN JUDD

"The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same." -- STENDHAL (real name Marie-Henri Beyle -- a male, despite his first name, Frogue novelist, 1783-1842)

"Tell them what they want to hear." -- V.I. LENIN (instructions he gave Dzerzhinsky to give to his disinformation double-agents) 

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough,we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you've given a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back." -- CARL SAGAN      (he could have been talking about the "election" of 2020, except that he died in 1996)                                                                                                                

"All warfare is deception." -- SUN TZU (Squire Sun said a lotta stuff, but this is all you need to retain)

Deception (Self-)

"If you can’t fool yourself, then who can you fool" – P. J. O’ROURKE

"We really believed in our hearts that this was the dawn of the new day we had been praying for: The Russians had proved that they could be reasonable and far seeing, and there wasn't any doubt in the mind of the President, or any of us that we could live and get along with them peacefully for as far into the future as any of us could imagine." -- HARRY HOPKINS (FDR's closest advisor, of course, after Yalta -- and a hell of an admission.) 

De-centralization

"Ideologically, I sort of agree with decentralisation; with the notion that cdertain functions of society should be governed by local people. But that's not how it works, is it? They are governed instead by an authoritarian creed well beyond the reachof local people." -- ROD LIDDLE

“De-colonization”

" 'Decolonization', whose central objective is to discredit or downgrade the cultural achievements of the West. Objective truth and empirical investigation are mere western constructs. They are optional ideas which need have no weight beyond the western societies which invented them. But the West has imposed them on the rest of the world by a process akin to the colonial conquests of the past four centuries.

'Decolonizers' are not just trying to defend their views. They are seeking to upend the free market in ideas by imposing them." -- JONATHAN SUMPTION

Decisions

"Weighing benefits against costs is the way most people make decisions — and the way most businesses make decisions, if they want to stay in business. Only in government is any benefit, however small, considered to be worth any cost, however large." — THOMAS SOWELL

"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong." -- THOMAS SOWELL 

“The likelihood that people will respect a decision is proportional to the speed at which you make it.” -- RORY SUTHERLAND

"In my new freedom, I remember thinking: if one knows what he wants to do, others will not only not stand in the way but will lend a hand from simple curiosity and amazement." -- WALKER PERCY     (from "Lancelot" – and I, or rather P.N. Gwynne, used this as an aphorism in my/his second novel, PUSHKIN SHOVE, 1984)                                                                             

"When you're presented with a decision, always take it, never vacillate. If your judgement's good, you'll be right 90% of the time. If your judgment's poor, you didn't deserve the job in the first place." -- CHRISTOPHER BLAND (the British Chairman of British Telecom and the BBC)

“The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision.” -- MAIMONIDES      (1138-1204, old, wise, Spanish Sephardic Jew)

“All permanent decisions are made in a temporary frame of mind.” – MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE     (1533-1592, and the more you think about this, the less it means – but it sounds nice....)                                          

Decline (National)

“Decline is a choice.” -- JAY NORDLINGER

Decorum 

"Old cats and dying empires insist on decorum." -- MARK HELPRIN

Dedications

“To J. Alastair Frisby, Who Told Me I Would Never Have A Book Published, And Advised Me To Get A Job Selling Jellied Eells, SUCKS TO YOU, FRISBY” -- P. G. WODEHOUSE (dedication to his 1957 autobiography “Over Seventy”)

“To all those fuckpigs of multiplicities who have attempted to molest and denigrate these plays, who tried to stop or shift them off the stage, who used them unfairly  as steps to stardom and bigger contracts, 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, to those who don’t know they exist,  I hereby dedicate the contents which still bring me and mine so much gold.” -- J. P. DONLEAVY     (the author of, amongst much else, “The Ginger Man”, on the publication of his collected plays, in 1972)

"Deep State, The"

"America doesn’t have coups or tanks in the street. But a deep state of sorts exists here and it includes national security bureaucrats who use secretly collected information to shape or curb the actions of elected officials... Since Trump was elected, unusually sensitive leaks of intelligence information designed to discredit him and his senior leadership have poured forth from current and former intelligence officials in the deep state." – JACK GOLDSMITH    (Harvard law professor, of all things, writing in The Guardian, of all rags, in April 2018)

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

“After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.” – ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

"There exists a shadowy Government free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself." ~  SENATOR DANIEL INOUYE

"A single party, supporting a vast ill-paid bureaucracy whose work is tempered and humanized by corruption." -- EVELYN WAUGH (in 1947)

"It's what all you bureaucrats want:  Equality through slavery. The two-class state -- proletarians and officials." -- EVELYN WAUGH (in 1947)

"If you win elections without a deep bench of dedicated, energetic, skilled professionals ready to sweep into the bureaucracy and implement your programs, you'll be easily thwarted by the permanent State. The Left has such armies constantly ready to roll, with reinforcements on standby. It has institutions, both private and funded by taxpayer dollars, that exist primarily to keep left-wing officials and bureaucrats paid and ready for the next Democrat administration." -- JOHN HAYWARD (National Security Editor at Breitbart, in Jan. 2023)

"Although the United States remains a republic, administrative power creates within it a very different sort of government. The result is a state within the state -- an administrative state within the Constitution's United States." -- PHILIP HAMBURGER      (A "legal scholar of the administrative state”)                                                                                                 

“Donald Trump has caused the Shadow Government to come out of hiding.” – JACK DEVERE MINZEY     (of Eastern Michigan University)             

“Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite... will quietly run the show as they see fit.” -- ALDOUS HUXLEY   (1894 – 22nd November 1963, the day Kennedy was killed)

“The infrastructure this liberal elite has built around itself.” – ROD LIDDLE     in the SPECCIE on 14 March 2020)                                                                                   

"No country can survive being ruled by people who hate it." -- TUCKER CARLSON

"The Deep (Leftist) State implanted itself from the top-down -- not the other way around." -- JACK JOLIS

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

"Conservative America, a constitutional democracy in a republic, has been facing its existential crisis since the Obama hegemony. The chickens of prosperity have come home to roost, and a deep state, unfettered by law or custom, is using the essential lawfulness of its opponents (the citizenry) against them -- in effect, daring the citizens to revolt." -- DAVID MAMET (in 2022)  

"In the same way hydroxychloroquine became snake oil the instant Trump said he was taking it, the 'Deep State' became a myth the moment Trump and his minions started saying they believed in it." --MATT TAIBBI      (the ex-lib from ROLLING STONE--turned non-lib perspicacious commenter and critic)                                                  

Defeat(-ism)                                                                                                                                               

“If we’re determined to be defeated, let’s at least surrender not to the Islamic fascists but to the Chinese. If for no other reason, better food.” -  CLIFF MAY

“Nobody goes through life undefeated.” - DON IMUS

"Defeat is a temporary condition, giving up makes it permanent." -- GEN GEORGE S. PATTON

“Every story of conversion is a story of blessed defeat” – C. S. LEWIS

"Any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats." -- GEORGE ORWELL

"A wise man fights to win, but he is twice a fool who has no plan for possible defeat." -- LOUIS L"AMOUR (the famous "Western" author, and reportedly Ronald Reagan's favorite novelist,1908-1988) 

Defense, (and Self-Defense)

“The army that stays within its fortifications is already beaten” -- NAPOLEON

“There are wolves. There are sheep. But there are also sheepdogs.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

“I was prepared to shoot first and to ask questions not at all.” – IAN JEFFRIES (the author of the comic thriller “It Wasn't Me”)

“Who does not see that self-defense is a duty superior to every precept?” – MONTESQUIEU

"This animal is very wicked.  When attacked, he defends himself." -- VOLTAIRE

"It is evidence of withcraft to defend witches." -- MARTIN DELRIO (A Dutch theologian, who wrote this with, presumably, a straight face, in 1599 in his piquantly-titled "Disquisitionum Magicarum Libri Sex")

"There are no permanent answers; there is, however, permanent self-defense." -- DAVID FRENCH

"The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended." -- FREDERIC BASTIAT

"If you have to shoot, shoot them a lot." -- SHERIFF GRADY JUDD (of Polk County, Florida, in 2020)

“A wall is only as good as those who defend it.” – KUBLAI KHAN (Genghis’ grandson)

Defense, National                                                                                                                               

"I would never invade the United States. there would be a gun behind every blade of grass." - ADMIRAL  ISOROKU YAMAMOTO

"Weakness is provocative.And provocation results in danger, and loss of life." -- DONALD RUMSFELD

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

“But how does America contain aggression except by preparing to defeat it? Intervention requires strength, but containment does too.” – JIM TALENT (Former senator from Missouri, then with the Heritage Foundation, in 2013)

“While strength does not guarantee success, weakness guarantees failure.” – JIM TALENT

“It is an unfortunate fact that we can secure peace only by preparing for war.” – JOHN F. KENNEDY

"A nation that can't defend itself isn't really a nation." -- SIR JOHN KEEGAN

"The reputation of one's arms is everything, and equivalent to real forces." -- NAPOLEON

 "States will get justice only in proportion achieved by demonstrating that their strength is up to the challenge." -- DEMOSTHENES (I think the old boy clearly kicked off a popular trend in this kind of thinking, over the years....)

"The belief that we should be more afraid of what America's adversaries can do to us than vice versa -- is the default position inside the US national security bureaucracy." -- MIKE POMPEO      (in 2023)

"There is a rank due to the United States among nations which will be withheld, if not absolutely lost, by the reputation of weakness." -- GEORGE WASHINGTON      (quoted by Mike Pompeo in his "Never Give An Inch")

Defense Spending

“Trimming the military to feed welfare bloat is one of the litmus tests of a civilization in decline. . . . Resources allocated to national defense should be cut back only for the right reasons.” – CONRAD BLACK

“You think defending this nation is expensive, try not defending it. That's a lot more expensive.” -- TED CRUZ

Defiance

“We’re surrounded. That simplifies the situation.” -- USMC GEN. LEWIS “CHESTY” PULLER

“To the Enemy we answer – you have unsheathed the sword, and by it you shall die.” – SEN. ARTHUR VANDENBURG

Deficits

"Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want and their kids pay for it." -- RICHARD LAMM (former Democrat - !! -Governor of Colorado)

“The difference between the debt and the deficit, I quite often find myself telling people, is like the difference between your overdraft and the gulf between what you earn and what you need. Even if you could reset the former to zero, somehow, the latter would still be there, however, dragging you down.” – HUGO RIFKIND

“In the Deficit we face the most predictable economic crisis in history.” – ERSKINE BOWLES (Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff)

De Gaulle, Charles

“Charles de Gaulle was a monumental slab of garlic-scented arrogance with the body of a furniture-shifter and the face of a parrot-fish.” – LLOYD EVANS

"I am like Tintin -- I respect realities." -- CHARLES DE GAULLE

"DeGaulle speaks 'Europe', but means 'France'." -- HAROLD MACMILLAN

Degradation

"If degradation comes cheap, how is a man going to feel superior?" -- ALAN COREN

“Degrowth”

"Degrowth is a middle-class luxury, an indulgence to be conducted from the comfort of your sofa with its electronic foot-raiser." -- ROSS CLARK (Mr. Clark is English, and we must remember that over there, "middle class" is a higher social rank than it is in the US -- practically what we Yanks consider "upper class")

“DEI”

" DIE/'DEI' is the enforcement regime of Cultural Marxism. And it hasn’t been something to be 'debated', but rather imposed." -- JACK JOLIS

"The point (of "DEI") was to end discrimination, not replace it with different discrimination." -- ELON MUSK

"DEI is a slow path into servitude to collectivist ideologies." -- RUEDIGER DRISCHEL (A German "internet entrepreneur")

"California' DEI list is pretty interesting: it includes trans people, and also Pacific Islanders. I did the maths (sic) and worked out that given the demand for trans and Pacific Island board members vs. the relative supply in the state, if you were a trans person or a Pacific Islander living in California, you should clear your diary for the diversity 20s, because you'll be shuttling from board meeting to board meeting with never an hour for yourself." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY (in May 2024)

"DEI is a tool for losers to steal the rewards they are unable to earn for themselves." -- KURT SCHLICHTER (in July 2024)

"If Kamala Harris isn't a 'DEI' hire -- I'd like to know what is." -- DOMINIC CARTER       (the black radio talk show host on WABC in NooYawk, on 31 July 2024)

"DEI is the Improvised Explosive Device the Left is using to divide America." -- CARL GOTTLIEB (my ex-newsman X-pal)

“Déja-vu”

" 'Vuja-dé' -- that feeling you get when you're someplace you've never been before, but you know for damn sure you never want to come back again." -- WILLIAM SAFIRE

Delaware

“Delaware is lucky it's even a state.” – MARK LEVIN

Demagoguery

“It is not a very healthy thing to have a voting population of millions thinking privately what they would never express publicly; in such a climate, demagogues on left and right gird for action.” - VICTOR DAVIS HANSEN

"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)

Dementia

"To a large extent we are our memories: without them we exist in a kind of no man's land, neither in possession of our own identity, not entirely denuded of it. This is very sad to behold; but it's hard to say, really, how sad it is to experience." -- CRESSIDA CONNOLLY

Democracy

“I don’t like to talk about ‘democratizing’…. Too many countries (Liberia even) have become skilled at holding periodic elections good enough to pass muster with international observers and the IMF.  In this case, it’s about civilizing - about introducing the rule of law and other conditions that eventually enable true democracy.” - MARK STEYN (speaking of that paragon, Liberia, it’s worth remembering that it’s constitution is virtually word for word a copy of the American.  Without “enforceable contracts freely arrived at”, you’re toast, baby…)

“The great object is to prevent democracy from destroying liberty.  In particular, it is to prevent it from destroying economic liberty, a necessary condition of prosperity but one which leads to a large measure of inequality, envy and division.” - JONATHAN SUMPTION (an English judge, writing in June 2005, and this is practically a good political science education in one sentence.)

“Hitler’s democratic triumph exposed the true nature of democracy. Democracy has few values of its own: it is as good, or bad, as the principles of the people who operate it. In the hands of liberal and tolerant people, it will produce a liberal and tolerant government; in the hands of cannibals, a government of cannibals. In Germany of 1933-4 it produced a Nazi government because the prevailing culture of Germany’s voters did not give priority to the exclusion of gangsters.” - NORMAN DAVIES (in his 1996 book EUROPE, A HISTORY)

“When democracy granted democratic methods to us in times of opposition, this was bound to happen in a democratic system.  However, we National Socialists never asserted that we represented a democratic point of view, but we have declared openly that we used the democratic methods only in order to gain power and that, after assuming the power, we would deny to our adversaries without any consideration the means which were granted to us in times of our opposition.” - JOSEF GOEBBELS (see above. For you ignoramii out there, the National Socialists won the’33 election with 36%)

“The confusion of liberty with democracy is an easy mistake to make.” - CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS      (see above…)

“To hold elections before you have civil society is to start cooking before you have either meat or potatoes.”  - CLIFF MAY

"In a democracy, people should be free to be wrong." -- OWEN MATTHEWS    (British writer-- author of "Stalin's Children")

“Most people's faith  in multiparty democracy is at best a lukewarm recognition that the alternative is much worse?” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE       (writing as ANTHONY DANIELS)               

“ ‘Democracy’ – as in a polling station and ballot box – is the last piece of liberty’s puzzle. What comes first are property rights, legal systems, freedom of speech and of conscience, a civil society rather than a tribal one. Absent those, the ‘cultural thing’ will out.” -- MARK STEYN

“Liberal democracy has always depended upon a kind of person it does not produce.” —  WILLIAM VOEGELI      (author and professor at Claremont McKenna College)                                      

“Republics are always more vindictive than monarchies.” – MONTESQUIEU

"Democracy is a means to an end, with the end being Liberty. It's proved to be best means of achieving that end, but by no means the only one -- colonial Hong Kong had no democracy but maximum liberty and Hitler was elected democratically.

