E

 

Earnestness

“Earnestness is just stupidity sent to college.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

 

“Earth Day”

"That annual parade of pagan panic known as Earth Day." -- JAMES LILEKS

 

“Earth Day is Green Kwanzaa.” – JACK JOLIS

 

"Earth Day is about being scolded by celebrities. There's no point in saving the planet if nobody sees you doing it." -- JIM TREACHER      (of PJM)                             

 

“The hippie springtime festival of lamentations known as Earth Day.” – STEPHEN KRUISER (also of PJM)

 

Eastwood, Clint

"Ol’ Clint – the guy's genius consists of taking the words out of honest Americans' mouths." – JACK JOLIS

 

Eating

"Hunger is certainly most excellent sauce." – JOSEPH BANKS (1743-1820, the great English natural scientist -- who accompanied Captain Cook to Tahiti.)

 

"Brunch turns out to be less a merger of convenience between breakfast and lunch and more an excuse to make an early start on drinking." -- ERIC JACOBS (the biographer of Kingsley Amis)

"Dinner is for conversation. You can always snatch a bite to eat between meals." -- MALCOLM BRADBURY    (and he's not entirely wrong, you know....) 

"Have you ever watched an old person try to eat a taco. They'd have an easier time to land a DC-10." -- ROBERT PLUNKET

"To me there are no three more beautiful words in the English language than 'all-day breakfast'." -- RORY SUTHERLAND (reminds me of my late dad, who was fond of saying "I'd be happy to eat nothing but breakfast food for the rest of my life.")

"A Gourmet who thinks about calories is like a Tart who looks at her watch" -- JAMES BEARD (His capitalizations. And I dunno -- in my, ahem, experience, looking at her watch is part of a tart's routine...)

"You know, if you eat the whole cake at one sitting, it's just one piece." -- ANDREW MALCOLM (veteran conservative American journalist)

“There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.” – ALFRED HENRY LEWIS  (This American journalist and short-story writer wrote this in COSMOPOLITAN in 1906, and, while it sounds to me more like a threat than an observation, for all I know he may be right. And to which my good pal SAMUEL M'CHEYNE GLASSER has appended: “Three days to chaos and seven to cannibalism.”)

"The most exquisite foodstuffs, such as honey, caviar, baked beans and Nutella appeal to our animal instincts because we can scoop them straight from the container into the mouth. Using cutlery is like wearing sunglasses at the Prado. It omits a minor but crucial part of the experience." -- LLOYD EVANS

Ebola

“Gotcha. You can't get Ebola on a bus or a plane, you can only give it. Good to know. Thanks, Doc." – MARK STEYN

 

Eccentricity

"Develop your eccentricities while you are young. That way when you get old, people won't think you are going gaga." -- DAVID OGILVY (This is pretty wise advice for many families I know, not least my own. Ogilvy was the great Anglo-American advertising godfather, whose firm, Ogilvy + Mather, used to occupy the first 14 floors of the 5th Avenue building in which our own family company used to have the 15th. Lotta nice modules (as my brother and I called them) clutching their portfolios going up and down in the elevators, as I remember....)

 

Economic Growth

"Economic growth is not a cure-all, but lack of economic growth is a kill-all." -- PAUL COLLIER (Oxford economist)

 

"Hosing economies with liquidity doesn't make them grow faster -- that's like trying to get fat by buying a bigger belt.' -- LIAM HALLIGAN (in the SPECCIE July 2020)

Economics

“The science (economics) may be dismal, but it is predictable.” – ARTHUR LAFFER

“In economics, things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could.” – RUDIGER DORNBUSCH  (German economist, 1942-2002)

“Economics is the science of scarcity. If Earth were the Garden of Eden and anything could be had by just wishing, economics wouldn't exist.” – THOMAS SOWELL

 

“Asking liberals where wages and prices come from is like asking six-year-olds where babies come from.” – THOMAS SOWELL

 

“Asking an economist to explain the workings of human society is like trying to understand human sexuality be consulting an expert on hydraulics.” – RORY SUTHERLAND (Vice Chairman of the Ogilvy Group, UK, – see above – and the technology columnist for the UK SPECCIE)

 

“Economists do not really understand either time or scale. Nor does conventional economics take into account the importance of identity. Economics is far too individualistic in its conception of human motivation. People’s pride in their collective identity can be considered as a parallel form of wealth, which people seek to grow and protect every bit as much as the balance of their bank accounts. When you strip people of their identity, the reaction is no different than if you deprive people of their earnings. Quite simply, economics is anthropologically tone-deaf.” – RORY SUTHERLAND (in January 2019)

 

“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)

 

“Mr. Brown does not run the economy, he just taxes it.” – FRASER NELSON (Referring here of the British Chancellor of the then-Exchequer, Gordon Brown, in May 2006. Although Nelson sounds oh so cute here, he’s both too glib… and wrong – the ability to tax IS to” run”  the economy….)

 

“My net income doesn’t cover my gross habits.” – ERROL FLYNN (That great Tasmanian philanderer and partner-in-crime of David Niven. He also played Gen. George Custer in “They Died With their Boots On”. In real life he died shortly after losing --  !! -- a drinking contest with my Franco-Armenian diamantaire colleague, Samy Coiran, at the Rock Hotel in Bangui, C.A.R.., where he’d been living while filming his last movie, “The Roots Of Heaven”, in 1959.)

 

“Because of the gold standard, which in its international form was a British-inspired institution to which most of the civilized world eventually adhered, between at least the end of the 17th Century and the outbreak of the First World War, overall inflation was zero.” – JOHN LAUGHLAND

"Well, the standard definition of economics is the study of how a society organizes its resources. In that sense, it's not particularly romantic. I would say it's a science about how human beings organize their cooperative activities." – MILTON FRIEDMAN

“Trying to steer the economy from the top is like trying to catch a train using last year's timetable.” – HAROLD MACMILLAN      (The ex-Brit PM who had before that been Chancellor of the Exchequer)                                        

“We economists don’t know much, but we do know how to create a shortage. If you want to create a shortage of tomatoes, for example, just pass a law that retailers can’t sell tomatoes for more than two cents per pound. Instantly you’ll have a tomato shortage. It’s the same with oil or gas.” – MILTON FRIEDMAN (he was speaking of health care at the time)

 

“Any problem generated by relatively too little of a commodity has one and only one ultimate cause: too little freedom. Take off the shackles and humans would produce abundance orders of magnitude greater than you have ever dreamed.” – JEFF PERREN (a letter-writer to NRO on 7 Mar 2011)

"Tax the rich, feed the poor/ till there are no rich no more," – ALVIN LEE (The English leader of the rock band “Ten Years After”, in his 1971 song “I’d Like To Change The World”.)