But democracy remains, ultimately, nothing but a good means to a desired end." — JACK JOLIS 

“Democracy  provides a fair field for the Good Life, but it is not itself the Good Life.” – JOHN BUCHAN      (also known as the First Baron Tweesmuir, and, of course, the author, in 1915, of “The 39 Steps”)  

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

“Democracy, without the restraint of law and tradition, easily turns into a tyranny of the majority. It has no special virtue of its own, and with its intolerance of minorities and its tendency to elective dictatorship and crowd-pleasing it often threatens liberty, without which democracy is not all that much use. - PETER HITCHENS

"It is a great mistake to assume that democracy is an enemy of Islamism. When the gift of democracy is unwrapped in the Arab world, Islamists frequently spring out of the box. The jihadis may be despised by most Muslims, but often in Arab countries only about 20 to 40 per cent of the population vote. It is by no means impossible for the Islamists to secure a majority from the minority, because their supporters are the most fanatical. Whatever the theory of democratization in the Arab world, the history is clear. Where democracy, however tentatively, has already been introduced, it is the Islamists who have come to power." -- JOHN R. BRADLEY (author of "Inside Egypt: The Land of the Pharaohs on the Brink of a Revolution" in 2008, and "Behind the Veil  of Vice: the Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East"in 2010.)

“Arafat was essentially ‘elected’ the same way Stalin was, but not nearly as democratically as Hitler, who at least had actual opponents. Arafat’s ‘opponent’ was a prop.” - JAMES WOOLSEY (the former CIA director, and a good man, even if a Democrat…)

“Democracy is a check on unnecessary war. Indeed, a drawback of democracy is that it's sometimes a check on necessary war.” - JAMES TARANTO

“We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.” - JEAN-CLAUDE JUNCKER (Prime Minister of Luxembourg, in 2006)

“How can shoemakers meddle in affairs of state?” - CATHERINE THE GREAT

"People, given a choice, will choose what will cause them the least pain. No majority that I've ever known of has voted for personal sacrifice. It may have ended up that way, but they didn't vote for it to begin with. No, they voted for those candidates who they think will cause them the least pain -- either economic or social or emotional." -- ROSS THOMAS (in his 1967 thriller "The Seersucker Whipsaw") 

“The bill of particulars written by Thomas Jefferson against George III would not require much editing to describe today’s excesses by the Federal Government, never mind that it is the creature of the ruled, by the ruled. Already, self-government, as widely practiced, is an exercise in self-deception. Ask the people. (Calling Mr. Gallup!)” - WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

“Trying to develop a democracy before order prevails is like trying to furnish a house before the roof and walls are constructed.  And before those walls are built, the foundations must be laid.” - TOM BETHELL

“The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a "warm body" democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction.... Once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader - the barbarians enter Rome.” - ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

“Only in Switzerland and America did the theory and practice of popular government survive into the modern world. But note: they survived because they were planted in an older, hybrid pre-Enlightenment roots.” - ANGELO CODEVILLA

“Democracy - that Great Fan that everything hits sooner or later.” - FLORENCE KING (not too sure what this means, but I like it anyway….)

“Bring elections prematurely to a country with a deeply illiberal culture, and you are asking for trouble.” – STANLEY KURTZ

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." -- BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (He was more than just a pleasantly avuncular decoration on a C-note and a tourist attraction at U. of Penn, was ole Uncle Ben....)

"When the People find that they can vote  themselves  money... that  will herald the end of the republic." -- BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

“If you rob Peter to pay Paul you can most certainly count on Paul’s vote.” - GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (as a good socialist, he knew whereof he spoke…)

“No one doubts what needs to be done for the people--no one, that is, except the people.” - JIM TARANTO (in conjunction, of course, with “The Obamacare Conundrum” -which  sounds like the latest Matt Damon effluence. Anyway, Taranto is, of course, from the WSJ)

“Government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.” - H. L. MENCKEN

"Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods." -- H. L. MENCKEN

“Politicians do precisely what we elect them to office to do: take the rightful property of one American and give it to another.” - WALTER E. WILLIAMS (the late distinguished black Economics Prof at George Mason University, in 2010)

“If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse’.” - HENRY FORD

"Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off." -- RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN (the Islamist (AKP) Prime Minister of Turkey, and I'd say "tayyip!", alright.... Actually, this poisonous little man would seem to fit right in with the EU -- he sounds right up their street)

"Your chances of meeting an IRS agent are far greater than your chances of meeting anyone you voted for." – JOE SOBRAN

"It's not a matter of electing the right people, but of maintaining the kind of political climate whereby the wrong people we elect are forced to do the right thing." -- MILTON FRIEDMAN

"I believe a relatively free economy is a necessary condition for a democratic society; but I also believe there is evidence that a democratic society, once established, destroys a free economy." -- MILTON FRIEDMAN

“In a democracy at least, fiscal profligacy is not a story of 'politicians gone crazy'. It is the rational outcome of the interplay between elections and pressure groups.” – CHARLES WYPLOSZ (the French economist)

“We don't vote to elect great persons to office. They're not that great. We vote to throw the bastards out.” -- P. J. O'ROURKE

“Where votes mean nothing, everybody votes.” – DENIS BOYLES (commenting on the election in Kosovo in Dec. ’10 which had a 95% turnout)

“It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.” -- TOM STOPPARD (Along with Neil Simon and David Mamet, our greatest living playwright – here channeling Stalin.)

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse over loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship." – ALEXANDER TYLER (In 1887. Tyler was a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, and he had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years prior)

“Something conservatives have always known: Men are fallible and flawed, hewn from the crooked timber of humanity. That is why democracy is necessary, but it is also why constitutional rules, checks and balances, and redundancies are necessary, too. There's no guarantee that there will be no mistakes. The only guarantee is that our system will be somewhat more likely to catch the mistakes and offer a chance to remedy them, all the while trying harder to respect our individual rights. That's pretty good, no?” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"In a pure democracy, 51 percent of the people get to piss in the cornflakes of 49 percent of the people." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"Democracy guards against bad outcomes, but it in no way guarantees good outcomes." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“There is nothing inherent to democratic theory that says the people can be counted upon to vote in favor of sustaining their rights, never mind the rights of other people. That’s why the Constitution protects our rights from democracy. The Bill of Rights explicitly makes it hard for government to infringe on our rights because our rights are considered prior to or above the whims of the voters. In a pure democracy, 50.1 percent of the people can pee in the cornflakes of 49.9 percent of the people.” – JONAH GOLDBERG        (in January 2022)

“The give-and-take of Western democracies depends on the idea that we can craft political solutions that enable most people to win most of the time. But in a world without growth, we can expect a loser for every winner. Many will suspect that the winners are involved in some sort of racket, so we can expect an increasingly nasty edge to our politics.” – PETER THIEL (The founding CEO of PayPal, here speaking at his alma mater, Stanford)

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” – H. L. MENCKEN

“Democratic politicians secure their following by making economic promises, basically to steal from the few in order to reward the many.” —  ROGER SCRUTON

"Democracy as we know it is bad enough; Democracy that really listened to all the people would be an authoritarian nightmare." -- BRYAN CAPLAN (American economist)

“Democracy is the crude leading the crud.” – FLORENCE KING

"The Swiss are a people of quite extraordinary stupidity and immorality. A very rare combination which only a long experience of democratic government could have produced." -- GEOFFREY HOUSEHOLD (an amusingly piquant comment from his excellent 1939 thriller "Rogue Male", and I hasten to add that these disobliging words are spoken by the book's chief villain.)

“Democracy is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failures. Faiths and utopias are the noblest exercise of human reason.” – WILLIAM JAMES (Oh. What an ass. He was.)

"Never forget: Immigration, multiculturalism, or democracy. You can only have two."  -- JONATHAN V. LAST     (One of the editors at THE WEEKLY STANDARD. In Nov. 2015 observing the unfolding societal trainwreck in France and, indeed, elsewhere in the West....)                     

“The most dangerous moments in our democracy come when all parties agree.” – NIGEL LAWSON (The ex-British Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, ex-Editor of the SPECTATOR, and papa of famous foodette  Nigella  Lawson.)

"Democracy is not only elections. It is values.”” -- – BERNARD-HENRI LEVY     (the sometimes interesting and occasionally correct Frogue fop/philosophe)                                                                             

“Every pub is a parliament.” – NIGEL FARAGE

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

“Western democracy is a never-ending auction whereby votes are purchased with debts to be paid off in the future by the coming generations, and charity has become entitlements that subsidize indolence.” – LEE HSIEN LOONG (The Prime Minister of Singapore – and son of ex-PM Lee Kwan Yew – in 2014)

“Democracy is about to exercises power and how they get to exercise it; (classical) liberalism is about the limits on their exercise of power. In principle, the dividing line between these two is simple:  A constitution establishes rules restraining the government (it can't cancel elections; it can't imprison people without due legal process; etc.), and a constitutional court interprets these rules, sometimes overriding laws or government regulations.” – JOHN O'SULLIVAN

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

“ 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 principal quality of a healthy democracy is not that you get perfect governments – a fairly good government is as much as anyone can hope for. What matters is that you get rid of a bad government before any rot sets in too deeply.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

“It is a perfectly valid point that in a democracy the government should do what the people want, not what economic theory says is good for them.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

“The most basic question in politics is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.” – THOMAS SOWELL

“There are only two European democracies: Switzerland and Britain.” – ROBERT CONQUEST

“Left-liberals take a very selective view of democracy, don't they?” – ROD LIDDLE

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

“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

"I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." -- THOMAS CARLYLE (Scottish philosopher, 1795-1881)

"Truth is not determined by a majority vote." -- POPE BENEDICT XVI

“British governments may not be much good, but at least we can get rid of them.” – ANDREW GIMSON (British political journalist)

"One of democracy's greatest weaknesses is the inability to reform itself." -- DAMBISA MOYO      (The redoubtable Zambian economist, in her book "Edge Of Chaos")                                                

“Mass democracy has no intellectual content.” -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Democracy is at best a procedural convenience for choosing representatives and ensuring a minimum level of accountability in elected officials. Democracy is not a synonym for ‘good government’ — often it is the opposite — and democratic is not another way of saying ‘decent’ or ‘intelligent’.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"For progressives, 'democracy' is a very plastic word that means, 'what we call it when we get what we want'.” -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON 

“Mass democracy is simply an extension of high-school cafeteria-table politics: status-jockeying and status monkeying 24/7/365 and not much else.” -- DAVID R. FRENCH

“A key difference between baseball and democracy is that in baseball the winners don’t get to rewrite the rules. And it never occurs to the losers to blame the rules for their losses. Our deepest norms of order can still be seen in operation on the diamond when they’ve been adulterated everywhere else. Baseball is our Utopia – not in assuring us of the victories we dream of, but in guaranteeing ideal conditions even of defeat.” – JOE SOBRAN

“The defining proposition of liberal democracy is that it mandates means (elections, parliaments, markets) but not ends. Democracy leaves the goals of life entirely up to the individual.” – CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

"Would it not be be simpler if the government simply dissolved the people and elected another?” -- BERTOLD BRECHT      (Advice he famously gave to his fellow comrades running East Germany when they were facing a popular revolt in 1953) 

"Accepting the results of a democratic election and working with the winner even though you find it painful—that takes character. Democracy takes character." -- YORAM HAZONY (The author of "The Virtue Of Nationalism")

“In a liberal democracy you have to convince and not command people into action. If you lost that principle, you will lose your soul.” – FREDRIK ERIXON (a Swede, in the UK SPECTATOR)

“Where there is no democracy, democrats take to the streets. And when they are forced off the streets, they crawl underground and start making bombs.” – RICHARD LITTLEJOHN (the “populist” columnist for the UK “Sun”, in 1995)

"Masculine republics give way to feminine democracies and feminine democracies give way to tyranny." -- ARISTOTLE       (astonishing, but it seems to be genuine)                                                      

“Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as Aristocracy. There has never been a Democracy yet that did not commit suicide" – PRESIDENT JOHN ADAMS       (who’d pretty obviously read his Aristotle, see above)

"Of all the tyrannies a country can suffer, the worst is the tyranny of the majority." -- WILLIAM INGE     (American novelist and playwright, 1913-1973)

"If you can't change the economic policy of your country by the way you vote at an election, because your economy is controlled by non-democratic forces elsewhere, then what remedy is open to you other than to riot?" -- SIMON HEFFER

"I'm not prepared to leave abortion to the whims of the public at the moment." -- JOE BIDEN (3 May 2022)

Democratic Party, The U.S.                                                                                                                    

“Say what you like about the Democratic Party - which is, essentially, all about having peaceful U.N.-sanctioned gay weddings in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge - it’s a nice place, for nice people.” - ROB LONG      (L.A. columnist for “National Review”.)                                     

“What a rotten thing the Democratic Party is - a morally disreputable gripe machine that mobilizes victim groups, stirs the pots of envy, and cultivates resentment and grievance. Its guiding spirits see democracy as an opportunity to reach into other people’s pockets. It is an alliance of college professors isolated from the real world; teachers’ unions protecting their perks; labor unions benefiting from their antitrust exemption; trial lawyers exploiting the breakdown of tort law, and blacks who think they deserve special treatment because their great grandfathers might have been slaves. Not an attractive bunch.” - TOM BETHELL

“I’m a liberal democrat. Nobody can question, I think, my credentials and my convictions. But I have to tell you, at this point it’s hard to believe that my party, the party I’ve belonged to since my great-great-grandfather of my family (sic), has become no longer a party of principles, but has been hijacked by a confederacy of gangsters who need to take power by whatever means and whatever canards they can.” - PAT CADDELL

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

"The winner of the Democratic primary is always the candidate who does the best impersonation of an American." -- ANN COULTER

“It's easy to see why Democrats vote for these treaties; they hate weapons. If the United States came up with a weapon that would destroy everyone else's weapons and shower the  planet with daisy petals and gummi bears, they'd oppose it.” – JAMES LILEKS

“If there's one thing that terrifies the Party of Science, it's science.” – JAMES LILEKS

“Presented with a horde of emotionally volatile individuals yelling like monkeys who’d been dipped in turpentine, millions of Americans thought, ‘That’s the group I want to join. They seem fun.’.” – JAMES LILEKS (in October 2018)

“We (the Democrats) are the party that made the hand-wring its official handshake.”-- DAN GERSTEIN (a Democrat Party “strategist”, at the 2008 convention in Denver)

"Democrats have problems with successful corporations, (but) they will do anything to save dying ones." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"The Democrats have no natural majority because they have no fundamental principles -- at least none that they are willing to state out loud. They are like a drunken vagrant who emerges from the alley to cause havoc every few years. They are the perpetual toothache of American politics." -- ANN COULTER

"The late Austrian intellectual Willi Schlamm once said: 'The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists.' And that was well before they sponsored the Obama Democrats." -- RICH LOWRY

“All Democrats are not horse thieves, but all horse thieves are Democrats.” -- HORACE GREELEY (1811-1872. I always thought Horace a wimp and an ass -- but here, he was quite right.)                                                                                                                                                                        

“The national Democratic Party neither recognizes nor abides by any limits to government largess, scope, or power. Its conception of 'propriety' is whatever it can get away with that will serve its ideological or partisan ends. Its devotion to the Constitution is negligible.” – QUIN HILLYER (in THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR in Aug. 2010)

“As someone who has only lived in cities where Republicans are outnumbered at least 5-to-1 (New York, Baltimore and DC — if you don’t count a brief sojourn in Prague), I’m used to differentiating between bad Democrats, awful Democrats, and tolerable Democrats.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“I am not part of the problem. I am a Democrat.” – AL GORE (in Oct. 1995. And, to paraphrase Bertie Wooster, did you ever in your puff witness such a perishing ass?)

“The Democrats can be trusted invariably to walk in the darkness even when to walk in the light would be manifestly to their advantage to do so.” – THEODORE ROOSEVELT (This explains, say, Obama’s admission that although he understands that the capital gains tax is actually counterproductive, he wants to keep it anyway, just for spite, sorry, for “fairness”)

“The Democrats' energy now comes from dismembering the carcass of the past, rather than understanding or advancing it.” -- STANLEY KURTZ (in NRO, Aug. 2015)

“That the rich and powerful are identical to conservatives and Republican is a hoary idea dear to Democrats and essential to their self-image as the opponents of privilege. It persists even though many of the plushest and most powerful institutions of American life are in the hands of liberal Democrats: public and private universities, government bureaucracies, nonprofit foundations, movie studios, television networks, museums, newspapers and magazines, Silicon Valley Political donations from 19 of the 20 richest ZIP codes in the United States go overwhelmingly to Democrats, by a ratio of four to one or more. Democrats are the party of what Democrats used to call the super rich. Only Democrats seem not to realize this. -- ANDY FERGUSON

“The history of racism in the United States is a history of the Democrat Party. It's that simple.” – CHRIS PLANTE (on WMAL radio, 18 Feb 2016)

" 'Bail Reform Laws' -- that's the euphemism for 'Democrats Putting Criminals Back On The Streets As Quickly As Possible'." -- CHRIS PLANTE (Sept. '23) 

“Break the media and you break the Democrats.” – MICHAEL WALSH

“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

“A Democrat will give you the shirt off my back.” – BILLIE WILLIAMS (A guy on the Twoot from Kansas City, MO.)

“The Democrats have always been a criminal organization masquerading as a political party.” – MICHAEL WALSH

“Democrats support criminals and like when normal people are raped and murdered. There is no alternative explanation that explains their actions.” — KURT SCHLICHTER (27 Sept. ‘23)

“My dogs really don't do much except demand free food and shelter. Except for me liking them, they're Democrats” – KURT SCHLICHTER

"Democrats never get into trouble when they lie, but they always get into trouble when they tell the truth." -- RUSH LIMBAUGH

“The Democrats have their own operating principle: Cargo cult economics. It has many facets but the basis idea is that if the government creates something that is associated with a vibrant middle class then a vibrant middle class will spring from that program as inevitably as Athena sprang from the forehead of Zeus.” – ERICK ERICKSON      (of RedState)                     

“It is a funny thing about American foreign policy. The Democrats are  the peacenik party until they have an opportunity to send American soldiers off to die for no reason other than to make them feel good about their higher morality.” – ERICK ERICKSON (The guy of the famous RedState blog)

“The Democrats promise voters free stuff — it always works out badly, but it sounds good in November.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"The Democrats are big with the very poor and big with college-educated government workers — i.e., the party of people who are enrolled in welfare programs and the people who administer them." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON (April 2022)                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

“Ideologies aren’t all that important. What’s important is psychology. The Democratic constituency is just like a herd of cows. All you have to do is lay out enough silage and they come running. With Democrats, all you have to do is make a lot of noise, lay out the hay, and be ready to use the old cattle prod in case a few want to bolt the herd. Eighty percent of the people who call themselves Democrats don’t have a clue as to political reality.” – JAMES CARVILLE

"Democratic culture has too many preachy females. Too much 'Don't eat Hamburgers, don't watch football, wear a condom'. Man, shit, leave me alone." -- JAMES CARVILLE     (in June 2024) 

“Ninety percent of the racism in America today comes from the Democratic Party and the Left. They live off it and exploit it. It is unconscionable to the degree they do this, ruining the lives and futures of the very people they say they are helping in the process. I am uniquely positioned to say this because I spent most of my life on the Left and was a civil rights worker in the South in my early twenties. I was also, to my everlasting regret, a donor to the Black Panther Party in the seventies.” – ROGER L. SIMON

“Looters elect looters to loot from producers. THAT'S why Democrats keep winning.” – DR. GENE LINGERFELT (A good Christian doc, on the Twoot)

"Instead of trying to win over voters by putting forward the best thinking in the marketplace of ideas, Democrats use government to force people to do what they want them to do." -- RON HART (self-described "libertarian", American author and humorist. March, ‘23) 

“Democrats have their own SuperPAC. It’s called the mainstream media.” – MARCO RUBIO

“The Democrat Road is full of potholes & toll booths, and populated by overpaid losers leaning on shovels.” – JOHN NOLTE      (a “Breitbart” senior editor)                                                                                                                                                                                                         

“Most Congressional Democrats see the world in fairly simple terms: Take money from taxpayers and give it to people they like. Maybe they genuinely can't grasp anything more complicated than that." -- JIM GERAGHTY (Of NRO)

"The mainstream media’s coverage of American politics is so often so indistinguishable from cheerleading for the Democratic Party that Democrats never actually have a good, reliable, realistic sense of how they’re doing." -- JIM GERAGHTY  

"In the minds of Democrats, the total number of legitimate votes cast in the election is this nebulous figure that can keep rising and rising, long after Election Day." -- JIM GERAGHTY        (18 Nov. '24)
                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

“The motto of the Democratic Party should be: 'We're against everything what works'.”  – GREG GUTFELD

“The Democrats are a political party in the classic sense, a coalition of disparate interests that unite to scratch each other’s backs and pick everyone else’s pockets. But granting special favors to specific groups is contrary to conservatives’ core beliefs.” – FRED SCHWARZ

"No longer can blacks claim victim status except as victims of Democrats.” – SHERIFF DAVID CLARKE     (The outstanding black Sheriff of Milwaukee County, in August ‘20)                 

"When I came home from college declaring that Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were both fascist pigs and I was a Communist, my grandmother said 'at least you're not a Democrat'."-- P. J. O'ROURKE

“The Democratic Party isn't a political party... It's the name of a den of thieves whose single point of agreement is that they want to break into the national cash register and swipe the booty. When it's time to divvy up the swag, all hell will break loose." – P. J. O’ROURKE (In January 2020)

“The Democrats are a national exercise in packing the dog with the cat.” – P. J. O’ROURKE (in 2020)

“Democratic Party isn't a political party... It's the name of a den of thieves whose single point of agreement is that they want to break into the national cash register and swipe the booty.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

"The Democrats are the party of screamers and schemers." -- NAN HAYWORTH (former Republican Congresswoman from central NY state, from Kingston to Ithaca -- and an opthalmologist) 

“The Democrats have their own operating principle: Cargo cult economics. It has many facets but the basis idea is that if the government creates something that is associated with a vibrant middle class then a vibrant middle class will spring from that program as inevitably as Athena sprang from the forehead of Zeus.” – BILL STREIFF (of the RedState blog)

“Sex is a private matter between a Democrat and his victim.” – ANDREW KLAVAN

“In a truly unprecedented position in terms of the Democratic party's self-understanding, for the first time, a political party self-consciously on the left of the ideological spectrum will have nothing to do with the conditions, aspirations, and struggles of what was once quaintly called the proletariat.” – LUKE THOMPSON (head of something called the “Applecart Political Consultancy”, in September 2016)

“The Democratic party is fairly easy to identify: people who work for government at all levels. The politics of the public sector is almost exclusively Democratic. And what they care about isn’t social justice or inequality or diversity or peace or whether little Johnny can use the ladies’ room if his heart tells him to ― they care about getting paid.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"The unfinished business of the Democratic Party is socialism. Don't take my word for it -- consult Bernie Sanders. 'This is the unfinished business of the Democratic Party, and the vision we must accomplish', Sanders said, 'These are my values and that is why I call myself a democratic socialist'." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON      (in August 2019) 

"The Democrats' health-care model writ large: Destroy and discredit what's there, and then... improvise." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"The Freakshow Party has been on the progressive scene for a long time. It’s the 'Shout Your Abortion and Show Me Your Pronouns!' party. The three legs of that wobbly stool are the Jew-Hating Weirdo Left (Sharpton, Farrakhan, Omar, Occupy types, etc.), the Loopy White People Left (NPR, vegan bakeries, college towns — everywhere you see a Subaru covered in bumper stickers), and 2SLGTBQIA+ (which I really hope is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s email password). Its natural occupation is that of hall monitor." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"The Democratic Party's constituencies already endorse its intellectuals' aim not to convince the rest of society, but to subdue it. For them, this is The Revolution. They have chosen the Leninist rather than the Mussolinian alternative." -- ANGELO CODEVILLA

"The two hallmarks of almost every major figure in the Democratic party over the past quarter century are 1) being much wealthier than the average American and 2) denouncing the greed of 'the rich' and 'corporate America' as the root of all of the country’s problems. They speak as if they became rich by accident. They just set out to make the world a better place, with no interest in accumulating wealth, and just happened to end up fabulously affluent with multiple houses!" -- JIM GERAGHTY (in April 2017)

“For all practical purposes there is no Democratic party as we have traditionally known it. It is no longer a liberal (a word now replaced by progressive) political alternative to conservatism as much as a cultural movement fueled by coastal elites, academics, celebrities — and the media. Its interests are not so much political as cultural.” – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

"The party that said democracy was on the ballot is now the most anti-democratic force in modern history." -- VICTOR DAVIS HANSON (in Nov. ‘24)

“Look, the average Democrat voter is just plain stupid. They're easy to manipulate. That's the easy part.” – HILLARY CLINTON      (to Dick Morris, in “Rewriting History”, 2005)                                          

“Democrat Party is very diverse we have liberals, socialists, communists, antifa anarchists, pedophile's (sic) gender confused err #MAGA” – HILLARY CLINTON (this actual Twoot of hers actually went out, as is, on 6 June 2017)

"Something has gone seriously wrong with Democratic ideology, which seems to have become a candied set of holier-than-thou bromides attached like tutti-frutti to a quivering green Jell-O mold of adolescent sentimentality." -- CAMILLE PAGLIA     (In "Salon" in 2008)                                                                                                           

"The Democratic Party has  spun out of control in a nationwide orgy of rage and spite." -- CAMILLE PAGLIA      (in an interview with the WEEKLY STANDARD, June 2017)    

“What do Dems stand for anymore? Illegals taking your job. Mentally ill men in dresses peeing next to your daughter. Bake my cake!” – JOHN NOLTE (in June 2017)

"The U.S. does not have an IC (‘Intelligence Community’); the Democrat Party does." -- DOUG BROWN (An American "writer/consultant", on the Twoot)

"The Democrats are the party that stands up for the men who are out of jail before you are out of the hospital." -- BEN STEIN

"The Democratic Party presides over the ruin of every jurisdiction it controls." -- BEN STEIN

“There is nothing more Anti-American than the modern day Democrat.” – COURTLAND SYKES      (Ex- Navy SEAL and GOP candidate for Senate in Missouri, Sept. 2017)                                           

"Democrats: A bunch of rich people, convincing poor people to vote for the rich people by telling the poor people that other rich people are the reason they're poor." -- ROGER SIMON

"It's so cold outside today that I saw a Democrat with his hands in his own pockets." -- CLINTON MICHAEL (an ex-SWAT cop -- on the Twoot -- in Jan. 2018)

"At least communism and Nazism promised their lunkheaded followers a better life. All the Democrats promise us is higher taxes." -- R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR

"For Republicans every day is the 4th of July! For Democrats everyday is Halloween." -- MIKE HUCKABEE      (the ex-Republican governor of Arkansas, and presidential candidate)                      

"Democrats: A bunch of rich people convincing poor people to vote for rich people by telling poor people that other rich people are the reason they are poor." -- CHARLIE KIRK        (Founder and president of TPUSA)

"The MSM is the world’s most pompous Democrat transcription service." -- NICK SHORT

"They, Democrats, are loyal little robots, they are lemmings. It's a mindless hoard of sad insecure dumb people hoping to become powerful by glomming on to a bigger structure." – TUCKER CARLSON

"The Democrat Party is the party of weak men and unhappy women." -- TUCKER CARLSON

“The Democratic party is the home of weirdos, bitterness, envy, hate, and conformity. It’s the enemy of freedom and creativity. It only destroys.” — TUCKER CARLSON (in Oct. 2024)

“You have replaced advice & consent with search & destroy.” -- JUDGE BRETT KAVANAUGH      (in Sept. 2018, to his Democrat attackers in the Senate)                                                      

"The only time Democrats create jobs is when they need protesters." -- TERRENCE K. WILLIAMS     (A Phoenix-based comic, actor and political commenter)                                        

"Democrats do not have foreign enemies; they have domestic enemies. This has been consistent since at least 1972." -- DAVID REABOI (of something called THE SECURITY STUDIES GROUP)

“A WORSE HABIT THAN SMOKING> Jews voting Democratic.” – ROGER SIMON

“Some of my Democrat colleagues have two speeds, hostile and smart ass." -- SENATOR JOHN KENNEDY       (Republican senator from Louisiana, in March 2019)                       

"The 2020 Democratic agenda owes a good deal more to Hugo Chavez than to Jack Kennedy." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Where did Democrats learn to live within someone else’s means?” – JANIE JOHNSON

"If life was easy, we would all be Democrats." -- JANIE JOHNSON

"Every Democrat accusation is a Democrat confession." -- JANIE JOHNSON (the “X” star, in April 2024)

"Why aren’t there any funny Democrat jokes? Because they are all true stories!" -- JANIE JOHNSON      (author and "X" star...)

“Politicians are the lowest form of life on earth. And Democrats are the lowest form of politician.” – GEN. GEORGE S. PATTON JR.

“The Democrats are an assorted throng of rainbow candidates and hectoring scolds who unite in disliking the United States, its history, and the institutions that made it the freest, most secure, and most prosperous country in the world.” – ROGER KIMBALL

"You don't need God anymore; you have us Democrats."-- NANCY PELOSI (in 2006)

"Democrats are the party of women and the men who are afraid of them." -- SCOTT ADAMS     (the creator of “Dilbert”, in April 2024)

"Democrats hate context." -- SCOTT ADAMS     (the creator of "Dilbert", 29 April 2024)

"The Democrats don't have a party. They have a criminal syndicate." -- KYLE BECKER (in Nov. 2022)

"Democratic politicians seem to spend about half the day accusing President Trump of trashing vaguely defined Constitutional norms—and the other half explaining how they plan to trash enumerated Constitutional rights." – JAMES FREEMAN      (From the WSJ, on 15 Oct 19)                                                                                               

"Democrats have a hard time connecting with people because of how smart we are." -- SENATOR MAZIE HIRONO (of Hawaii, on 29 Nov. 2019. And this, coming from the biggest idiot in the Senate, is what is known in the Trade as a “keeper”.)

"Democrats have always looked on the U.S. Constitution as the menu in a restaurant they'd rather not be in." -- JACK JOLIS

“With Democrats, everything is always ulterior. They are the Ulterior Party.” – JACK JOLIS

"The Democrats are the Party of the Ulterior Motive; they are The Slippery Slope." -- JACK JOLIS

"The #1 foreign policy project of the Obamarroid Demo☭rats from Jan. '09 to now has been the aiding, abetting, promoting and protecting DeathToAmerica Iran." -- JACK JOLIS     (in Sept. 2024)

"The truth is, voting Democratic past the age of forty is a silly affectation. We have met the enemy, and it is us." -- JOE QUEENAN (what "past the age of forty"?)