 

“Monopolies are like babies: we are generally opposed to them until we have one of our own.” – BENJAMIN LLOYD STORMONT      (The 3rd Baron Mancroft – UK, of course, don’t you know…)                               

“There are two types of people in the world. Those who understand that the only resource on this globe that really matters – and from which all forms of wealth are derived – is the human mind; and those that don’t.” –  STEPHEN MOORE

“Finance, after all, is human nature in action.” – CHRISTOPHER FILDES

“High finance is smoke and mirrors; a question of fragile confidence founded upon gossip, rumour, guesswork and suggestion. It is about as scientific an endeavor as the final voting  for Strictly Come Dancing; endlessly and hopelessly suggestible.” – ROD LIDDLE (in Jan. 2009)

 

“Tired of listening to financial pundits, I asked a psychotherapist what she though was the root cause (of the economic crisis): ‘This isn’t a fashionable word in my profession’, she replied, ‘but it’s pure hysteria.’ And the measures needed to restore sanity, we agreed, have more to do with mass psychology than with any textbook of central banking practice.” – MARTIN VANDER WEYER

 

“No American is ever made better off by pulling a fellow American down” – JOHN F. KENNEDY

 

“Liberal economic policies are always counterproductive, and that word should be taken literally. They aim to counter the forces of production. They try to stop things from happening – things that market forces would encourage. Don’t cut down those trees, don’t develop that land, don’t open that factory, don’t build those houses, don’t drill for oil, don’t dig up that coal, don’t let the wealthy keep the money they have earned, tax what people have managed to save, take their money away before they can pass it on to their children.” – TOM BETHELL

 

“Every economic argument boils down to a conservative saying ‘the market isn’t free, so let’s make it freer’ and a liberal saying ‘the market isn’t free, so let’s regulate it.’ “ – FRED SCHWARZ (Writing in NATIONAL REVIEW)

 

“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…)

 

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

 

"You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it." – ADRIAN ROGERS (The conservative American Baptist preacher)

 

“No American politician, whether elected, appointed, or squatting on the New York Times editorial board, is going to go on Hardball and tell us that when we lose our job, due to some guy in Gouangzhou being willing to do it for $145 a month, it's because what we did wasn't worth a shit. When you're doing something that isn't worth a shit, (and I speak as a print journalist), you've got two choices. Either you can do something that is worth a shit or you can try to make everyone else do something that's as shit worthless as what you do. You can be Chinese or you can be French. You can build cars or you can burn them in the suburbs of Paris. We don't want the Chinese doing things that aren't worth a shit such as crossing the Yalu in hordes the way they did during the Korean War or wading the Formosa Strait to belatedly settle Chiang Kai-shek's hash in Taiwan. Let's keep them busy making money.” – P. J. O'ROURKE

 

“ 'The problem with socialism', Lady Thatcher once said, 'is that eventually you run out of other people's money.' This time, it is worse: we are running out of our children's money, and our grandchildren's money. We are assuming we will have a never-ending supply of borrowed money, and we have no backup plan if this supply chokes up.” – JOHAN NORBERG (a hotshot young-ish Swedish economist, and more power to him.... my only gripe with what he says here is that it's not “if” it chokes up but rather “when”....)

 

“There is no such thing as a 'social science' and if there were, it wouldn't be economics.” – J. P. MULHERN (a reader of NRO in March ’11)

 

“You can’t use economics to explain everything in the world as (Paul) Krugman and his materialist friends try to. At a certain point one needs to have respect for common sense and experience. Marx tried coming up with an economic explanation of everything and it’s been downhill ever since. “ – JOHN RANSOM (columnist in Town Hall, Sept. ’11)

 

"Making a speech about economics is a bit like pissing down your own leg. It seems hot to you but never to anyone else." -- LYNDON B. JOHNSON (For sure he was a lot funnier than the disastrous policies he put into place, e.g., "The Great Society", from which the national debacle kicked off by His Highness You-Know-Who in 2009 can be directly traced.)

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

 

“We seem to be taxing ourselves to death in an effort to arrive at a magical formula which will allow us to survive without either production or exploration.” -- DAVID MAMET

“If you want more of something, subsidize it; if you want less of something, tax it.” -- RONALD REAGAN

 

“I don’t want him to fix the economy. I want him to stop politicians from trying to fix the economy. That’s what’s caused the problem. When we had 150 years when nobody thought it was the president’s job or anybody else in the government’s job to fix the economy. The economy fixed itself.” – THOMAS SOWELL

 

“The conflict between growth and austerity is artificial and framed to favor bigger government. Growth comes from economic freedom within a framework of sound money, property rights, and a rule of law that restrains government overreach. Businesses won’t invest or hire as much in an environment where governments dominate the economy. Thus, government austerity is absolutely necessary for economic growth in both the short and long run. “ -- DAVID MALPASS

 

"If hiring cops, firefighters & teachers help the economy, then theft, arson & stupidity are stimulus programs." -- DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE

 

“A large Sweden is a contradiction in terms. It cannot be done, and the more determinedly you try to do it, the more you will preside over a ruined wasteland. The road to hell isn’t paved at all, and the street lamps went out long ago.” – MARK STEYN

 

“Talk to engineers about energy problems and they come up with technical fixes; talk to economists and it's all about bribing people.” – SIR CHRISTOPHER LLEWELLYN SMITH (A big deal physicist and Provost of University College London)

 

“Economists create models for a species that has never existed – an imaginary hyper-rational automaton whose behavior is entirely unaffected by the behavior of it fellows. It is palmistry for the numerate, and its spurious mathematical neatness holds government and business in thrall to a discipline with no predictive value for which no serious scientist or mathematician outside the field has any respect.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“Economists, we should all have learned by now, are mostly quacks. They practice neither a science nor an art but a good game of darts.” – PHILIP DELVES BROUGHTON (an English author and journalist, for the DAILY TELEGRAPH)

 

“More Pie Eaters Than Pie Makers = Eventually Everyone Begs For Crumbs”-- SARAH PALIN

“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” – JOAN ROBINSON      (An English left-wing “post-Keynesian” economist)                                                                                                                                                  

“Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.” – JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH

“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.” – JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH

“The discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences.” – THOMAS PIKETTY      (the leftist French economist and literary-sensation of 2014, and if anyone knows about “ideological speculation”, it's he.)                    

“Too large a proportion of recent ‘mathematical’ economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.” – JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

“We move from more or less plausible but really arbitrary assumptions, to elegantly demonstrated but irrelevant conclusions.” – WASSILY LEONTIEFF (Nobel-winning Russian-American economist. Not notably left-wing....)

“Existing economics is a theoretical system which floats in the air and which bears little relation to what happens in the real world.” – RONALD COASE (a British economist who is noted for his anti-regulatory views)

“The economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.” – PAUL KRUGMAN       (one of the biggest, most malicious fools, ever to call himself an “economist”)

"The Stock Market has forecast nine of the last five recessions." --- PAUL SAMUELSON

“Economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather than dealing with real economic problems.” – MILTON FRIEDMAN

“Modern economics is sick. Economics has increasingly become an intellectual game played for its own sake and not for its practical consequences for understanding the economic world. Economists have converted the subject into a sort of social mathematics in which analytical rigour is everything and practical relevance is nothing.” – MARK BLAUG       (Dutch-British economist)                                                                                                                                                              

“Economics has never been a science – and it is even less now than a few years ago.” – PAUL SAMUELSON

“For far too long economists have sought to define themselves in terms of their supposedly scientific methods. In fact, those methods rely on an immoderate use of mathematical models, which are frequently no more than an excuse for occupying the terrain and masking the vacuity of the content.” – THOMAS PIKETTY

“In my youth it was said that what was too silly to be said may be sung. In modern economics it may be put into mathematics.” – RONALD COASE

“If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, “what would I do if I were a horse?” – RONALD COASE

“Any man who is only an economist is unlikely to be a good one.” – FRIEDRICH  A. HAYEK

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” -- FRIEDRICH A. HAYEK

“If socialists understood economics they wouldn’t be socialists.” – FRIEDRICH A. HAYEK

“The study of economics has been again and again led astray by the vain idea that economics must proceed according to the pattern of other sciences.” – LUDWIG VON MISES

"Economics requires three qualities: faith, hope and clarity." -- ROBERT SOLOW (American Nobel-Prize winning economist -- not our most left-zing economist, but not our least either....)

“The use of mathematics has brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it has also brought mortis.” – ROBERT HEILBRONER (American economist and historian, and an ideological mate of Uncle Miltie etc.)