"It’s often said that the Democrats fight 'for the little guy.' That’s true: liberals fight to make sure the little guy stays little! Think about it. What if all the little guys were to prosper and become big guys? Then what? Who would liberals pretend to fight for? If the bamboozlers fight for anything, it’s to ensure that the little guy stays angry at those nasty conservatives who are holding him down." -- ANGELA McGLOWAN       (the rather glamorous black conservative political commenter and CEO of something called ‘Political Strategies and Insights)                                                                                  

“Having embraced homosexuality as its mantle and communism as its creed, the Democrat Party is now circling the drain.  It forgot that communism’s driving force is hatred and that as a cult it’s ultimate destiny is death.  Having failed to kill Trump and knowing that further attempts to overthrow him will fail, it has now turned on itself.  It begins with the destruction of its own machinery (Iowa caucus) and next will turn in its own candidates, one by one, until it splits into pieces and there is nothing left.” – SAMUEL M’CHEYNE GLASSER       (in February 2020)

“Any American political party which has a candidate (no less it’s leading candidate) who’s a self-admitted cocksucker and butt fucker and proud of it deserves to lose. The Democrat party has now completely and irrevocably adopted communism as it’s creed, but it forgot that communism’s most prominent characteristic is hatred and that as a cult it’s goal is death. The Democrat party will now turn on and destroy its own candidates, one by one, until none remain and then, like a snake in its death throes, will eat and consume itself until nothing is left and it vanishes from sight, leaving only a dirty brown stain on the floor of American political history." -- SAMUEL M'CHEYNE GLASSER (in February 2020)

"The 'moderate' is just the Democrat candidate that you don't yet know anything about." -- MARK STEYN

“They're taking the beauty out of the game. These stat-driven workouts are all eyewash. It’s a bunch of bullshit.. It’s like the Democrats are running baseball," -- RICH "GOOSE" GOSSAGE       (the former Yankee Hall of Fame relief pitcher, in Feb. 2020)                                                                                                                 

“Somebody needs to open an investigation into the Democrat Party to find out if they have any ties to America.” – LAURA INGRAHAM      (in April 2020)                         
                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

"Imagine being a Democrat and having to pretend that Joe Biden is competent, Hillary Clinton was innocent and Barack Obama did a good job!" -- MARK GRANT (Vietnam Vet, from Wichita Falls, Texas -- on the Twoot on 13 April 2020)

“Happy people don’t vote Democrat” – GITABUSHI     (a guy on the Twoot – if that is his name)                                                                                   

“If Democrats are willing to cause such destruction in the pursuit of power, just imagine what they’ll do if they obtain it.” – PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP

“I’ve met the enemy. I’ve killed the enemy. Democrats endorse the enemy.” – ROBERT J. O’NEILL      (the SEAL who killed Bin Laden)                                                      

"In the hands of Democratic politicians, climate change is like systemic racism in the sky. You can't see it, but rest assured it's everywhere and it's deadly. And like systemic racism, it is your fault. The American middle class did it, they cause climate change" -- TUCKER CARLSON (in September 2020)

“The Democratic Party at this point is a cartel that exists only to perpetuate itself and the elderly mediocrities who run and benefit from it." -- TUCKER CARLSON (in August 2022)

“In the Democratic Party identity politics matter far more than, say, democracy.” – FREDDIE GRAY     (the Deputy Editor of the UK SPECTATOR, in August 2020)                                     

"Russia is the hand, Cuba is the cross, Venezuela is the thread and the Democratic Party is the dancing marionette. China pays for the show." -- CESAR REYNEL AGUILERA (Cuban exiled writer, doctor, and historian. In Nov. 2020)

“I will not dwell at length on the years it took the Republican Party, and American patriots, to recognize what the Democrat Party had become or the threat it posed to our country as an enemy within. Suffice it to say that Republicans can still be heard referring to Democrats as “liberals” when it is obvious even to them that there is nothing liberal about their principles or methods. They are vindictive bigots who are actively destroying the First Amendment in our universities, on the Internet and in our once but no longer free press.” – DAVID HOROWITZ      (“Fighting Words”, 22 Nov. 2020)                                                                                                                    

“Democrats are not democrats; they are totalitarians. They have declared war on the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, the Electoral College, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the election system, and the idea of civil order. They have called for the Republican President of the United States to be de-platformed and jailed. Their obvious goal is a one-party state that criminalizes dissent. To them, support for such basic necessities as borders and law enforcement are racist. If you oppose their efforts to legalize infanticide, they will condemn you as enemies of women, and if you make videos of their confessions to selling body parts of murdered infants, they will throw you in jail.” – DAVID HOROWITZ (“Fighting Words”, 22 Nov. 2020)

“The Democratic elites have learned nothing and forgotten everything.” – DOMINIC GREEN     (The Deputy Editor of “The Spectator USA”, in December 2020)     

 "I greatly underestimated the awesome power of the Democratic Medusa, whose snakes writhe into, wrap around and infest nearly every American institution, particularly the press. It has been amazing to watch but also chilling. The US no longer enjoys an independent press. The American fourth estate is almost entirely an arm of the Democratic party." -- LIONEL SHRIVER      (in August 2024)

“You can either be an American or a Democrat. You can't be both. The Democrat Party is a clear and present danger to America. This criminal organization is far more dangerous than China, Russia, Iran and North Korea combined.” – STEVE FERGUSON     (on the Twoot on 10 April 2021)                                                                                          

“The Democrat Party is absolutely the party of American Marxism – there are no two ways about it.” – MARK LEVIN      (on his radio program, 11 May 2021)    

"When Democrats don't like something, they just change the rules." -- JOE DI GENOVA (on 19 September 2023)

"Democrats don't have a moral compass, they have a political compass." -- JOE DI GENOVA

“Simply put, Democrats know they can no longer win by the old agree-upon rules, constitutional or otherwise. The newborn radical Democrats can’t win – not without rewriting the rules to get around competition at the state lever, where elections are closer to the people.” – DANIEL McCARTHY       (director of the Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship Program at The Fund for American Studies and editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review and a contributing editor at The Spectator. In April 2021)                                

"There are two kinds of Democrats - those who cheat and those who applaud it." -- PHILIP SCHUYLER      (the fellow on the Twoot with the big following)                              

"My Democratic colleagues in Washington are determined to dramatically reshape our society in a way that leaves our country even more vulnerable to the threats we face.” – SENATOR JOE MANCHIN      (Democrat of West Virginia, 18 Dec. 2021)                                                     

“The Democrats believe in five things: inflation at home, appeasement abroad, teachers unions first and parents and students last, an open southern border and closed police precincts everywhere.” -- HUGH HEWITT (on 13 Feb 2022)

"A Democrat complaining about the extremism of the Democrat party is like a kid mad that he has a stomach ache after eating a bag full of candy." -- DANNY ASHMAN (the owner of The Ashman Free Press, in April 2022)

"Democrats, if they were honest with themselves, simply believe Americans are too 'deplorable' to govern themselves. They believe in their hearts that the rubes and the rednecks need correction by benevolent elites in the bureaucracy or the courts. So the Dems and their interest groups stick to manoeuvring (sic) to get benign court decisions and then have meltdowns on Twitter if they get reversed." -- ANDREW SULLIVAN

"In my lifetime the Democratic Party has gone from being the party of the factory floor to the party of the faculty lounge." -- PAUL BEGALA (on Bill Maher's TV show, May 2022)

"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.)

"On fighting Islamic terrorism--which, to me, is more important than any other issue, not just because of Israel but because Islamic terrorism seeks to destroy Western civilization--Democrats don’t understand. Republicans do. I was shocked when I saw a poll which said that 48% of Democrats, supported Israel. 48%! Republicans, 70%." -- ED KOCH (the former Noo Yawk mayor, in "The Tablet", in 2013)

"The Democrats never met an enemy of America they did not like." -- JOHN ROSSOMANDO (3 Oct. '23)

"Congress has failed to deliver for the people we care about most, the undocumented Americans in this country.” --  SEN. CHRIS MURPHY    (Democrat senator from Connecticut, in Feb 8, 2024, and you read that right -- the people that the Democrats "most care about" are... the illegal aliens. Says it all....)

"If you could reason with Democrats, there wouldn't be any Democrats." -- TONY HELLER     (the leading debunker of GlobWarm bullshit)   

"Democrats and leftwing activists don't care if the information is correct; only that it’s effective." --  CHAD FELIX GREENE   (a contributor to "Twitchy", "Red State" and "The Federalist)

"There is no sane surviving version of the Democratic Party. It’s now a party of power-mad lunacy." -- KYLE SMITH      (on 29 July 2024)

"Anti-semitism is now marbled into the Democratic Party." -- VAN JONES        (the self-admitted "communist" on  CNN, 7 Aug.'24)

"Democrats have to hide the truth and lie about what they believe to win. It’s why they’re all-in on censorship of their enemies. Democrats cannot win when people are allowed to speak and hear the truth." --  SEAN DAVIS      (CEO & co-founder of THE FEDERALIST)

"The Democrat party is gay. It's dominated by judgmental manipulative women and effeminate gay men. Real men don't want to be associated with that." -- BRIAN K. BASINGER     (a solid bloke on X, in Aug. 2024)

"It's impossible to understand the Democratic Party in traditional terms. If you think about it as a group of Americans who have a view of the way the country should be governed, you’ll be scratching your head. If, on the other hand, you think of it as a hostile force, one that has no interest in the wellbeing of average Americans, it makes a lot more sense. The people who are vocally supporting it are in some ways victims of a psychological operation that has convinced them to support things that are, frankly, unholy.” -- BRET WEINSTEIN     (American professor of Evolutionary Biology, in Sept. 2024)

"Democrats are so worried about preserving democracy that they staged a coup to preserve it." -- JIM GAFFIGAN       (at NY's Al Smith Dinner, 17 Oct 2024)

"The Democrats -- their party has gone Quinoa, while the rest of America is eating at Cracker Barrel." -- BRIAN WILLIAMS     (the disgraced NBC News Anchorman nevertheless speaking the truth in Nov. '24)

Demography

"The very concept of a nation founded by European settlers is offensive to me. Old stock White Canadians are an unpleasant relic and, quite frankly, replaceable. And we will replace them." -- JUSTIN TRUDEAU     (the principessa is truly Castro's kid...)

Demonstrations/Demonstrators

"Strange, parasitic end-time cultists who stop members of the public who still bother to go to work from actually getting there." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY

Denial                                                                                                                                                           

"I not only deny the allegation, I deny the alligator"—JESSE JACKSON      (although this is widely attributed to him, Jesse almost certainly didn't say it.  But as my old mater used to say, “si non e vero, e ben trovato”.)                                                             

“Stout denial is the thing. Don't go in for any airy explanations. Simply stick to stout denial. You can't beat it." – P. G. WODEHOUSE      (from his “Mike And Psmith”, 1909)                          

Denmark

“The Danes, of course, are the least goody-goody of all the Scandinavians.” - THEODORE DALRYMPLE

“I know that some people in the U.S. associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.” – LARS LOKKE RASMUSSEN (the Danish Prime Minister, to Harvard’s Kennedy School, in 2016)

"In fact, for Denmark to work, the whole original socialist model had to be reformed in a way that empowered entrepreneurship." -- EDWARD GLAESER (American economist, and Prof of Economics at Harvard)

Departures (Exits)

"There's never a good time to leave, but there is a right time." -- TERRY WOGAN      (the great Irish-English DJ-compère, and scourge of the Eurovision Song Contest)                                                                         

“There are plenty of things in life which I can only enjoy knowing I can make a sharp exit at any time. It's not that I leave: I just like to know I can. My idea of hell is a party on a boat.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

Dependability

“You know where you are with him: he always lets you down.” – DAVID NIVEN (speaking of his long-time pal, Errol Flynn)

Depression (economic)                                                                                                                  

“Government intervention helped make the Great Depression great.” - AMITY SHLAES

"In 1929 the stock market cratered. Roosevelt was elected in 1932, at the height of the Depression. He, who'd never had a job, decided he would take charge of the economy. He instituted absolute wage-price controls (The NIRA, 1933-35) and turned a bad month on Wall street, in the most prosperous economy in history, into a decade-long worldwide depression." -- DAVID MAMET

“Never forget, never forget, and I think it’s very important for Democrats especially to remember this, that if Hitler had not come along, Franklin Roosevelt would have left office in 1941 with an unemployment rate in excess of 15 percent and an economic recovery strategy that had basically failed.” – LAWRENCE SUMMERS (The Harvard dean and economic adviser to Obama – who was marginally less criminally useless than the others, which was one reason he got out early....)

“FDR got the political credit for ending the Depression, even though it really didn’t end until he stopped trying to fix it, and the economy didn’t boom until after he died.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"It's not a recession unless it's from the Recession region of France otherwise it's just sparkling misery." -- SETH MANDEL (in July 2022, mocking the Bidet Administration's dicking around with the wording of the recession they created)

Depression (mental)                                                                                                 

“If you can describe depression, then you do not really suffer from it.” - LEWIS WOLPERT       (in his book “Malignant Sadness)                                                    

“A surprise visit from hell” - ANDREW SOLOMON       (in his book “The Noonday Demon”)                                                                                                                          

“Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.” – STEVEN WRIGHT

“Living with depression is like driving with the brakes on.” – PROF. ANDREA FAGIOLINI      (University of Siena)                                        

“Depression has little to do with sadness, I think. It's blankness.” –  JEREMY CLARKE

"One of the depressing things about depression is knowing that there are lots of people in the world with far more reason to feel depressed than you have, and find that, so far from making you snap out of your depression, it only makes you despise yourself more and thus feel more depressed." -- DAVID LODGE (in his very funny -- really! -- 1995 novel "Therapy") 

"Nothing is easier to act than remorse, unless it be depression." -- THEODORE DALRYMPLE

"Obsession dispels depression; the third law of psychodynamics. (The other two are 1/ That people loathe those they've wronged; and, 2/ That people despise the victims of misfortune)." -- EDWARD ST. AUBYN

DeSantis, Ron

"Trump was all talk, but DeSantis was a culture warrior with substance." -- MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHTERTY (After RDS emerged as a GOP superstar after the 2022 mid-terms)

"I think Ron DeSantis is the best presidential candidate since Reagan... and possibly the best in all my (rather long) lifetime. He's only lacking in charisma -- which may be a handicap in campaigning, but otherwise... may be no bad thing. (Give me sagacity over charisma any day...)" -- JACK JOLIS

"DeSantis is Trump 2.0 -- but unlike Trump, DeSantis doesn't shoot himself in the foot." -- CHRIS KROK (of WBAP, 9 Dec. 2022)

Desertion                                                                                                                                          

“Desertion is a coin. You turn it over, and it's loyalty.” – DENIS JOHNSON      (in his novel “The Laughing Monsters”)                                                                                                         

Design                                                                                                                                                                                                           

“A key has no logic to its shape: the only logic is, it turns the lock.” – G. K. CHESTERTON

Desire                                                                                                                                                                                                      

“Once you stop wanting something, you get it.” – ANDY WARHOL

“He'd concluded that wanting something was generally less painful than hauling it.” – DENIS JOHNSON

“What you want you can’t have; what you do have, you don’t want. That’s the Great Universal Paradox.” – FAY WELDON

Despair                                                                                                                                                     

 “To despair is a sin.” – WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

“When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something.” – DMITRY SHOSTAKOVICH

“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

"Perhaps there was something in this half-shallow, half-profound idea that one had to despair of life in order to grasp its real value." -- EDWARD ST. AUBYN

“Despair should be large and general, not petty and particular.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

"Despair is not despair until you admit it, and then like your reflection in a tin tray, it has a face that goes on forever." -- NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE     (this sounds both obtuse AND banal to me, but on the other hand it also sounds pompously weighty enough... to makes the cut, here.)