“An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.” – LAURENCE J. PETER (he of the eponymous “principle”)

“When an economist says the evidence is 'mixed', he or she means that theory says one thing and data says the opposite.” – RICHARD THALER (American economist specializing in “behavioral finance”)

“The First Law of Economists: For every economist, there exists an equal and opposite economist.      The Second Law of Economists: They’re both wrong.” – DAVID WILDASIN       (American professor of “public economics”)                                     

"Swollen government has a shriveled brain: By printing and borrowing money, government avoids thinking about its proper scope and actual competence." -- GEORGE WILL

"There's a concept in economics called the 'marginal value of wealth'. It means that the wealthier you become, the less each additional dollar means to you. That's why we have environmentalism -- because some people have grown so affluent that they really aren't much interested in further economic development." -- WILLIAM TUCKER

 

«When everyone gets something for nothing, soon no one will have anything, because no one will be producing anything.» – CHARLES KOCH (one of the two «infamous» Koch Bros.)

 

“Laws mandating wages and benefits beyond market prices are political money laundering for unpopular welfare payments. They work brilliantly: Americans have a generally low opinion of welfare programs, but large majorities of us — including majorities of Republicans — support raising the minimum wage.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

«Economics is about satisfying human wants, not defining them.» – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

"But ideology does not trump math." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"Thatcher rightly observed that economics is not a science. At best, it's a set of principles, supplemented by a set of ever-evolving relationships. And so when it it comes to economic policy making, history is probably the best guide there is." -- NICK MACPHERSON     (A British banker and former Conservative Treasury official, in June 2024)

"An economist's guess is liable to be as good as anybody else's." -- WILL ROGERS

"1/ Capitalism is human nature in action;

2/ Socialism is screwing with 1/, above

3/ Economic theory is either stating the obvious or it’s bullshit." -- JACK JOLIS

 

“Economics is less a matter of understanding numbers than a matter of understanding psychology and human nature.” – JACK JOLIS

 

"Economics is 10% math and 90% behavioral psychology." – JACK JOLIS

 

"The government is like the reins of a horse - it can slow the economy down or turn it the wrong way but the only way to make it go faster is to quit pulling on the damn thing." -- THOMAS COLLET (a guy on Facebook, commenting in NRO in Nov; 2017)

 

“Economics is a study of scarce resources.” – KATE ANDREWS (in the UK SPECTATOR)

 

"Economics is essentially half psychology and half elementary school arithmetic." -- CONRAD BLACK

"The horror of a command economy is not that mistakes will be made but they they will not be corrected." -- DAVID MAMET

"It probably is the primary duty of government to get the economics right. Because when the economics go wrong, everything else goes wrong in very short order." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY


Economics («boom and bust»)

"...the boom is where the mistake is made, the bust is the correction." – STEVE HORWITZ      (of something called the «Independent Institute»)                        

 

Economics, Keynesian

“I believe in evolution, but when I was asked whether schools in my home state of Tennessee should be allowed to teach creationism, I answered 'Why not? They teach Keynesian economics, don't they?' ” -- ARTHUR LAFFER (he of the famous world-changing cocktail-napkin “curve”)

 

“When you get right down to it, Keynesianism is just a convenient excuse for what the left wants to do anyway: spend more government money.” -- DON BOUDREAUX (economist at George Mason University)

"The curious Keynesian theory that it is better to set high prices than to pay them." -- GEORGE PLIMPTON (I'm pretty sure he was joking, here...) 

Economics, “Supply-Side”

“The secret to supply-side economics is not merely to incentivize people to work harder or accept more risk in order to gain a greater reward. That could be done under socialism. The reason lower marginal tax rates produce more revenues than higher ones is that the lower rates release the creativity of employers, allowing them to garner more information.” -- GEORGE GILDER      (who puts forward, here and elsewhere, the intriguing notion that, important and incentives are in the success of “capitalism”, it's the freeing up of information that's even more important.)    

 

“I can testify that one’s psychological maximum is 40 percent. You know that almost half of what you earn will be taken from you, your animal spirites droop. So eventually, does the entire economy.” – CHARLES MOORE

“It is a paradoxical truth that the soundest way to raise the revenue in the long run is to cut the rates of taxes now. And economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance our budget, just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits.” – JOHN F. KENNEDY

“Eco-Tourism”                                                                                                                                                            

“The success of ecotourism is fueled by that endlessly renewable resource, liberal guilt, in this case caused by the fact that people occasionally need to take vacations even while the rain forest is dying. Smart hotel and tour operators have created packages that offer tourists a chance to ‘do something’ about the environment while on vacation. In response, thousands of busybodies are marching south, like a parade of army ants, in search of a guilt-free holiday. Fun-free too, by the look of things”. --  ADAM J. FREEDMAN

Editors/Editing                                                                                                                                            

"Humorous writers are much more loved by readers than editors ever suspect." -- MARCUS BERKMANN

"Most editiors are boobs, cretins, and witless crayfish who have edged into their jobs through some devious means made possible by the slothful and incestuous nature of the World of Publishing." -- HUNTER S. THOMPSON

"never proofread. it's a sign of weakness." -- KURT SCHLICHTER     (sic)                                                                  

"I have referred before to the discomforts of being edited, which are indeed many and grievous. You write something to the best of your abilities and hand it in, imagining, for some reason, that that's the last you will hear of it. Not a bit of it. A whole series of people in offices, of whom you'd not previously heard -- producers, rights personnel, accountants, women -- express an interest in what you've written, boast even of some expertise in asessing it, when half an hour watching television or a quick trip to a book shop will tell you in all likelihood that their opinion will be of less interest than the cleaning lady's." -- WILLIAM DONALDSON (the English gossip-columnist and playboy)

“Editing is a service job. I encourage editors to read submissions and respond to writers right away. It's cruelty to animals to keep them waiting.” – ROBERT GOTTLIEB       (editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf, and The New Yorker)                                                                

                       

Education

"The chief purpose of education is to know when a man is talking rot." -- WILLIAM BENNETT

“The C students run the world”. – HARRY S. TRUMAN (… PARTLY true…. THIS C student doesn’t, for starters….)

 

“American education starts bad and gets worse with every passing grade.” – MARK STEYN

 

“The entire American education system seems to exist mainly to promote self-esteem.  That’s bad enough if you’re an already insufferable prom queen with fabulous hooters.  But for less favoured high-school types the cult of self-esteem might just tip you from festering geek into narcissistic psycho.  If I understand correctly the educational philosophy underlying the English public school, the idea seems to be to reduce self-esteem to undetectable levels within two weeks of the start of term.  On the whole, that seems the safer option.” – MARK STEYN

 

“New York public schools are prep schools for State prisons, nothing less.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

“Education is all that is left behind when you have forgotten all that you have learned.” – ALEXANDER WAUGH (Grandson of Evelyn)

 

“It is a question of what Cuban schools are good at. Ideological tyrants have always aimed simultaneously at total literacy and total censorship, so that their subjects can read their thoughts and nobody else’s.” – PETER HITCHENS (Addressing the dreary leftist apology of leftist tyrannies, here, specifically Castro’s, that “at least they have good health and education systems”, in 2006)

 

“We can all agree that American public schools are a joke, and are more responsible than anything else for rising levels of public ignorance.” – DAVID GELERNTER (In Jan. 2006. And things have gotten positively Orwellian when the schools are the greatest producers of ignorance – not only they do no good, they do positive harm.)

 

“Today most incoming college students don’t seem to know any history at all. (Except what they’ve learned by themselves, or their parents have taught them.)” – DAVID GELERNTER (what about OUTGOING college students?)

 

“The government might best leave to parents to obtain the education where and how they pleased, and content itself with helping to pay the school fees of the poorer.” – JOHN STUART MILL

 

"In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards." -- MARK TWAIN

 

“Rote discipline is not much found in our education systems any more. It has come to be considered unimaginative and oppressive of the human spirit, which, left to itself and freed of all restraints, will soar aloft in joy, spontaneously discovering all knowledge and skill for itself. This is the foundation of wet garbage on which modern pedagogy is built.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

 

“None of my students could have failed without government help.” –  MARVA COLLINS (The late founder of Westside Preparatory School, in the “deprived” Garfield Park suburb of Chicago. The “Eugenia Charles” of American Education, and if we had a Department of Education worthy of the name, her statue would be in front of it.)

"It's amazing how everything you do, even late in life, you did in school." -- WALKER PERCY 

“The three-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages and mathematics… If you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots.” – ROBERT HEINLEIN

 

“The less substance to a school or degree program, the more lightweight its courses, the more apt it is to be affected by the ideological climate. A magnet is more apt to cause lightweight objects than heavy ones to skitter towards it.” – DAVID GELERNTER

 

“Why is it that a society which fills its public rhetoric with the importance of education has developed such a hatred of actually learning anything?” – CHARLES MOORE (the ex-Editor of the SPECTATOR on his country, the UK, in Feb. ’08)

 

“One of the benefits of a bad education is the constant pleasure of discovery.” – RICHARD BROOKHISER

 

“One great advantage of a good education is that it dethrones your ego.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE (if only….)

 

“The good news is that the Left’s attempt to indoctrinate college students is frequently ineffective. The bad news is that it often fails simply because students aren’t paying attention to – or learning – much of anything.” -- JOHN HOOD (President of the John Locke Foundation)

 

“My effort to begin the process of toughening up my children for the rigours of the British education system, (after their time in the American one), met with disregard bordering on insolence. ‘You might have to take exams’, I ventured. ‘What’s an exam?’ they chorused without lifting their heads from the telly. Oh dear. At their Washington school they mainly learn how wonderful they are; the headmaster begins each day by shaking hands enthusiastically with every pupil.” – JUSTIN WEBB (The estimable BBC Washington reporter, in September 2008, and I say estimable because he is one of the very few – practically unique – BBC reporters who is not left-wing and anti-American. In the same interview, he said, a propos of the War in Iraq, “American self-confidence has been battered by the Iraq war and by events on Wall Street – on the eve of this election most Americans think the country is in poor shape – but they still back themselves and the American creed: pluralism, tolerance and freedom; They raise their glasses in what they genuinely believe is a fundamentally decent cause. And I raise my glass back to them.”)

 

‘There’s no place in the world where children like school so much as in the United States,’ -- DIMITRI NEGROPONTE (John's father)

 

"We’re becoming a nation of people who are propagandized from elementary school right on through graduate school in a certain vision of the world. Only the few, for one reason or another, stop and say — “wait a minute!” — they are the only ones left that we have to depend on." -- THOMAS SOWELL

 

“Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.” – THOMAS SOWELL (on 18 April 2021)

 

“The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation is the philosophy of the government in the next.” – ABRAHAM LINCOLN

 

“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.” - C. S. LEWIS

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

“'A' students work for 'B' students. Or not even. A businessman friend of mine corrected me, 'No, P.J.', he said, ‘ “B” students work for “C” students, “A” students teach'.” – P. J. O'ROURKE

 

"We in the West have ruined our education system and most of our youth are thus amnesiac, with no knowledge of past conditions or of the work and bequests of prior, far more deprived generations." – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

 

“Anyone who has been to a British public (private – ED) school has no difficulty coping with privations in later life, including prison.” – EVELYN WAUGH

 

“Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is only the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums who find prison so soul-destroying.” – EVELYN WAUGH (I'm pretty sure he was using “gay” in its proper, pre-homosexual usage.)

 

“As everyone knows, there is no class so dangerous as the idle educated.” – MARK STEYN

 

“It's not snobbery that compels liberals to promote college for all; it's a scam to manufacture more Democratic voters, much like their immigration policies. Is a Valley Girl who takes courses in Self-Esteem at Cal State Fresno (an actual course at an actual college) a finer class of person than a skilled plumber with approximately 1,000 times the earning capacity and social worth of the airhead? No. But she is more likely to vote Democratic.” -- ANN COULTER

 

"The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling." – THOMAS SOWELL

 

"Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination."~ THOMAS SOWELL

“Even parents who complain about low academic standards in the schools seem not to understand that academic achievement is not the real priority of today's educators. Classroom brainwashing is the goal, though it is expressed in prettier and more pious words than this.” — THOMAS SOWELL (elaborating a bit on the previous statement, above) 

“If I had learned education, I would not have had time to learn anything else.” -- CORNELIUS VANDERBILT (the great steamship and railroad – NY Central RR – tycoon and phlilanthropist – founder of Vanderbilt University, who famously didn't think much of “book larnin'” and who reputedly only read one book in his whole life, Bunyan's “Pilgrim's Progress”, and that only after he was 70 years old.....)

 

“Athens is always in the hearts and minds of anyone educated in the West who did not choose female or transgender studies.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

“Black Americans face severe social disadvantages, starting with very poor public schools, but what stands in the way of their improvement is not white racism but the teachers' unions, which happen  to be allied with the Democrats.” -- JOHN O'SULLIVAN     (the English ex-editor of NR)   

 

“America's downfall doesn't begin with the ‘low-information voter.’ It starts with the no-knowledge student.” – MICHELLE MALKIN

 

“The essence of education is the experience of greatness.” – ALLAN BLOOM

 

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

“The risk of starting good schools is that they might become popular and then everyone will want to go to them.” -- JOHN PRESCOTT      (The old lefty trade-union Labour Party “Deputy Prime Minister” under Tony Blair, and I swear this is what he said.)         

 

“Nothing you can't spell will ever work.” – WILL ROGERS

 

"Schools should teach history, not repeat it." -- DEBBIE ALDRICH

“'Self-esteem' is the one thing American schools seem to teach really well – possibly the only thing.” – TOBY YOUNG

 

“The reason we have such high youth unemployment isn't because children have been taught 'obsolete' subject knowledge at school. It's because they've been taught absolutely bugger all.” – TOBY YOUNG

 

“The new iron rule of the American college degree: The more it costs, the less it's worth. Bank on it.” – JACK JOLIS

 

“A stable and democratic society is impossible without a minimum degree of literacy and knowledge on the part of most citizens and without widespread acceptance of some common set of values.” – MILTON FRIEDMAN (He said this in 1955 – and things ain't got any rosier since then, that's for sure....)

 

“The dumbest people in America are the ones we hire to make our kids smart.” – MICHAEL GRAHAM

 

“Achingly hip neophiliacs who have mastered the peculiar illiteracy that comes from having been the willing victims of critical theory, cultural studies and art history.” – JONATHAN MEADES (An English writer, journalist and film-maker, in the Speccie, April 2015)

 

"Education is like a big fucking fashion show, everybody parading what they're wearing." -- EDDIE H. CISNEROS (as it happens, Mr. Cisneros is the extremely affable senior doorman of my building – and it’s from his excellent novel “HIS-Panic, The Early Years”)

 

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

 

“Unprivileged, unclassy (parents) understand that their children are filled full of leftist bile every day at school and college. These parents don't always have the time or energy to set their children straight. But they are not stupid. They know what is going on.” – DAVID GELERNTER

"Progressives really do think, he says, that “consciousness is to be transmitted by the government. And they’re working on it, starting with kindergarten. The academic culture, from the Harvard graduate school of education to kindergarten in Flagstaff, Ariz., is the same now, coast to coast, as far as I can tell.” -- GEORGE WILL (in 2023)  

“Only a fool would let his enemy teach his children.” – MALCOLM X

 

“The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.” – MAXIMILIEN DE ROBESPIERRE

 

“Well, it's hard to bullshit your way around a wrong answer in physics. Which is why I majored in English. – KYLE SMITH

 

“Too much of what is called 'education' is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.” – THOMAS SOWELL

 

"If you want to see the poor remain poor, generation after generation, just keep the standards low in their schools and make excuses for their academic shortcomings and personal misbehavior. But please don't congratulate yourself on your compassion." -- THOMAS SOWELL

 

"Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity." -- THOMAS SOWELL

 

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

 

“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.” ― ISAAC ASIMOV

 

“The purpose of any school is to get out of it.” – RUSH LIMBAUGH

 

"US schools have long since passed a line from education to indoctrination." -- LARRY ELDER

 

"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)

 

“What does 'educated' mean today? I doesn't mean knowing a lot about the world. It means having been injected with the views and assumptions of their teachers. It means being taught by people who themselves have little experience of the real world.” – JAMES BARTHOLOMEW (English author and journalist, in January 2017)

 

"The world is full of educated derelicts." ~ CALVIN COOLIDGE (Coolidge went to Amherst, where he was, despite later being known as “Silent Cal”, a hot-shot   debater. Also he was a Phi Gam – good house...)