Despotism                                                                                                                                                                                              

“We are rid of the despot , but not of despotism. The republic has avenged her injuries by the death of the tyrant at your hands, nothing more. What of her dignities? Which of them has she recovered? The right to obey a dead man, whom she could not tolerate alive. Are we defending the paper memoranda of one whose laws graven on bronze we ought to annul?” – CICERO      (to Cassius, who was, as all schoolboys kno, was one of the group wot kilt Jules Caesar)                                                                                                                                                

Destiny                                                                                                                                                          

“Control your destiny or someone else will.” – JACK WELCH      (the long-time, legendary generalissimo of General Electric)                                                                                                      

"A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it." ― JEAN de La FONTAINE (1621-1695, the Froggie Aesop. Knew his stuff, did de la Fontaine....)

"I believe that a combination of free will and random chaos controls our destinies, that the world is sort of like a ladies garment sale at Lochmann's. In any case, you had to be awake and alert at all times." -- NELSON DEMILLE

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

Destruction                                                                                                                                              

"That is one of the terrible lessons of history. To build up a community, a city, or an empire can take generations of concentrated effort by wise and prudent men. To wreck one takes about five minutes. All you need is the right fool in the right place at the right time." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Destruction is hard to make interesting.” – ANTHONY BURGESS

Detail(s)                                                                                                                                                    

“The danger with detail, for a storyteller, is to put in too much of it: to be so in love with one’s research that one wants the reader to fall in love with it as well. But the reader rarely does.” – LIONEL DAVIDSON       (the great novelist, author of “The Rose Of Tibet” and “Kolymski Heights”)                                                                            

Deteioration   

 "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")

Determination                                                                                                                                       

“When I say ‘Never Again’, I mean ‘Never Again’. Not, ‘Never Again unless it's too hard'." – KURT SCHLICHTER

Determinism                                                                                                                                            

“No one is a determinist in his own case (except when it suits his purposes, for example in court).” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

Deterrence                                                                                                                                                

“No one ever picked a fight with Jack Dempsey.” – RONALD REAGAN

“Deterrence only works if you actually, you know, deter...” – JOHN SCHINDLER

"Never fire a warning shot. It is a waste of ammunition." -- HUNTER S. THOMPSON

“Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.” – GEORGE SAVILE, 1ST MARQUESS OF HALIFAX

"Disclosure is part of deterrence." -- AMROM H. KATZ (American physicist and military intelligence, satellite specialist, 1915-1997 -- as quoted by my friend Edward Jay Epstein in his excellent 1979 book "Deception")

“The most beautiful manners I have ever met with are in countries where men carry knives.” –  R.G. COLLINGWOOD       (Early 20th century English philosopher, historian and archaelogist)                    

"Deterrence is the product of two factors: military power and the will to use it. As a result, if you have the power but lack the will to use it you have nothing since any quantity, no matter how great, multiplied by zero, is zero." -- LOUIS J. HALLE   (a US State Dept wallah, 1910-1998, and though this sounds self-evident, it's amazing how many Deep Staters, mostly Democrats, never get the message)

Detroit                                                                                                                                                                                                  

“Detroit became our national ashtray, a safe place for everyone to stub out the butt of their jokes.” - MATT LABASH  (the great WEEKLY STANDARD columnist)                

Development (economic)

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

“Everywhere nations claim a resolve to develop; but everywhere their first goal is to expropriate, banish, or kill the existing developers.” - GEORGE GILDER

Development (human)

"Each new generation extends childhood and extends the age of responsibility. If teens in the West these days don't drink, date or have sex as much as previous generations, it's not because they're more mature, but because they're developing later. Today's 16-year-olds aren't, for the most part, socially or emotionally ready to get smashed or laid." -- MARY WAKEFIELD (in June 2023)

Development, (“sustainable”)

“'Sustainable' development might imply having your cake without eating it, or possibly cutting off your nose to save anyone else the trouble in future.” – DOT WORDSWORTH (the distinguished resident etymologiste at the UK SPECTATOR)

Devil, The

"The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." -- MARTIN LUTHER

“The devil . . . the prowde spirite . . . cannot endure to be mocked.” – SAINT THOMAS MORE (taking his cue from Martin Luther... or vice versa....)

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

"The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist." – CHARLES BAUDELAIRE (“La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas.")

"God is on your side? Is He a Conservative? The Devil's on my side, he's a good Communist." -- JOSEPH STALIN

"Only poor people are possessed by Demons you will never see a rich person rolling on the floor in Church" ~ ROBERT MUGABE     (The old Shona communist butcher at least got this one right....)
 

“Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil.” -- ERIC HOFFER

Dhimmitude

“Even after all these years, all these attacks and all these dead, the West still keeps asking the same question after such events: 'Who would do such a thing?' The answer is always the same. Yet still our society wonders what would make someone do such a thing?  The tone of bafflement is strange  like a society that keeps asking a question, but keeps its fingers lodged firmly in its ears whenever it is given the answer.”  DOUGLAS MURRAY

Diamonds

“I have never hated a man enough to give his diamonds back.” - ZSAZSA GABOR

“Big girls need big diamonds.” – ELIZABETH TAYLOR

“Diamonds are what's called a Veblen good. Their value lies in their being widely known to be expensive.” – RORY SUTHERLAND     (Thorstein Veblen was the turn-of-the-20th Century Danish-bord left-wing economist who was the author of “The Theory of The Leisure Class”, and his eponymous “good” is something that's worth a lot  merely BECAUSE it's worth a lot. Like a Rolls Royce, for example.)

“Nothing in the world is harder to sell than a diamond, because no one in the world needs a diamond.” – BRIAN J. CAMPBELL (my grate pal – known in Israel as “Beryle Kimpel”)

“Go get lost in the Amazon by yourself. What would you rather have, a map or big-ass diamond? The diamond only has value once you get out of the jungle, but you can’t get out without the map.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"Diamonds are the most valued of human possessions." -- PLINY THE ELDER     (Gaius Plinius Secundus, 23 - 79AD —and this is kind of a banal observation, except… he said it over 2000 years ago…)

"It's a great pity, but I'm afraid God didn't put diamonds in pleasant places like Bermuda." -- A. E. JOLIS

Diana, Princess

“Diana forged a 'Special Relationship' all her own when she developed so many neuroses and eating problems that she in effect became an American.” – FLORENCE KING

“A gilded hysteric who resembled nothing so much as Judy Garland with a title.” – FLORENCE KING

“Diana spoke beautifully and, unfortunately, we could understand every word she said.” – FLORENCE KING

Dictatorship/Dictators

"When I go to a dictatorship, I only have to talk to one person and that's the dictator, because he speaks for all the people." -JIMMY CARTER (What an ass. WHAT. A FUCKING. ASS.)

“One does not establish the dictatorship in order to safeguard the revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” - GEORGE ORWELL

“Dictators hate humor.” – GARRY KASPAROV (the inimitable chess-ist, freedom fighter, and bon-vivant)

"I know well that nowadays it requires a rod of iron to rule men, but it must be gilded, and we must make them believe when we strike them that they direct the blow themselves. It is necessary always to talk of liberty, equality, justice, and disinterestedness, and never grant any liberty whatever. No change of system is required, but only a change of language." – NAPOLEON (The Little Corsican said this in 1815 on St. Helena, to his English jailer there, Sir Henry Keating)

"The weakness of all dictatorships is that they are vast bureaucracies. What is not on file does not exist." -FREDERICK FORSYTH (1971)

“All dictators are terrified of coups, so their armed forces are crap.” – THOMAS WICTOR

"With authoritarianism, you cannot fight with it, because they love you to fight with them, they are so powerful. But if you laugh about it, they hate it, because they are so laughable. They do not know how to fight with humor." -- AI WEIWEI    (the exiled Chinese artist, in Dec. 2023)

"Once you form a police state it is very hard to dismantle it." -- ANTHONY BURGESS 

“Every ruler is harsh whose rule is new.” – AESCHYLUS (in his “Prometheus Bound”)

“National saviours tend to have their little ways.” – SHIVA NAIPAUL (actually referring to the Shah of Iran, here.)

“The quasi-dictatorship of the right, as opposed to dictatorships of the left, can alter. During the fall of Saigon, Solzhenitsyn shocked the left by saying that one was freer under Franco than in the Soviet Union. And yet it was true.” – OLIVIER TODD       (the leftist-but-honest French journalist, of the “Nouvel Observateur”, said this in late 1975)

"In democracies, politicians obsess over polls. In dictatorships, they obsess over plots" – JACK JOLIS

"The definition of a police state is this: in a police state the authorities search for crime; whereas in a free society the authorities search to solve crime." -- DAN BONGINO

“Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size.” - VLADDIMIR NABOKOV

"Every socialist is a disguised dictator." -- LUDWIG VON MISES (don't even know how "disguised"....)

"Dictatorships depoliticize their citizens." -- PASCAL BRUCKNER      (a French writer-philosopher, one of the "Nouveau Philosophes" of the 1970s. He wrote this in 2024, and it's of course true -- dictatorships do this out of self-protection.)

"Only intellectual fashion and the tyranny of Right/Left thinking prevent intelligent men  of goodwill from perceiving the facts that traditional authoritarian governments are less repressive than revolutionary autocracies, that they are more susceptible of liberalization, and that they are more compatible with U.S. interests." -- JEANNE KIRKPATRICK      (Reagan's Democrat-but-anti-communist Ambassadrice to the UN, and a friend/collaboratrice of my dad's)

Dignity

“I am an economist — student of the allocation of scarce goods — and the scarcest commodity on earth is human dignity.” – BEN STEIN

"One shouldn't ever do anything to protect one's dignity. You either have it or you don't." -- MARK HELPRIN

"Dignity was the first quality to be abandoned when the heart took over the running of human affairs." -- WILLIAM BOYD 

Diplomacy

"The carrot is that we won`t use the stick!" - RICHARD PERLE (on being asked what was the “carrot” in a particular negotiation)

“Professional diplomats, acolytes of the first-class-cabin fundamentalism that holds that ‘talks’ and ‘engagement’ can iron out any problem, regardless of the interests and beliefs and fanaticism that make up the underlying reality.” - DAVID BROOKS (commenting here about the endless effort by its enemies to get Israel to “negotiate”, in August 2006, but could pertain to just about any world crisis, at any time…)

“Diplomacy is not for the proud.” - JAY NORDLINGER

"I’m afraid that too often when State Department types go into negotiations with envoys from Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Iran and similar places, it’s like me sitting down to play Texas Hold ‘Em with guys named “Doc” and “Slim.”" -- CLIFFORD D. MAY

“A Soviet diplomat is in America not to protect Soviet tourists, but to damage America.” – WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, Jr.

“Diplomats were old women of both sexes fussing around, worrying about what the whole world thinks when in fact no one gives a damn.” – ALAN JUDD      (An excellent and shamefully under-appreciated English author/novelist who wrote what I consider to be the best novel ever written on South Africa, “Short of Glory”.)

“One of the reasons why Europeans think every problem has a diplomatic solution is that they have no other tools in their belt.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“Diplomacy is the art of saying ‘Nice doggie!’ until you can find a rock.” – WILL ROGERS

"Diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments." – FREDERICK THE GREAT (King of Prussia, 1740-1786)

“Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

"Diplomats long made redundant by telephones, still preserved the mannerisms of men who were dealing with great matters of state." -- EDWARD ST. AUBYN

“Diplomacy is the shadow cast by military and naval power.” -- JOHN LEHMAN (this chap was Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy. Good guy.)

“In every city, in every country in the world, diplomats live and work in the most valuable and desirable real estate there is to be found. Mansions, castles, palaces, ten-up-ten-downs with ensuite deer park: whatever and wherever it may be, diplomats walk in, look around, and say yes, I think I can bear this.” – HUGH LAURIE (the comic English actor)

"A diplomat who says 'yes' means 'maybe', a diplomat who says 'maybe' means 'no', and a diplomat who says 'no' is no diplomat." -- TALLEYRAND (1754-1538 -- full name Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord)

"Diplomacy is politics without power." -- MALCOLM BRADBURY

“A diplomat these days is nothing but a headwaiter who’s allowed to sit down occasionally.” – PETER USTINOV (in 1957)

Disability

“Like any profitable business, disability is an expanding concern.” -- ROD LIDDLE

"People with learning disabilities have rights, but then so do people without them. If you are always holding back a group of children in order to involve someone who is much slower, eventually they are not going to like it." -- ROSS CLARK (in the UK SPECTATOR, in April 2018)

Disappointment

“You can’t be disappointed in your enemies, only your friends.” --JONAH GOLDBERG

“There are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers.” -- ST. TERESA OF ÁVILA (1525-1582)  

“So much of life consists of a process of disenchantment.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY

"When you are disappointed, it isn't with foes and enemies. You are disappointed with friends and allies." -- WALID PHARES (Co-Secretary General of the Transatlantic Parliamentary Group)

Disapproval

“Indifference is not the same as contempt.” – LLOYD EVANS      (Heh, though sometimes, of course, it is.)                                                                       

Disarmament

“A solemn and prolonged farce.” -- WINSTON CHURCHILL (describing some “disarmament negotiation” or other.)

"The disarmament movement had been tragically successful in disarming the nations that believed in disarmament." -- WALTER LIPPMANN (in 1943, when it was ok for a big lib like him to say such an illiberal thing)

“Can I imagine a world without nuclear weapons? Yes, I can. That’s a world I didn’t like.” -- GEN. JOHN E. HYTEN       (Commander, STRATCOM, July 2017)        

"The Left hates nukes, but it really hates that the West has them. If we gave them up, so would everyone else. If the enemies of the West were the only ones with nukes, that would be okay, since it would deter imperialism." -- JAMES LILEKS

"It simply does not matter to arms-controllers whether Russia is in compliance or if the treaty does not include China. Agreements exist not so much to curb bad behavior overseas as to rein in hawks at home." -- MATTHEW CONTINETTI     (Of The Washington Free Beacon, in March 2019)         

 “Arms control was a bugaboo, a fantasy, a figment of the Western imagination.” – VLADIMIR BUKOVSKY

Disasters

“When really disastrous events happen they tend not to announce themselves as such.” – SAM LEITH

“Something good always emerges after a catastrophe: like never trusting the Chinese and outlawing the word ‘globalist’.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 
"As seems to be the norm with disaster, the baleful day was heralded by a spell of brilliant weather." -- WILLIAM BOYD

Discipline

“I’ve been in schools in Washington D.C., where there are young men who do not know the taboos of the family, the shibboleths of the society, the need for self-restraint.  That’s what drill sergeants do.  Young recruits hate their drill sergeant.  They want to kill him.  By the eighth week they’ll do anything to please him, and they will never forget his name.” -- COLIN POWELL (he’s right about that – mine was Sgt. Reggie Phillips, E-7, black as coal, Fort Knox KY, ’67)

“If a child's parent or teacher no longer possesses any authority, the child in question is completely at the mercy of its peer group. Why is that bad? Because the authority of a group, even a child group, is always stronger and considerably more tyrannical than the severest authority of an individual person can ever be. In this way, children are emancipated from the authority of adults, only to be subject to the much more terrifying and capricious authority of the majority.” -- TOBY YOUNG

“It was an inflexible maxim of Roman discipline that a good soldier should dread his own officers far more than the enemy.” – EDWARD GIBBON

"Emancipating children from the authority of adults leaves them to the tyranny of bullies." -- ROBERT ADES    (Mr. Adès is a psychology teacher in London)

Discovery

“I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before.” - G.K. CHESTERTON

“The end of all our exploring will be that we arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” – T.S. ELIOT

“One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time." -- CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

 “There are three stages of scientific discovery, first people deny it is true, then they deny it is important ; finally they credit the wrong person.” – ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT (Prussian, geographer, naturalist, explorer, 1769-1859)

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

"Genius consists not in making great discoveries but in seeing the connection between small discoveries." -- WALKER PERCY

“This, I’m sure, is how most discoveries through history came about: bored men pissing about (while their irked womenfolk looked on in bemusement and irritation) and accidentaly learning more stuff about the world through repetition and trial and error.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

Discrimination

“It is often said that one shouldn’t judge by appearances, but it is rather difficult to see by what else one might judge, at least in the first instance.” -- THEODORE DALRYMPLE

“Until the inclusiveness lobby turned the word ‘discriminating’ into a boo-word, it was a compliment, meaning the ability to know the difference between good and bad, deserving and undeserving. We all discriminate every day, and why not? We favor the things we like.” - JOHN PARFITT (a good citizen of Painswick, Gloucestershire, England, in Feb. 2007)

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” – JOHN ROBERTS      (Chief Justice of the SCOTUS, and the best one sentence dismissal of “Affirmative Action” ever)     

“The man who doesn't discriminate literally cannot tell shit from Shinola.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“An inability and unwillingness to discriminate always leads, by default, to the overgrowth of the worst, from which the better can never recover.” -- THEODORE DALRYMPLE

“Prejudice is free but discrimination has costs.” – THOMAS SOWELL

"When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination." -- THOMAS SOWELL

“Discrimination derives from discerno. And discrimination is not against things, but rather between things.” -- PETER JONES (The “classicist” at the UK SPECTATOR)

“Do not act like the mob, without deliberation, reason or discrimination.” -- CICERO

“We don't have actual preferences. We only find out what we want by contrasting them (sic) with other things.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

"Discrimination and thinking are the same thing. To think is to discriminate between things." -- JORDAN PETERSON

"To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others." – GEORGE ORWELL

“Discrimination is the essential faculty of the civilized mind.” – EVELYN WAUGH

Disgrace                                                                                                                                                 

“Fame may last a minute, but infamy lasts a lifetime.” – ALSTON B. RAMSAY

“The nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master and deserves one.” – ALEXANDER HAMILTON

"If a man behaves outrageously enough, disgrace is impossible." -- POPE BROCK (this amusingly-named fellow is an American author who lives in Arlington, Mass.)