"You can't learn everything from books. You've got to look around." --  LARRY SHAFFER    (professor of animal behavior at SUNY Plattsburgh)  

“The climate on campus now is somewhat an admixture of Communist Cuba and kindergarten.” – R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR. (in May 2017)

"I have long held to the belief that the most conformist institutions in America are its universities. More recently, I have come to the conclusion that high schools are joining the ranks of universities in regimenting thought among their students. Now, more alarmingly, I have come to the conclusion that grammar schools are turning out goose-stepping student bodies, and even kindergarteners are getting in on the act." -- R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR. ( in Feb. 2023) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

"The handmaiden of failed socialist regimes has always been ignorance of the past & present. And that is never truer than among today’s American college-degreed (but otherwise economically & historically illiterate) youth" -- VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

 

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

 

“If everyone had one fewer degree, workers would be ranked in exactly the same order, and little of value would be lost.” – BRYAN CAPLAN (author of the book “The Case Against Education”, and this is a simply brilliant insight.)

 

“Going to school is not the same as getting an education, of course, much less finding wisdom.” – CHARLES KESLER (prof of government at Claremont-McKenna College, and the editor of the Claremont Review of Books, in NR, in May 2018)

 

"Education is not as important as everyone thinks. Africans have survived thousands of years without it. It is not for Africans, it came with the whites.” – ANGIE MOTSHEKGA (the South African “Basic Education Minister” – I swear, and the head of the “Womens’ Branch”  of the ruling ANC Party, to boot.)

 

“Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.” – TOBY YOUNG

 

"Education is what's left behind after you've forgotten all you've ever learned." -- ALAN BENNETT

 

"I say destroy academia as currently constituted. It's a commie conformity factory that also provides sinecures for leftist parasites subsidized by working normal people." -- KURT SCHLICHTER

 

“Schooldays are warfare.” – ROGER LEWIS       (the prolific author-biographer)                       

 

“If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.” -- FRANK ZAPPA

"Never having had the time to attend school, I never studied long enough to find education boring." -- W.C. FIELDS    (whose sporadic, formal "education" stopped shortly after grade school) 

«The school is the institution by which, for the rest of their lives, the British come to understnd all arbitrary authorities of capricious brutality.» – NIGEL BARLEY (An English anthropologist and the author of the very funny Africa novel, «The Coast»)

 

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

 

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

"Our schools have shifted away from the acquisition of knowledge towards how one feels about stuff, how one might interpret it. It is not merely that the acquisition of knowledge is tiresome and difficult -- it is that the knowledge acquired is itself part of the problem, an agency which enables white supremacy and the straight hegemony (as critical race theory has argued about maths (sic) for example.)" -- ROD LIDDLE (In Dec. '22) 

"As someone who has taught bonehead English 101 to college freshmen, let me disabuse you of the impression that the majority of them enter college capable of writing a simple sentence or expressing the most straightforward of meanings." -- SARAH HOYT

 

"And all you educated just enough to make you think you knew everything." -- JEREMY CLARKE

"In their campaigning zeal, egalitarians have always hated learning since real learning discriminates, and the result is a deadly weapon in the battle against knowledge." -- ROGER SCRUTON 

"One wonders what curriculum they were taught. No doubt, a bracing mixture of climate change, human rights and how to put a condom on a banana." -- LLOYD EVANS (in Nov. 2022)

"It's ironic that 'cultural hegemony' -- a term coined by the Marxist Antonio Gramsci o describe how the ruling class maintain their rule -- is now a term more applicable to how the Left control education in universities and schools." -- TIBOR FISCHER (A British novelist -- whose basketball star Hungarian parents defected to the West in 1956)

"If a private school underperforms they get shut down." -- BRIAN LENNEY (Republican Idaho State Senator, in Feb. "23) 

"Public schools are minimum security prisons with night release. The only things kids learn are criminal incivility, how to avoid personal responsibility, and gender dysphoria." -- JOE MALLEIS (8 March 2023)

“Public education needs to be a site of socialist organizing. Libraries really do too.” -- EMILY DRABINSKI (Gee, what a surprise! -- Behold, the boss of the American Library Association, in Sept. 2023)

"For the love of God, people, a public school classroom is not some sort of marketplace of ideas. Not every viewpoint can or should be taught. Time and resources and curriculum space are scarce. The state thus has a legitimate role in defining what counts as an adequate education." -- ADRIAN VERMEULE (on 13 June 2021)

 

Education, private

“You may not get much else out of private education, but at least it makes you a snob.” – SIMON BRETT      (In his Molesworth revival “How To Stay Topp”)          

 

“Private education exists in this country almost exclusively for the education of liberal kids.” – RUSH LIMBAUGH (on 9 May, 2017)

 

“The most concrete thing that parents got for all the money they spent on private education was the knowledge that their loved ones would be beaten on the backside instead of the hand.” – DAVID NOBBS (he wrote this in 1983, of his pre-WWII education in the UK)

“Anyone seeking to escape the leftism of public education by shelling out the fortune required for ‘going private’ are just fooling themselves — private schools are just as leftist as the public ones, only even worse in that their indoctrinators are more CLEVER and therefore more effective.” — JACK JOLIS

 

"If a private school underperforms they get shut down." -- BRIAN LENNEY (Republican Idaho State Senator, in Feb. "23)

“Nine years of boarding-school chain gangs turned me into someone incapable of working a nine-to-five job, or ever getting out of bed before midday.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

"His boarding school:  A pressurized place where people behaved worse than in the natural world." -- NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE  

"Girls who went to private schools always managed to work that into the conversation within fifteen minutes of meeting you." -- TOM WOLFE

“Education, Sex”

“Our society sexualizes children earlier and earlier, with sex education starting almost before they know anything else.” THEODORE DALRYMPLE, M.D. (in June 2005)

 

“Sex education is very much a child, perhaps the only child, of the hedonistic sixties dissociation of sexuality from morality and from procreation. It is for this reason that in sex education the emphasis is on contraception rather than on babies, on techniques of all sorts, rather than on right and wrong, and would seek to deny any distinction between normal and deviant sexuality. Indeed, were sex educators to promote abstinence and the sacredness of human sexuality, rather than condoms and what amounts to our similarity to animals, they would do themselves out of a job.” – ANTHONY O’HEAR (the head of the Dept. of Education at England’s only” private” university, the Univ. of Buckingham)

"Why is talking sexually in the workplace considered sexual harassment to adults... but talking sexuality to children K-3 at school considered essential?" -- BENINE NAJIM HAMDAN (a GOP/Conservative candidate for Congress in Noo Yawk City's "West Side", in May 2022)   

Efficiency

“In government, business, military and about everything else, the fewer moving parts the better.” – TIMOTHY JOLIS

 

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

 

“If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk?” – ALBERT EINSTEIN

 

"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." -- PETER DRUCKER (the Austrian-American management consultant, professor, and writer;1909-2005)


Effort

"Sometimes it's just not good enough to do your best -- you have to do what's required." -- WINSTON CHURCHILL

 

“Effortlessness is hard.” – SARAH SANDS (A Brit lady journalist, and grande dame at the Beeb)

 

Ego

“There is no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit.” – RONALD REAGAN (for some reason, this is one of my favorite all-time quotes....)