Disinformation (& Misinformation)

“Beware of false knowledge, it is more dangerous than ignorance.” – GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

“During the Vietnam War we spread vitriolic stories around the world, pretending that America's presidents sent Genghis Khan-style barbarian soldiers to Vietnam who raped at random, taped electrical wires to human genitals, cut off limbs, blew up bodies and razed entire villages. These weren't facts. They were our tales. Nevertheless, millions of Americans ended up being convinced their own president, not communism, was the enemy.” – ION MIHAI PACEPA (Lt. Gen. Pacepa, the ex-head of the Romanian KGB and the highest-ranking defector ever from the Commie side during the Cold War, said this in the late 70s, either echoing John Kerry's earlier vile testimony to Congress, or, more likely, showing us where Kerry got his words in the first place. Anyway, this is the very definition of “dsezinformatzia”)

“If there’s a misinformation problem, it’s a centralization of misinformation problem” -- PETER THIEL

"The essence of disinformation is provocation, not lying. In fact, in peacetime, disinformation might be the chief job of an intelligence service." -- JAMES JESUS ANGLETON (to him disinformation was a synonym for deception. Oh, and he was right about Nosenko.)

"Tell them what they want to hear." -- V. I. LENIN (instructions he gave Dzerzhinsky to give to his disinformation double-agents) 

"Disinformation relies on the premise that all information is known." -- DAIN EHRING (an author and astrophysicist, on the Twoot-- in April 2022)

"It's ironic that 'disinformation' (before the term was perverted, along with so many others, by today's Left) was actually a 'thing', a tactic -- in fact a whole Department of the effing Soviet KGB -- that would actually create damaging shit and slip it into friendly western media." -- JACK JOLIS (in April 2022)

"The Department of Homeland Security -- which shouldn't even exist -- has no business lecturing the American public about disinformation. This is Stasi shit. Countering 'deza' is a FOREIGN issue ONLY in a democracy." -- JOHN SCHINDLER

"Freedom of information is a fundamental human right; (and) for a nation that is afraid to let its people to judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people." -- JOHN F. KENNEDY (on the 20th Anniversary of the Voice of America delivered February 26, 1962)

"It was the KGB whose successful campaign of disinformation against the United States created the international calumny that America is a racist society, when in truth America is the world's least racist society. From the 1930s through the 1980s it was the KGB which tirelessly spread worldwide its campaign of 'dezinformatsia' about America's racism. This culminated in the KGB's 'Operation Infektion' which started in a KGB-owned Indian newspaper 'The Patriot' in 1983 (a newspaper established in 1962 by the KGB solely for the purposed of spreading 'dezinformatsia'). The KGB pushed the story that scientists working for the US Government invented the AIDS virus as part of a secret campaign to extinguish Africa's Black population! The campaign succeeded at least and the French movie star Marion Cotillard who I heard say that the Americans had indeed committed this crime. A host of Americans have bought into this lie as well: Bill Cosby (to my surprise), Spike Lee, John Singleton, Dick Gregory and, of course, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright." -- PAUL JOLIS (in his excellent 2022 memoir "Going Mobile") 

"When I hear the word 'misinformation' online, I just think 'anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders'." -- DAN TOLER (the podcaster, not the late guitarist)

"Misinformation is just a euphemism for any point of view the radical progressive left disagrees with." -- TOBY YOUNG

Disneyland                                                                                                                                                    

"Could Walt Disney create Disneyland today? From ground break to ribbon cutting in nine months. You couldn’t get a permit to cut one orange tree in that time today." – GLENN BECK      (in May 2018)                                                                                           

"How could you spend a day at Disneyland and not come out believing in abortion?" -- MARK LAWSON (bit harsh, surely....)

“Diversity”

“ Diversity. That word has become a sacred mantra, endlessly repeated for years on end, without a speck of evidence being asked for or given to verify the wonderful benefits it is assumed to produce. Despite much gushing about how we should 'celebrate diversity', America's great achievement has not been in having diversity but in taming its dangers that have run amok in many other countries. Americans have by no means escaped diversity's oppressions and violence, but we have reined them in.” --THOMAS SOWELL

"It has not been our diversity, but our ability to overcome the problems inherent in diversity, that has been our strength" – THOMAS SOWELL

“I have never known a word to become absolute dogma, without a speck of evidence, the way ‘diversity’ has.” – THOMAS SOWELL

“The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask them how many Republicans there are in their Sociology Department.” – THOMAS SOWELL (One of America's Wise Old Men. Although he's an adopted Californian, owing to his long-time association with Stanford's Hoover Institute, he was born and raised in the Bronx and every time I hear him say something I'm reminded that he sounds exactly like a black Bill Casey.)

«Liberals are fond of saying that they want to hear opposing points of view, but it always distresses them to learn that there are opposing points of view.” - WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

"Do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same." - GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

“As a simple but surely effective measure for achieving cuts in spending, might I propose that anyone with any of the words ‘Diversity’, ‘Equality’, and ‘Outreach’ in their job title be immediately relieved of their ‘duties’? This would be win-win as, apart from the vast savings, there would undoubtedly be a benefit to the sum of human happiness.” - PHILIP BROOKSBY (a good citizen from Penarth, Vale of Gamorgan, Wales, writing to the Spectator in November 2008)

“Never in recorded history has diversity been anything but a problem. ‘Diversity’ is a difficulty to be overcome, not an advantage to be sought.” -- ANN COULTER

"I'm not against diversity, I'm against anyone who cares about diversity." -- ANN COULTER

"If everyone is thinking alike, someone isn't thinking." -- GEN. GEORGE S. PATTON JR.

“The remarkable thing about the Diversity cult is that all the circumstances of the actual human world refute its tenets, wherever we look. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that there has never been an ideology so heartily and jealously embraced by all the main institutions of a society; that we at the same time so obviously at odds with the evidence of our senses: It is as if the entire Western world had committed itself to the belief that human beings can fly by flapping their arms.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

"Diversity is a dinner party conversation, not Reality for this crowd." -- TODD KRUSE (candidate for state representative in Minnesota, in Sept. '22 — talking about the residents of Martha’s Vineyard) 

"In Baltimore you've got a black mayor, a black police chief, a black prosecutor and black city councilors, all Democrats -- so much diversity.."– CHRIS CUOMO (The TV talking head son of one governor, brother of another, and he did NOT mean this ironically)

"There's nothing good about diversity, other than the food, and we don't need 128 million Mexicans for the restaurants."--ANN COULTER

“The British political system is a place where diversity of thought means that the Liberal Party is Liberal, the Labour Party is Liberal, and the Conservative Party is Liberal.” – PETER HITCHENS

“We progressives believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, latinos, gays and Muslims at the table – er, so long as they're not conservatives. We're fine with people who don't look like us, as long as they think like us.” – NICHOLAS KRISTOFF (The long-time liberal NY TIMES columnist, finally admitting this in May 2016, and I tip my hat to the bugger)

"In multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.”-- LEE KUAN YEW

"You fill your platoons with 'diversity'. I'll fill mine with killers. We'll see how it turns out." -- JESSE KELLY (in Sept. 2022) 

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

“ 'Diversity' is where nations go to die.” – MARK STEYN

“Being 'diverse' means that everything must be the same.” – CHARLES MOORE (what he meant, of course, is that everything must have the same “diversity”)

“People do not say so, but whenever they think others have got a post because of diversity requirements rather than merit alone, they have it in for them.” – CHARLES MOORE

“ ‘Diverse’ is a code-word for ‘uniform’.” – CHARLES MOORE

"'Diversity' as used by the Left is a meaningless un-word – Humans are by definition diverse. What the Left means by – and wants in – ‘diversity’ are M&Ms:  Different colors, Same flavors." -- JACK JOLIS

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

“Sitting around being diverse accomplishes nothing.” – LIONEL SHRIVER

“Put simply, growing diversity begets greater poverty.” – LUKE THOMPSON (the Californian political consultant)

"The modern doctrines of diversity and multiculturalism are a kind of homogenizing totalitarianism. Its acolytes want every institution to be filled with people who look different but think alike. What our society needs is not more “diversity” of this sort but more variety." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"'Diversity' -- all the mess we can tolerate..." -- DAVID W. THOMPSON      (conservative fellow on the Twoot)                                                                     

 “Liberals love diversity. That's why they love to punish anyone who doesn't think, act, eat, drink, drive and speak exactly like them.” – STEVE STOCKMAN (ex-GOP Congressman from Texas, in 2013)

 “ 'People of color', a meaningless non-category in which Nigerians and Bengalis are lumped in with Mexicans and Iraqis." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

" 'Diversity trainer' -- perhaps the most repugnant phrase in the English language today. It makes 'fuck off'' look almost ecclesiastical." -- JEREMY CLARKE (in July 2022)

“Who came up with this idea that all white nations must become racially diverse, whereas that's not happening in Japan, Korea, China, Mexico -- only in white nations?” – RICARDO DUCHESNE (A Canadian Prof at the University of New Brunswick, who immediately became a pariah Prof...)

"Diversity isn't diversity in any real sense. Instead, it's actually a movement to suppress and, probably, eliminate heteronormative white men." -- TED JOY (in June 2023) 

"The weird thing about diversity hires as they get so pissy when you point out they were diversity hires. I thought hiring on the basis of diversity was good, but apparently you’re not to point out that they were not hired on because of merit. It’s almost like it’s all a bunch of nonsense." -- KURT SCHLICHTER

"Diversity is just cover for mediocre and incompetent people to get the jobs that should go to those who do not suck. Every diversity hire is a loser." -- KURT SCHLICHTER

“Minds differ still more than faces.” – VOLTAIRE

"One of the worst perversions of this Orwellian age is that the word 'diversity' is now almost completely synonymous with 'conformity'." -- JOHN HAYWARD (of Breitbart News, on 23 June 2021)

"Happily for their own  who career prospects, a diversity officer's work is never done." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY

Divinity

"When human beings started to organize into societies, the rule was always a god. The Pharaoh of Egypt was a god. If you delve into primitive groups, the rulers were always god. It wasn't until a few hundred years ago that we got the idea the people were god, that they make the decisions. People impart divinity to the ruler because you have to have some reason for obeying order." -- GEORGE REEDY (Lyndon Johnson's Press Secretary)

Divorce

“That’s the trouble with divorce. Even the jokes are sad.” - JUDI BEVAN (an English writer)

“The desire to touch something, rather than simply look at it, is probably responsible for more dissolved marriages than all other desires combined.” – AMMON SHEA

“Paying alimony is like feeding hay to a dead horse.” – GROUCHO MARX

"The obvious effect of frivolous divorce will be frivolous marriage." – G.K. CHESTERTON

"Ah, yes, divorce, from the Latin word meaning to rip out a man's genitals through his wallet." – ROBIN WILLIAMS

“For all his failings he had proved to be irreplaceable.” – JOHN UPDIKE

"One of the great advantages of divorce is the number of people it lets you discuss your sex life with." -- MALCOLM BRADBURY 

“My wife and I started communicating through lawyers. The most expensive way of chatting, incidentally, since Armstrong phoned the White House from the moon.” – GUY BELLAMY

DNA

"The sudden and utterly unexpected discovery by Jim Watson and Francis Crick of the double helix of DNA, and hence that the key difference between living and non-living things is digital information written in a universal four-letter code, is in my view the most surprising and portentous eureka moment of all time, beating evolution, gravity, relativity, America, the atom and all the rest into a cocked hat." -- MATT RIDLEY

Docility

"People will not revolt. They will not look up from their screens long enough to notice what's happening." -- GEORGE ORWELL (“1984”)

Doctors

“Doctors talk very nearly more nonsense about alcohol than they do about almost anything else.” - JEFFREY BERNARD (RIP. This guy knew a lot about both booze and doctors. Ultimately, I believe, he died of both.)