Egypt

"Egypt’s blink-of-an-eye descent into instability underlines afresh the uniqueness of Israel, that embattled sliver of enlightened land in a largely dictatorial region. Those who like to characterise it as the root of all the Middle East’s problems look particularly foolish: the people on the streets aren’t enraged by Israel, but because their countries are so unlike Israel, so lacking in the freedoms and economic opportunities that both Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs take for granted." -- DAVID HOROWITZ (Editor of THE JERUSALEM POST, in February 2011)

 

“Egyptians don't like Jews, and they don't much like each other either. Anti-Semitism has therefore functioned something like an escape valve, and blaming Israel, and/or the United States, for everything wrong with Egypt, was the most pracical way to keep Egyptians from each other's throats. Morsi is not the problem, then, he is merely the president of the problem, which is Egyptian society itself.” -- LEE SMITH  (the Senior Editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, in February 2013)

 

"Egypt is not a country that has an army, but an army that has a country." – CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

 

“The point to be borne in mind is that there remain two forces of note in Egypt: the army and the Brotherhood. Everything else is a decoration.” -- DR. JONATHAN SPYER (Jonathan Spyer is a senior research fellow at the Global Research in International Affairs Center, and a contributor to the GUARDIAN, and he said this in July 2013)

 

“What happens in Egypt does not stay in Egypt.” – MICHAEL RUBIN       (of the American Enterprise Institute)                                                                        

 

“Most of populated Egypt can be seen very easily from a boat.” – DOROTHY STANNARD      (An English lady author of guide-books)     

 

"Modern Egyptians have never taken the smallest interest in their antiquities; they have remained an invading race throughout the centuries of their occupation, and have consistently been either neglectful or actively destructive of the civilization of their predecessors."-- EVELYN WAUGH (in 1930)

 

“Tell the Egyptians if we have any more of their cheek we will set the Jews on them and drive them into the gutter from which they should never have emerged.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL (in 1951 when the Egyptians were giving the Brits a headache over control of the Suez Canal)

Einstein, Albert

“And for years (after 1919), if anyone said anything wise, within a few months their words were being attributed to Einstein.” – SIMON INGS (An English novelist and science writer, in May 2019)

 

“They cheer me because they all understand me, and they cheer you (Einstein) because no one understands you.” – CHARLIE CHAPLIN (when they both appeared together at a film première)

 

Elections

"Real elections are the final manifestation of a free society, not the primary building block." -- MARK STEYN

 

“It's not who votes for whom that matters, it's who gets to count the votes.” – JOSEPH STALIN (This was rather an obscure quote when I first stumbled on it. Since the notorious Great 2020 Election Steal, of course, it’s become, quite rightly, a “household phrase”.)

 

“What is the alternative to private financing of political campaigns? Only one alternative exists. Under a system of public financing of political campaigns, people trying to change the government would have to go to the government to get the money to try to change the government. Something a little East German about that?” – 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)

 

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

 

“But the fact is that elections shouldn't matter as much as they do.” -- NANCY PELOSI (A really rather obtuse comment, when you begin to examine it, but “Stretch” Pelosi is way too stupid even to be obtuse – she was just bemoaning the important imperative given to the need to  reverse her insanely left-wing legislative program.)

 

“Purges are the elections of the left.” – RICHARD FERNANDEZ (in his PJMedia column “Belmont Club”)

“A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows.” – O. HENRY      (American short-story writer 1862-1910)                                            

 

"Hell, I never vote for anybody, I always vote against."-- W. C. FIELDS (WILLIAM CLAUDE DUKENFIELD)

"How you win an election? You can never be too right-wing!" -- GEORGE STPHANOPOULOS    (this astonishing statement by the lefty Clintonista was quoted by ROD LIDDLE in the SPECTATOR on 9 Dec 2023)

"The Left is always banging on about how "sacred" the franchise is, and yet they treat it like a used condom." -- MICHAEL WALSH    (in January 2024)

"When you've seen one election, you've seen one election." -- LOWMAN S. HENRY     (Chairman and CEO of the Lincoln Institute) 

 "I am mortified to have taken part in a process that required bars to be closed." – JIMMY BRESLIN (Taking a page out of William F. Buckley's book, when he ran for mayor of NYC in '65 and got 13% of the vote I n a 3-way race; a couple of years later, in 1969, Norman Mailer ran for mayor, and did considerably worse than Buckley. Anyway, Mailer picked the hard-drinking newspaperman Jimmy Breslin as his "running mate" – his candidate for President of the City Council. This quote was his  «concession speech» – Back in those days, they rather quaintly closed bars and liquor stores in NY State on election day.)

 

“The modern election is still mostly about having the right candidate. But it's increasingly important to get the right message to the right people at the right time – tapping into their deepest emotions and fears to figure out what buttons to push. We used to call this sort of thing propaganda. Now we call it 'a behavioral approach to persuasive communication with quantifiable results' and give awards to the people who are best at it.” – JAMIE BARTLETT (the author of the book “The People Versus Tech”, in 2018)

 

"We wrecked the best economy in history, burned your cities down, silenced you and stole the election. And now it is time to heal." -- TONY HELLER (climate scientist, engineer, teacher, 9 Nov. 2020)

"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)

“No ballots are illegal.” -- JOSH SHAPIRO      (the Democrat Gov of Pennsylvania... and a purer distillation of bullshit you will not find in this entire Compendium....)


“Election” of 2020, The (& Aftermath)

"We wrecked the best economy in history, burned your cities down, silenced you and stole the election. And now it is time to heal." -- TONY HELLER (climate scientist, engineer, teacher, 9 Nov. 2020)

 

“The motherfuckers sabotaged an incoming admin. staged a coup, ran a sham impeachment, politicized a bioweapon attack from communist China, rioted, looted and burned cities down, and then blatantly rigged a presidential election. And they got away with all of it.” – AUGUST WEST (a guy on the Twoot, 24 Nov. 2020 – since banished, not surprisingly, by the Stalinists who run Twitter)

 

"So far, no evidence that the recent election was honest." – WILLIAM MARBURY (writing in THE AMERICAN THINKER, in Nov. 2020)

 

“What I have learned from the aftermath of the 2020 elections is our nation has no remedy for organized fraud. It is easier to ignore evidence than stop a runaway train. If Democrats can get away with what was done in this election, there’s no hope for justice.” – DR. CAROL M. SWAIN (author and retired Pol Sci prof from Vanderbilt)

 

“Fake vaccines for a fake virus that caused a fake election.” – SAMUEL M’CHEYNE GLASSER (I think my old pal Sam is exercising poetic license here, but it makes a great soundbite nevertheless.)

 

“American Civilization (1776-2020). Well, it was a nice 244 year run while it lasted.” – SAMUEL M’CHEYNE GLASSER

 

“The US as created by the Constitution ended on January 20, 2021 with the installation of an illegitimate regime in D.C. leaving no elected Federal government. We are technically now 50 separate and sovereign states (nations).” -- SAMUEL M'CHEYNE GLASSER

"Once the 2020 Demo☭rat election-steal was allowed to stand -- hell, was accepted as though it had never occurred — then everything changed in American politics: henceforth, the Demo☭rat Party became an overconfident, hubristic, amok criminal gang, And the old USA was no more." -- JACK JOLIS

"Hell, there's no evidence that the election of 2020 was not stolen." -- JACK JOLIS

“Who knew that the year after 2020 would be 1984?” – STEVE ROSEMAN (a CPA in St. Louis, and a good man)

"Democrats are scared that American voters are going to interfere with the 2020 election." -- GREG NORBERG      (A big cheese on the Twoot)   

"Anyone who says the claims of voter fraud are 'unfounded' is either willfully ignorant or lying." -- TOM FITTON (head of Judicial Watch, 10 Nov 2020)

 

"There has never been an election in any truly democratic country in which the liberal establishment has been so viciously, relentlessly opposed to one if the candidates and vilified him at every possible moment. This is the first election where the liberal left has won by pure bullying, by closing down debate, by vilifying and mocking, by ignoring stories hostile to his challenger and by tarnishing those who supported Trump as -- guess what -- racist. If they can do it once, they can o it again." -- ROD LIDDLE

 

"No evidence of anything but the usual minor glitches." -- ANDREW SULLIVAN (words fail me.)

"Should the Left be allowed to steal another election, they will not be put to the task of doing it again." -- DAVID MAMET (in his excellent 2022 "Recessional") 

“There's a difference between not having the evidence and not hearing the evidence.” – EVAN KILGORE (conservative novelist and screenwriter)

 

“The idea that Obama won re-election despite losing 3.5 million voters but Trump lost re-election despite gaining 11 million voters, is beyond credulity. No incumbent loses re-election when gaining voters. It just doesn’t happen. ‘Vote by mail’ was used to rig the election.” – LAWRENCE POLYAKOV (A first generation American Jew. His family escaped the Soviet Union. He writes for The Jerusalem Post )

 

"We are two countries. Populist and The Cheats." -- C. DENNIS PEEK (a conservative American engineer, on the Twoot)

"Voter fraud is not the problem. Voter fraud is a voter casting a fraudulent ballot which typically changes nothing. The problem is election fraud. This refers to a system of organized cheating to rig the outcome of an election. 2020 was election -- not voter -- fraud." -- DINESH D'SOUZA

“The one thing you cannot say about that (6 Jan.) mob is that they were crazy. From their point of view – a rigged election, fomented by Democrats and weak Republicans, suppressed by Fake News in league with Big Tech – they were being perfectly rational. If it were true that a vast left-wing conspiracy had used specially constructed voting machines to rig the election so that Trump’s landslide victory was erased, why would you not storm the Capitol? It would, indeed, be obligatory for a patriotic American to fight in such a case of treason. I might have picked up a musket myself.” – ANDREW SULLIVAN (it doesn’t need to have been “a vast left-wing conspiracy” for that to have been exactly what happened, Andrew....)

 

“The installation of the illegitimate dementia patient as president of this dying empire of debt by the Deep State (billionaire oligarchs, surveillance state agencies, military industrial complex, Silicon Valley censorship tyrants, corrupt bought off state politicians, Soros installed bureaucrats, and their propaganda arm – fake news media outlets).” – TYLER DURDEN (of “Zero Hedge, on 26 July, 2021)

 

“I'll say it straight out loud. I do not think that Joe Biden ‘won the election’. I don't think it is a question of ‘widespread fraud’. I think the way the system works with the Electoral College, you only need actually to spread fraud in six key cities in six key states.” – MARK STEYN

 

"We have put together I think the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.” - JOE BIDEN (while still a candidate, on 24 October 2020)

"The struggle is no longer about who gets to vote, it’s about who gets to count the vote.” -- PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN      (to a "holiday celebration" of the Democrat National Committee, on 14 December 2021. Channeling Joe Stalin.)                                               

 
"The real threat to democracy is a man who gets five CIA directors to lie for him to win an election." -- HANS MAHNCKE (of the Epoch Times and its Epoch TV)

"The Left can put whipped cream on shit all they want, but 70,000,000 American are outraged by this befouled election.  We don't accept this fraudulent result, and none of us is inclined to bury the hatchet with a mob that lied, cheated, burned and looted to get their way." -- JAMES WOODS (the excellent American actor)

“The Democrats act like the late night drunk driver who killed a pedestrian in the crosswalk and fled the scene, (the 2020 election). They hid their vehicle in the garage and built a security fence around it to avoid any scrutiny, (the US Capitol). They then investigate the pedestrian.” – TODD L. GRIFFITH (my old Twoot-pal, in July 2022)

"No serious person believes the 2020 election was fair. The signature anomaly, the middle of the night pause in counting in the six swing states—where President Trump was in the lead at the start of the pause, only to have the count resume with Joe Biden ahead—is all one needs to know.

The election of 2020 was decided—most likely—by the illegal collection and production of absentee ballots by a variety of front groups whose purpose was to steal the election. It is not possible to demonstrate with absolute certitude this assertion because there was no real investigation of the election and its many anomalies. Historic numbers of absentee ballots were returned, the chain of custody of ballots was either missing or defective, and signature verification was in many states nearly non-existent. Under the letter of the law, many key states were unable to certify their elections legitimately.

Citizen groups that did investigate were treated not only with contempt, but as if their civic actions were criminal in nature." -- BRIAN T. KENNEDY       (in THE AMERICAN MIND, 29 June 2024)

“Election” of 2022, The (& Aftermath)

"It’s not Republican messaging. It’s not low-quality candidates. It’s not Trump. It’s not abortion. It’s mass mail-in/drop-box voting. It’s as simple as that. And Republicans will never win another election unless it’s stopped." -- JOEL BERRY (the Managing Editor of THE BABYLON BEE, 11 Nov 2022)

"Shocker... the person running the election in Arizona won the election in Arizona." -- TIM YOUNG (of "AMERICAN GREATNESS")

" 'Elections are not over when the polls close,' said President Joe Biden's cybersecurity chief Jen Easterly at a Washington event recently, adding: 'Sometimes it takes weeks.' Not in functioning democracies, it doesn't." -- CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL

"Should the Left be allowed to steal another election, they will not be put to the task of doing it again." -- DAVID MAMET (in his excellent 2022 "Recessional") 

Electricity

“Power outages are like being grounded by God. You can’t do anything fun.” – JIMMY KIMMEL

 

Electric Cars

“Electric cars essentially run on coal and condescension.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

Elegance

“Elegance is refusal.” -- DIANA VREELAND (eh? I guess the old fashionista was also a crypticista....)

 

“We must never confuse elegance with snobbery.” — YVES ST. LAURENT

 

Elephants

“Nature’s great masterpiece, the elephant; the only harmless great thing.” – JOHN DONNE (The “No man is an island” fellow, 1572-1631)

 

“The elephants, nature’s bulldozers.” – TIM CAHILL

 "Contrary to prevailing opinion, I never found an elephant big enough to justify the sin of killing one." -- JOHN HUSTON     (a big-game hunter hmself, the great movie-maker said this after directing "The Roots Of Heaven", about a hunter who wants to save elephants, in 1958, in Bangui, C.A.R. and  Fort Lamy, Chad)

"Elephants suffer from the same problem as bananas, measles and Spam. They make people snigger before taking them in any way seriously." -- BILLY CONNOLLY
 

Elites (-ism)

“Strive, if thou canst, to make good thy station on the upper deck; those that live under hatches are ordained to be drudges and slaves. Poverty is a shame amongst men, an imprisonment of the mind, a vexation of every worthy spirit.” – SIR WALTER RALEIGH (advice to his son)

 

"The problem is not that the Elites do not practice what they preach, rather that they to do not preach what they practice" – CHARLES MURRAY

 

«Conservatives who go on about elitism need to rediscover the virtues of hierarchy. Problem isn't elitism, it's deficient elites.» – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

"Everyone's an elitist when it's time to pick a brain surgeon." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

"The elites of both political parties have more in common with one another than they do with truck drivers from northern Louisiana or combine mechanics in Nebraska." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

"Everyone is an elitist when it really matters. We get away with anti-elitism in politics and in culture because the stakes are so low. (What the most you've ever lost in a presidential election?) (Besides your country.) -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

"The eternal, yet banal, lesson is that national elites can ignore deep social divisions while steadily rigging the system in their favor for only so long before the plebeians catch on." -- MICHAEL AUSLIN     (in NR, May 2016, and the author of "The End Of The Asian Century")                           