“Bung a couple of letters - Dr -before someone’s name and if they tell you your liver is made of Gruyère cheese and that dogs give you diabetes, you’ll believe them.” - ROD LIDDLE

“But that’s medicine, the art of prolonging disease.” - PETER DEVRIES

“People working on their own get out of touch and it corrupts you... it's hubris isn't it? The funny thing about medical hubris is that nemesis is visited on the patients rather than the surgeon.” – DR. HENRY MARSH (the celebrated English neurosurgeon, and author of the two successful books “Do No Harm” and “Admissions”, in May, 2017)

“It's always been my tendency to lie to doctors, as if good health consisted only of the ability to fool them.” -- DENIS JOHNSON

“Patients always preferred a bogus explanation to no explanation at all.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE (a doctor himself)

“I prefer my doctors to be aged, sardonic, and dismissive. That? That you bring me? That’s nothing. Get outta my office. I have actual sick people to see. I like a doctor who is older than I, a man with hair sprouting out of his ears whose jowls and paunch remind me that we’re in this together, this process of internal rot.” – KYLE SMITH

“Doctors have become our new confessors. Forgive me Father, for I have binged. Except the priests of the caduceus keep fiendishly effective lie detectors in their medical gizmos.” – KYLE SMITH

“The English language may hold a more disagreeable combination of words than ‘The doctor will see you now.’ I am willing to concede something to the phrase ‘Have you anything to say before the current is turned on.’ That may be worse for the moment, but it doesn’t last so long. For continued, unmitigating depression, I know nothing to equal ‘The doctor will see you now.’ But I’m not narrow-minded about it. I’m willing to consider other possibilities.” – ROBERT BENCHLEY

"A point arrives in every man's life when he desperately wants to please his doctor, even if the doctor isn't his anymore." -- STEVE TESICH (who died prematurely of a heart attack at the age of 53)

"American doctors, in his experience, would only visit you at home if you were actually dead." -- DAVID LODGE

"When many remedies are proposed for a disease, it means the disease is incurable." -- LEO TOLSTOY

"Only a doctor can commit homicide with complete impunity." -- PLINY (THE ELDER) (23-79 AD, Roman pal of Emperor Vespasian, he was also a military commander and wrote the world's first encyclopedia)

“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

“The old-fashioned country GP, with his horse and buggy and little black bag of sugar pills, has become the white-collar gouger of the urban hospitals, running thousand dollar tests on comatose street people and propelling a ruinous run-up on medical costs the country over. Except for the very rich and the legally penniless, nobody can afford to get sick in this country.” – JOHN UPDIKE

“My doctor tells me I should start slowing it down -- but there are more old drunks than there are old doctors so let's all have another round.” – WILLIE NELSON (a singer neither whose music or politics I care for, but this is just amusing enough to make the cut)

“Dogmas”

“When man drops one doctrine after another in a refined skepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.” – G.K. CHESTERTON

“In truth there are only two kinds of people; those who accept dogmas and know it, and those who accept dogmas and don’t know it.” – G.K. CHESTERTON

“Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.” – G.K. CHESTERTON

“I have never known a word to become absolute dogma, without a speck of evidence, the way 'diversity' has.” – THOMAS SOWELL

“All the dogmatic stations in life have the effect of fixing a certain stiffness of attitude forever.” – HENRY ADAMS (This sounds a bit solipsistic – sounds to me that he's saying, in effect, that being dogmatic makes you dogmatic –   but he was, after all, the pompous Mr. Henry Adams, the historian descendant of the presidents)

“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

Dogs

“The world is divided into two kinds of people: those who can break up a dog-fight and those who can’t.” - P. G. WODEHOUSE

“The Peke followed him. It appeared to have no legs, but to move by faith alone.” – P. G. WODEHOUSE (“Plum” Wodehouse loved dogs and cats, and founded a home for homeless dogs and cats in the town of Remsenburg, Long Island – where he lived for the last twenty years of his life.)

“Fortunately, a dog is of limited interest to anyone except its owner.” - FRANCIS KING (reviewing “A Dog’s Life” by Paul Bailey)

“Cats are nice pets. Dogs are our allies in the great battle to muddle through life.” - JONAH GOLDBERG

"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 

"What is a  dog, anyway? Simply an antidote for an inferiority complex. We order him around, tell him to sit up, lie down, roll over, and al manner of other useless maneuvers, simply to show bystanders that we can boss something. No man is boss in his own home, but he can make up for it, he thinks, by making a dog play dead." -- W. C. FIELDS

"Dogs do not make cultural distinctions." -- DIOGENES

 “A Shitsu is a breed of dog; not, as popularly supposed, a zoo without penguins.” – PENNY JUNOR (a Brit journalist, biographer and broadcaster. It says here.....)

“Dogs are notoriously right-wing creatures:  loyal, patriotic, implacably pro-hunting, wedded to the family unit and deeply suspicious of all aliens.” – ROD LIDDLE

“My dogs really don't do much except demand free food and shelter. Except for me liking them, they're Democrats” – KURT SCHLICHTER

“Wind is like high-speed Internet for dogs.” -- JAMES LILEKS

"A dog is the one mistake you never regret." -- ANTHONY HOROWITZ (The English author of the "Alex Rider" novels for "young adults")

"A really companionable and indispensable dog is an accident of nature. You can't get it by breeding for it... it just happens along." -- E.B. WHITE

“Domino Theory, The”

“Burma, Thailand, Japan, the Philippines and obviously Laos and Cambodia are among those whose security would be threatened if the red tide of Communism flowed into Vietnam.” – (SENATOR) JOHN F. KENNEDY (the future President, in a speech in 1956)

Double Standards

“When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing – When you see that money is flowing to those who deal not in goods but in favors – When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull, rather than work, and your laws don’t protect you from them, but protect them against you – When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – You may know that your society is doomed.” – AYN RAND (in 1937.  Incidentally, the only Ayn Rand book I ever read was “We The Living”, which wasn’t all that bad, actually....)

"Behind every double standard is an unspoken single standard." -- JONAH GOLDBERG 

Doubt

“If in doubt, don't. If still in doubt, do what's right.” – DONALD RUMSFELD

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

"There is more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds." -- ALFRED (LORD) TENNYSON 

“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” -- BERTRAND RUSSELL

“Doubt is one thing, hesitation another. Doubt is the truth, hesitation a lie.” -- DENIS JOHNSON

Drama                                                                                                                                                     

“Love affairs without obstacles are tedious to watch.” – LLOYD EVANS

"True drama is when there are no more chances. This is it and how it will be." -- NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE

Dreams

“I have reached the stage in life when I rather regret waking up; I don’t remember my dreams, exactly, but I know that they are better and more entertaining than reality.” - THEODORE DALRYMPLE

“Dreams are a tour across our personal playgrounds of guilt and misery.” - JONATHAN KEATES (English journalist in 1995)

“Dreams are simultaneously the most exciting things to tell someone and the most boring to hear about.” – MADELEINE KEARNS (in NR in Oct. ‘19)

“People who dream of a better place are already in a better place than the better place they yearn for.” – LLOYD EVANS (He's dreaming. Heh.)

"The only people who actually live in dreams are people in comas." -- DAVID MITCHELL    (in his 2020 novel "Utopia Avenue") 

“And really, what good are dreams if they come true?” – FREDERICK EXLEY

"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night." -- EDGAR ALLAN POE

“He dreamed a great deal each night. It felt like work. Sleeping made him tired.” – DENIS JOHNSON

“It is in one's final years that dreams and reality can seem to merge.” – ALEXANDER CHANCELLOR (the old journalist and one-time editor of the SPECTATOR, a few days before he died, in January 2017)

"I slept soundly and had no need for cheering dreams. Facts are better than dreams." -- WINSTON CHURCHILL

"I find that the older I get, the more my dreams seem to consist of nothing but bad guys trying to kick my ass in." -- JACK JOLIS 

“Dreamers of the day are dangerous people – they try to live their dreams to make them come true.” – TERRY HUGHES

 "To recount your dreams is to bore the entire world, and I don't normally even trouble myself to recollect mine." -- DENIS JOHNSON      (in his novella "The Name Of The World")                                

“I wish I had nightmares. It would at least imply that I am getting sleep.” – PETER DEVRIES

"Exhaust fumes of the brain." -- ANTHONY BURGESS

"Literary creation is much like the dreaming process, and dreams fuel all the arts, not just the landscapes of Salvador Dali." -- ANTHONY BURGESS

 “Where do dreams come from if they are not the wind-blown shreds of lost, possible lives?” – JAMES HAWES (I almost left this out because it sounds like a big pile of pompous codswallop, to me, but what the hell....)

"Facts are better than dreams." -- BOB DOLE (I doubt I would’ve included this if anyone else had said it, but it’s so Bob Dole... that I just had to)

 
“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

"We possess the best cinema: our own images at night." -- APITCHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL (I've always agreed with this insight, from the celebrated Thai moviemaker)

Drink

“Alas, health, fitness, and self-approval are in vogue.  A man who drinks in a healthy, fit, and self-approving manner will mix vodka with yogurt and get tangled in the Nautilus machine - trying to kiss his own ass.  Thus, I am compelled to skip the do’s and don’t-you-dare’s, the how to’s and here’s how’s.  Instead I must explain why readers should knee-walk into the attached garage of the psyche, tear the MADD bumper sticker off the Oldsmobile of their superego, make John Barleycorn their designated driver, and weave across both lanes of life with nothing on but their fog lights.  Metaphorically speaking, my dear, of course.” - P. J. O’ROURKE

“Giving up alcohol is easy, but what have you got left?” - RAYMOND CHANDLER

“Think of all the suffering that mankind would have been spared if the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO said ‘Workers of the world, it’s Miller Time’” - P. J. O’ROURKE

“My Uncle Timmy said, ‘At lunch, have gin. When you go back to the office you want people to think you’re drunk, not stupid.’ “ – P. J. O’ ROURKE

“Have you noticed how Olde Worlde the world looks when seen through the bottom of the glass?” - MERRILY HARPUR (an Irish lady cartoonist, believe it or not)

“The most beautiful sound in America is the tinkle of ice at twilight.” – E. B. WHITE (the old “Elements of Style” ball-buster....)

“Drinking is the joy of the Rus/ We cannot exist without it.” – PRINCE VLADIMIR OF KIEV (in the, er, 10th century. Shows you how much nothing’s changed, despite Lenin’s dictum that “The proletariat does not need drunkenness – they need only clarity, clarity, and again clarity.” Pull the other one, Vlad….)

“I have no friends who are public-health analysts, for whom the technical term for what I drink is ‘far too much’. The inscription at Delphi has nothing on my twin mottoes: ‘Nothing’s better than more’ and ‘Too much is nearly enough’.” - ANDREW McKIE (this excellent gent purports to be a writer for the London Daily Telegraph. At least he did in Nov 2001, when he penned this…)

“Orange, grapefruit and pineapple juice are not hellish in themselves, but no one could drink more than one glass of them without adding vodka. The Virgin Mary is, with enough Tabasco and pepper, an excellent drink, but, as its name suggests, you can’t have it twice.” - PETRONELLA WYATT (the delectably-named Petronella is the daughter of the wayward Labour-turned-Conservative British MP, and a “sexually active”, as the saying goes, one-time columnist for the UK Spectator. A great bimbo - her mother is famously Hungarian – she strikes me as being a fun girl, does Petronella….)

“If I had all the money I’d ever spent on drink, I’d spend it all on drink.” - TREVOR HOWARD (the great English actor, who I remember quite memorably giving the mincing Marlon Brando “Fletcher Christian” unholy shit as Captain Bligh in “The Mutiny On The Bounty”)

“Being fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.” - CHRIS MILLER (an Alpha Delta Phi, Dartmouth, fraternity brother of mine, and author of ANIMAL HOUSE, here in the words of “Dean Wurmer” to “Flounder”, I believe, the proto-pledge of the Delta House)

“I only drink on 2 occasions - when I’m thirsty and when I’m not.” - BRENDAN BEHAN (the Oirish drunk and, also, playwright)

“I’m a drinker with a writing problem.” - BRENDAN BEHAN (see?)

“Civilization began with fermentation.” - WILLIAM FAULKNER

“A bar is a lot of use to a man after a brothel, but a brothel is of no use to a man after a bar." -- REDMOND O'HANLON (in his 1988 Amazonian memoir "In Trouble Again") 

"I have a weird theory. Maybe one of the reasons -- aside from the illiteracy, shame culture, anti-Semitism, authoritarianism, etc. -- that Arabs are both so conspiratorial and so complex in their political machinations is the lack of alcohol in their cultures. Maybe there's so much intrigue and duplicity in the Middle East because that's exactly the sort of thing you'd expect in a society where men sit around all night consuming stimulants like nicotine and caffeine. In, say, Russia -- another hotbed of paranoia -- people stay up late into the night, but they get drunker and more simplistic the later it gets. In hookah bars, you stay up later and later, totally sober and increasingly wired, like a college sophomore on a sleep-deprivation vision quest who, at 3:00 in the morning, suddenly realizes he should write his term paper on how Kierkegaard predicted Jersey Shore." -- JONAH GOLDBERG (Jonah's explanation of the world's Muslim Problem -- no booze. And I must say,  it does seem to hold water.... heh.)

“Drink is the social glue of the human race? It is? You could just as well say that vomit is the social glue of the human race” -- BARBARA HARRIS (she says this in her book “The Joy of Drinking”.)

“An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.” - DYLAN THOMAS

“Drunk enough to lose our licenses but not drunk enough not to care.” – JAMES HAWES

“The publicity given to the harm of excessive drinking has been vastly greater than that given to the benefits of moderate drinking. No one has yet proposed, as far as I know that irresponsible and feckless teetotalers should be refused treatment for heart attacks.” - THEODORE DALRYMPLE

“ Here is something else that proves, to my mind, anyway, that I am an alcoholic. If I could drink alcohol like a normal person, I would not be interested in drinking alcohol. This is sometimes very difficult for nonalcoholics to understand. That’s what makes them nonalcoholics.” - GRAIG FERGUSON

“I never particularly wanted a drink until someone said I couldn't.” - MARK TWAIN

“Without alcohol, people tell you what they want to say. With alcohol, they tell you what you want to hear.”- MATT LABASH

“I don’t usually start this early, but holding yourself to a drinking schedule is always the first sign of alcoholism.”- CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS (Who was one that knew….)

“I prefer alcoholics to drug addicts. They are more often people of character and are much more amusing. Even their special pleading (for themselves) is often funny, and they can be brought to see it. By contrast, drug addicts whine horribly and frequently turn nasty.” - THEODORE DALRYMPLE (that’s my experience as well….)

“People who have never gotten drunk in the morning have no idea just how therapeutic it can be for alcoholics.” - CRAIG FERGUSON

“How terrible to be an alcoholic. You just want to quietly soothe and maybe poison yourself, b ut you end up poisoning those around you as well, like trying to commit suicide with a gas oven and unwittingly murdering your neighbors.” -- JONATHAN AMES

“ 'Jinantonix' is on a par with 'OK' or 'Coca-Cola' in being understood in every country on earth and may well be the only four syllables guaranteed to get you an alcoholic drink in every bar on the planet.” —  RORY SUTHERLAND       (the  SPECTATOR's “Wiki Man”, and he might have included “taxi” and “hotel” to his small list of “universal words”....)    

"High-end wine, there's a huge amount of bullshit around it. Wine tastes better if you tell people it's expensive." -- RORY SUTHERLAND (I know this first-hand to be true. When I was social chairman of my chapter of ΑΔΦ, brothers would show off in front of their dates and complain about all the cheap booze that I'd buy -- which I in fact did, to make ends meet. But then an older brother gave me a useful tip -- I bought one-each bottles of really expensive stuff, and kept re-filling the empties thereafter with the same old rotgut -- and those same pretentious guys started ostentatiously complimenting me for "FINALLY buying the good stuff!")

"Many of life's enjoyable yet potentially addictive behaviors suffer from 'the invisible 10 per cent problem'. As with alcohol or gambling, the habit may be enjoyable for 90 per cent of people, but catastrophic for the remaining 10 per cent, whose genes and/or personal circumstances predispose them to addiction. Worse, you only find out you are in that unfortunate 10 per cent when it is too late." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

"In the Mad Men era, when Americans were drunk after lunch, the economy grew at about 9 per cent annually." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

“In my younger days I used to make it a point not to partake of spirits before lunch. These days I make it a point not to do so before breakfast.  WINSTON CHURCHILL (to King George VI in 1952)

"If you mean whisky, the devil's brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; If you mean that evil drink that topples men and women from the pinnacles of righteous and gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, shame, despair, helplessness and hopelessness, then, my friend, I am opposed to it with every fibre of my being."However, if by whisky you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the elixir of life, the ale that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes;
If you mean good cheer, the stimulating sip that puts a little spring in the step of an elderly gentleman on a frosty morning;
If you mean that drink that enables man to magnify his joy, and to forget life's great tragedies and heartbreaks and sorrow;
If you mean that drink the sale of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of pounds each year, that provides tender care for our little crippled children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitifully aged and infirm, to build the finest highways, hospitals, universities, and community colleges in this nation.Then my friend, I am absolutely, unequivocally in favour of it!"This is my position, and as always, I refuse to compromise on matters of principle!" – WINSTON CHURCHILL      (upon being asked his opinion of whiskey)   

“I was now drinking up to three bottles of vodka a day, and the trouble with doing something like that is that at the end of the day you can’t count – so you don’t know you are doing it.” – MICHAEL CAINE      (In 1971. He soon thereafter stopped – cold turkey, apparently.)

"You got to realize that when I was 20 years old, I had a house, a Mercedes, a Corvette and a million dollars in the bank before I could buy alcohol legally." – DR DRE (“rap” artiste extraordinaire... real name Andre Romelle Young, from the sunny burg of Compton, California)

“In my drinking days, I used to hate the festive season because the pubs were always filled with office parties and there was no space, or peace, for serious boozers like me. It's even worse now I am sober and I find myself surrounded by screaming bimbos, macho lads spoiling for a fight and amateur drinkers throwing up in shop doorways as I head back home after a West End first night. At this time of year, Leicester Square resembles a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. Why I used to think getting wasted was a great idea is a mystery I still cannot fully fathom.” – CHARLES SPENCER (the theater critic of the London Daily Telegraph, in 2011, and a recovering alcoholic.)

“A drinking problem is like a little Latin – sooner or later, it will find its way into your writing.” – WILLIAM STYRON

“Drinking too much is the only thing stopping us from drinking too much.” – MARK MASON

"Good whisky, like good propaganda, needs to have rough edges." -- ROBERT LITTELL

“I think I need a hug. And by ‘hug’ I mean ‘beer’.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

“A pub is just a barracks for the unenlisted.” – LLOYD EVANS

“Ugh! This beer is horrible. I can hardly wait 'till I've had enough!”  — RONNIE BARKER

“I've had about 400 fights while drinking and I don't recall having won a single one.  GEORGE C. SCOTT

“The more interesting the drink, the more uncomfortable the sequel.” – SIR KINGSLEY AMIS

“One of the things about being sober was what a lot seemed to be going on at any given moment – another point in favour of being drunk.” – KINGSLEY AMIS

“All serious drunks are the same, except over details that can be mildly interesting, such as brainy places to hide a bottle.” – SIR KINGSLEY AMIS

"The definition of an alcoholic is a man who drinks more than his doctor." -- KINGSLEY AMIS

“Drink doesn’t put things in people’s heads that weren’t there to start with, it just makes them feel it’s alright to say them. For good or ill.” – KINGSLEY AMIS

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut." -- ERNEST HEMINGWAY

“A man in Oregon walked away with minor injuries after he fell asleep in a Dumpster and ended up in a trash compacter. It raises a lot of questions, and the answer to all of them is tequila.” – JIMMY FALLON       (the late-night TV funnyman)                                                                        

“First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.” – F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

“The Soviet system drove more and more  people to drink, of worse and worse quality.” – BRUCE ANDERSON      (so that by the end they were reduced to glugging bootlegged jet-fuel)                 

“Every pub is a parliament.” – NIGEL FARAGE

"When I read about the evils of drinking after golfing I gave up reading." – PAUL HORNUNG (the one-time great quarterback of the Green Bay Packers)

“The best drink in the day is just before the first one.” – IAN FLEMING

“I had to stop drinking, cause I got tired of waking up in my car driving 90.”-- RICHARD PRYOR 

“A man can never have too muchred wine, too many books, or too much ammunition.” – RUDYARD KIPLING

“Booze is a great emancipator, freeing us from our obligation to suffer through tedious conversations with some of society's most difficult personalities – not just relatives, but also hipsters, vegetarians, marathon buffs and soccer fans.” – ANDREW STILES

"The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him (sic) for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it." -- WILLIAM JAMES (A suitable pomposity from the big, pompous 19th century American egg-head, at a 1902 Harvard lecture)

"A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo. And when the herd is hunted, it is the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members! ; In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells. Excessive intake of alcohol, as we know, kills brain cells. But naturally, it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first. In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine! That's why you always feel smarter after a few beers.” – JOHN RATZENBERGER (as “Cliff Clavin” of the TV comedy “Cheers”)     

"The pleasure of introducing vodka into the body is only matched by the pleasure of eliminating it." -- FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY      (In his “Notes from the Urinal”)                                      

“Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.” – MARK TWAIN

“My drinking is greatly exaggerated. I spill a lot, you know.” – FORREST McDONALD     (the great American historian)                                                              

“The venue is as important as the vintage.” – RAYMOND BRIGGS      (the author of  the famous kids' book, “The Snowman”)

“In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is freedom, and in water there is bacteria.” – BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

“As Tolstoy might have said, drug addicts are all alike whereas every alcoholic is crazy in his own way.” – TERRY HAYES

“Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.” – WILLIAM JAMES

"I distrust camels, and anyone else who can go a week without a drink." -- JOE E. LEWIS

"We alkies are just a tangle of lies like the insides of a golf ball. You start cutting into one little rubber band in that mess like how do you really feel about your husband shafting you, and the whole ball starts unraveling and whizzing around the room." -- DENIS JOHNSON

"Lunchtime drinking is a positive virtue. People treat each other better, helps the world go around more smoothly." -- ALAN JUDD

"I only drank beer to excess one time in college. When? If I'm remembering right, it was from 1977-1981." -- ANDREW C. McCARTHY                               (pretty funny, counselor)

“30 years of hard drinking doesn’t tend to make you more interesting or handsome.” – NICHOLAS LEZARD      (a habitué of the famous “Coach And Horses” pub of Soho, celebrated in the pages of the SPECTATOR)

"I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day." – FRANK SINATRA

“It’s the alcoholics who have all the best ideas. The trouble is that they have forgotten them by the time they sober up, so nobody has ever heard of one.” – GUY BELLAMY

"In 1903 I circumnavigated the globe leaving New York and going west to San Francisco on to Honolulu, Pago Pago, New Zealand, Australia, Africa and back to Europe and reteurned to New York after three years. Everywhere i went alcohol was the reigning spirit. (Pardon me.) The aborigines, the natives, in every land in which I visited took two or three days and nights off to go on a bender every so often with some sort of a native brew distilled from potatoes, maize, fruits etc. ad lib. Whilst I do not countenance excessive drinking, especially after having seen a couple of birds fall out of the limb of a tree after having eaten well but unwisely of overripe fruit which contained alcohol. I do believe it was Carrie Nation or Mrs. Carrie Catt who said 'Take a little wine for they stomach's sake, but don't get blotto'." -- W. C. FIELDS    

"I've often been asked, what do you old folks do now that you're retired? I stay active and happy. I'm fortunate to have a PhD in chemical engineering and one of the things I enjoy most is converting beer, Manhattans and scotch into urine. then I take a jog out to the shed and piss on pictures of B. Hussein Obama, Maxine Waters, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Bernie Sanders. I do this several times each day. I really enjoy it and get my exercise too." -- HAROLD SCHLUMBERG (A chemical engineer, quoted in "Beerchaser" blog, on 29 August 2011)

"My understanding was that if you could drink during a recreational activity, it's a game. If not, it's a sport." -- TOMMY MACDONNELL (A Dublin resident, answering Hemingway's contention that only if someone can get killed doing it is it considered a sport.)

“For him alcohol was a magical elixir that elicits, enhances and erases emotions all at once”.  - LAURA KIPNIS   (Speaking about her boyfriend in her book “Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis”)

"The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind." -- HUMPHREY BOGART

“Alcohol is the prime determining factor of human history: the fact is that it’s too big an issue even to think of confronting. Thank God. For, having said all that, we get by on it far better than we manage without. Total abstainers make rotten leaders of men and incompetent husbands.” – STEPHEN FRY

"I fantasize that most pre-modern people were drunk all the time." -- TANYA GOLD (I daresay she's right about this -- as my man Bill Bryson has also pointed out. Hell, it makes sense -- what was there to drink in Olden Days other than beer and wine? Water was polluted and milk went bad in a day...)

“My doctor tells me I should start slowing it down -- but there are more old drunks than there are old doctors so let's all have another round.” – WILLIE NELSON (a singer neither whose music or politics I care for, but this is just amusing enough to make the cut)

“The bourbon flavor made him wince. No wonder the Confederates lost the fucking war, he thought sourly.” – CHRIS MILLER (My ΑΔΦ brother, from his 2006 memoir “The Real Animal House”)

"You always slightly worry about people who don't drink." -- BORIS JOHNSON

“The best thing you can add to a whisky is a little more.” – JOSEPH CONNOLLY                              

"A drunk man’s words are a sober man’s thoughts." -- ROBERT JAMES RITCHIE (a.k.a. KID ROCK, on refusing to apologize for publicly saying "Fuck Oprah Winfrey and fuck Joy Behar!")

Drones                                                                                                                                                     

"Have you noticed that every single person killed in a drone strike, according to the anti-Americans, is always part of a wedding.?” -- KURT SCHLICHTER (An American Army Colonel, veteran of Gulf I and Kosovo, and a lawyer living in California, and prolific Tweetist)

Drugs

“You can't fight anyone who's on drugs, bud. They've got abnormal strength and don't feel pain.” – JEREMY CLARKE (The late UK SPECTATOR's “Low Life” columnist to his drunken friend Trev, who was looking for a barroom punchup)

“Liberals and cultural revolutionaries are relaxed about stupefying themselves because drug-taking was the Holy Communion rite of the campus left in the years when they were coming to full immaturity.” – PETER HITCHENS

“ ‘Cocaine’ is God’s way of saying you’re making too much money.” — ROBIN WILLIAMS 

“I am too right-wing for drugs such as ecstasy, since I instinctively dislike the idea of anything that makes you love people indiscriminately. My idea of a good drug is one that lets you sit alone in the corner cynically attributing base motives to almost all human actions, not one that makes you stand in a boggy field hugging strangers and shouting 'Woooo!' “ – RORY SUTHERLAND

"I find stoned people pleasanter than drunks, or at any rate they are annoying in a less alarming way." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

“Drug addicts are a local menace; the DEA is a national menace.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"The only good thing about keeping drugs illegal is that it really drives innovation." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“When you drink beer a lot of things happen in the world. When you take drugs a lot of things happen in your head.” – P.J. O’ROURKE

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

“The amount of money and legal energy being given to prosecute hundreds of thousands of Americans who are caught with a few ounces of marijuana in their jeans simply makes no sense , is the kindest way to put it. A sterner way to put it is that it is an outrage, an imposition on basic civil liberties and on the reasonable expenditure of social energy.” -- WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR

“Marijuana is my least favorite  recreational substance. Not only because it smells and is loved by the kind of irritating people who refuse to believe you when you tell them that you can't name a single Grateful Dead song. But also because dope is such a lonely drug, such a stupefying drug. The point of it is to dull the socialising instinct rather than to liberate it, as booze and fags do. This is why dope fans are often such tut-tutters over alcohol.” -- BRENDAN O'NEILL

“Amazingly, cannabis is now pushed almost entirely on the basis that it's healthy. It's the quinoa of drugs. At least the 1960s cats used hash to get wrecked: today's dopeheads are the kind of people who shop only at Whyole Foods and probably frown over those photos of drunk girls in miniskirts.” -- BRENDAN O'NEILL

“Cannabis won't kill you; they're right about that. It does something worse: it makes you boring. I'm convinced this is  why so many officials, from California to Colorado to Washington to Bighty itself, are into decriminalization. It isn't because they care for liberty, far less for hedonism, but because they see hash as a social sedative.” - BRENDAN O'NEILL

"Every time I smell pot it's like a skunk crapped himself, died, rotted, was eaten by another skunk which then farted in my face.  So, not a fan." -- BILL MITCHELL (the conservative host of something called “our Voice America” on something called “scp tv” here writing on the Twoot...)

"Yes, I have smoked crack cocaine, probably in one of my drunken stupors."-- ROB FORD      (the late, former Mayor of Toronto)

"Acid is like being sucked up through a tube; DMT is like being shot out of a cannon." -- GRACE SLICK       (the one-time lead singer of  THE JEFFERSON AIRPLANE  you know, the chick who sang "White Rabbit"...)

“People want to take drugs and nothing will stop them.” – CHRIS DAW, QC      (an English lawyer who’s spent a long legal career entirely in drugs.)

“Everything one achieves in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving.” – JEAN COCTEAU         (the multi-talented Frogue artiste, who died in 1963)

“The drug-oriented kid is more enterprising than his peers, in all the old-fashioned work-ethic ways:  he hustles, he sets up contacts, the merchandising system is at least as efficient as Sears Roebuck. A drug addict is a busy, busy fellow. He must learn to burgle, to fence, to con the police, to argue in court. The technology some of these kids can use is remarkable. Just to shot up is a chemistry lesson.” – JOHN UPDIKE (in 1974)

"After thirty-five, man, either it's killed you, or you get tired of it." -- DONALD WESTLAKE (The hero, Freddie, in his 1995 novel "Smoke")

"Smack is God's Own Stash, the drug of drugs. Which is why doctors keep it in their black bag to give you if they find you with your spine ripped out on the motorway and the morphine is not strong enough to stop you screaming while you die. Smack is the last of the last things, it is your Friend Death, that is all." -- JAMES HAWES

“The only way to treat smack is make it part of your happy past, which is following your determination into your even happier future. If you want to forget it, forget it: you never will." -- JAMES HAWES

"Nobody's really described an acid experience properly because it's impossible to come back to one and you can't really describe it. Your mind is going four times as fast as your hands can go and you get disorganized and you can't keep your mind in phase with your fingers. That's why I have to get increasingly faster typewriters." -- HUNTER S. THOMPSON

"Cocaine is instant hubris." -- HUNTER S. THOMPSON

"Republicans want to throw you in jail for smoking weed, Democrats want to throw you in jail for weed tax evasion." -- DAVE IOWAHAWK BURGE

"So now cocaine is legal in Oregon, but straws aren’t. That must be frustrating." -- TONY LIMA (a retired economics teacher on "X" -- on 7 Nov. 2023) 

Dubai                                                                                                                                                    

“Dubai is the Arabs’ Las Vegas. I’ve been there, and trust me, it’s less fun than it looks. (And it doesn’t even look that much fun.)” – JACK JOLIS

“For unformed souls whose fragile sense of self requires ceaseless assurance from the labels in their clothes and the bowing and scraping of other people, Dubai is perfect. Every car is a limousine and every carpet is red and everything is covered in so much gilt that it makes Versailles look like Bauhaus.” – JULIE BURCHILL (in January 2021)                                                                                                                                              

“Everything in Dubai is 99 floors tall. You have to be tall if you’re going to like it here.” – A. JAMES PANOS        (my great State Department pal, in his novel “Dreams Of A Suffering Sailor”)

Duty                                                                                                                                                          

"The last person to leave the ship is also the last person not to leave the ship." -- MARK HELPRIN.

“Duty is something imposed and involves self-sacrifice, discipline and obedience. It does not mean doing what the hell you like.” – ROD LIDDLE

"Man's only right is to do his duty." -- AUGUST COMTE (Froggie philosopher, 1798-1857, and although quite piquant, I'm not at all sure this is exatement correcte...)

Dylan, Bob                                                                                                                                              

“Bob Dylan. He’s not going to go away when he dies. He’s going to be like Confucius.” – CERYS MATTHEWS       (the ex-lady lead singer for the English band “Catatonia”,  who fell apart and re-appeared as a successful Brit radio DJ)

 “Today a hack comic like Jimmy Kimmel offers more grandstanding about politics in a single week than Dylan did in his entire career.” – KYLE SMITH (in May of 2021, as Dylan turned 80)

Dystopia                                                                                                                                                  

"You lose interest in dystopia when it's on your doorstep." -- ALICE JOLLY       (in her novel A SAINT IN SWINDON; And I would’ve thought your interest in dystopia would rather increase when it’s at your doorstep....)

"The truth is that dystopia is now, not in some future date." -- NIALL FERGUSON      (In Dec. 2021)