 

«Ordinary people have been subjected to the same kind of indoctrination as the elite. They have just had less of it. They were in the hands of the propagandists for a shorter time and have been in the real world longer.» – JAMES BATHOLOMEW (English economic writer, in the UK SPECTATOR)

 

"And by elite I do not mean the elected government: establishment elites can survive most forms of government and easily outlast them. The liberal elite we talk about today is beholden to a leftish cultural and political paradigm which predominates in all the non-elected institutions which run our lives." -- ROD LIDDLE

 

"All the best people reject Trump. Of course, all the best people brought us to where we are today. As I've said before, I believe that if someone presumes to be my better, he should actually be better. None of them are. Hence, I say 'Whatev, dude'." -- KURT SCHLICHTER (in October 2017)

 

"It's a lot easier for the base to get a new elite; than for the elite to get a new base." -- MARK STEYN

 

“Give me an army of West Point graduates and I’ll win a battle. Give me a handful of Texas Aggies and I’ll win a war” – GEN. GEORGE S. PATTON

 

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

 

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

 

“Elites hate jet skis, snowmobiles, and recreational vehicles in part because they reflect that so many have the wherewithal to have fun without the approval or sanction of their supposed betters.” – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

 

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

"The key to success in liberal America is not ethics but projecting views and attitudes pleasing to the elite.” -- GEORGE NEUMAYR (of the AMERICAN SPECTATOR, shortly before he died. Incidentally, he died in in  Jan. 2023 in the Ivory Coast, of all places, of malaria,  of all things.) 

Eloquence

"Only intuition can protect you from the most dangerous individual of all, the articulate incompetent" -- ROBERT L. BERNSTEIN (liberal publisher, founder of Human Rights Watch)

 

Embarrassment

"A dementia patient is immune to embarrassment." -- PHILLIP MARK MCGOUGH     (writing about Pres. Biden in the Jan 2024 AMSPEC)

Emotions/Emotionalism/"Emojis "

« I trust someone who feels what I feel more than a person who merely thinks what I think.» – DAVID GELERNTER

"Emotions neither prove nor disprove facts. There was a time when any rational adult understood this. But years of dumbed-down education and emphasis on how people 'feel' have left too many people unable to see through this media gimmick." -- THOMAS SOWELL

 

"This is a generation dependent on outsourced emotions." – LAURA FREEMAN (writing in the UK SPECTATOR, in May 2018 – about her students)

 

«To wear your heart on your sleeve isn't a very good plan; you should wear it inside, where it functions best.» – MARGARET THATCHER

 

“When a nation sets up a direct pipeline between its emotions and its laws, it does not keep its liberty for long.” – CHARLES C. W. COOKE

"Be like the English. It's not just a question of concealing your emotions. Don't even bother to have any." -- JOE QUEENAN 

"Emotional neediness -- call it an excess of sensibility." -- MELANIE McDONAGH (Referring to Prince Harry and his mum, Princess Diana when she penned this universal truism.)

 

“I pretended to look downcast. Unless I expressed an emotion of some kind, I reasoned, he might think I was mad.” – JEREMY CLARKE (in a chat with his doctor.)

 

“I did not think he was funny. If I hadn’t been supposed to not show my emotions, I really would have shown my emotions.” – CHRIS MILLER (my ΑΔΦ brother, from his 2006 memoir “The Real Animal House”)

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

"He who has learned not to intrude his emotions upon his fellows has also learned not to intrude them upon himself." -- GEOFFREY HOUSEHOLD (I'm not sure this is true... but it's worth pondering.)

"So many emotions seem to be the result of self-interest or fear." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS


"Women, unlike men, take positive pride in their emotions." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS (the very amusing English novelist)

"Thoughts are never honest. Emotions are." -- ALBERT CAMUS (I always kind of liked Camus because I saw him as the "anti-Sartre", but this is the intellectual rationale for Leftism, and he couldn't be wronger, here.)

"The heart has its reasons that reason ignores." (“Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point”) -- BLAISE PASCAL (The Frogue heavy thinker, 1623-1662 -- died young from all that heavy thinking)

 

Empathy

“People who literally experience others' feelings are either characters in novels or nuts.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“Empathy is directed inward, but sympathy is directed outward. Sympathy is about the other guy – and empathy is all about me and my precious feelings. That is its main appeal to the Left, which is after all very little more in its American expression than infantile spoon-banging organized into voting blocs.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“'Empathy', which our politicians like to talk about, is not an emotion at all but a literary conceit." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

" ‘Empathy’ does not mean lie to lazy losers about the source of their loserdom.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

"It isn't about sharing people's pain: it's about alleviating it." -- MATTHEW PARRIS 

"We can seldom help anybody. Either we don't know what part to give, or the part that is needed is not wanted... or we do not have the part that is needed." -- NORMAN MACLEAN (1902-1990. The American Maclean was the author of "A River Runs Through It")

"I found out that it's not good to talk about my troubles. Eighty percent of the people who hear them don't care and the other twenty percent are glad I'm having them." -- TOMMY LASORDA (long-time and legendary ex-Los Angeles Dodger manager)

 

Empire, (The British)

“Instinctively the Englishman is no missionary, no conqueror. He prefers the country to the town, and home to foreign parts. He is rather glad and relieved if one natives will remain natives, and strangers strangers, and at a comfortable distance from himself. Yet outwardly he is most hospitable and accepts almost anybody for the time being…. His adventures are all external; they change hims so little that he is not afraid of them. He carries his English weather in his heart wherever he goes, and it becomes a cool spot in the desert, and a steady and sane oracle amongst all the deliriums of mankind. Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, such a boyish master.” – GEORGE SANTAYANA (An American, writing in 1922)

 

“Not since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, conspirators, and fanatics manage to supplant him.” – GEORGE SANTAYANA

 

“The moment the Union Jack raced up a colonial flagstaff, speech was free and habeas corpus the right of all”. --  WILLIAM MANCHESTER (the historian and Churchill’s biographer)

 

“Best Thing That Ever Happened To Them” – JAMES DELINGPOLE (Proposed title for a TV series on the British Empire. To star himself. Sadly, never got made.)

 

“It is nevertheless true that the people of Zimbabwe were free under British colonial jurisdiction in a way that they are not free today – and the same is true of almost all those African peoples who had the good fortune to be part of the British Empire.” – ROGER SCRUTON

 

“Insofar as the world functions at all, one can easily make the case that it's due largely to the British inheritance.” – MARK STEYN

 

“The British Empire was a great and wonderful social, economic and even spiritual experiment, and all the parlour pinks and eager, ill-informed intellectuals cannot convince me to the contrary.” – NOEL COWARD (that wonderful, patriotic, conservative old poofter snob who mine Mama knew and adored, darling....)

 

“...the imperishable empire of our arts and our morals, our literature and our laws.” – LORD THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY

 

“For many subjugated peoples, the alternative to British rule was not liberty but conquest by someone less enlightened.” – CHARLES C.W. COOKE (the young English-born libertarian at NATIONAL REVIEW, in February 2014)

 

“The British Empire was the greatest thing that happened to an undeserving world.” – GEORGE MACDONALD FRASER     (of course, the author of the “Flashman” novels) 

"The  British Empire (was) the most civilizing and humane of any empire in history. (I don't know if one can properly call the United States an imperialist power.)"-- VICTOR DAVIS HANSON (on June 30 2023, on board the SS Regent Seven Seas Mariner)

“Too often lost in the hand-wringing over the evils of colonialism is the aesthetic contribution of the British Empire. The Brits tended to colonise beautiful places and make them prettier. Bermuda, New Zealand, Fiji, Cape Town – notice a theme? Style wasn't an ancillary benefit: it was part of the point. Behind every Gurkha regiment marched a battalion of interior designers.” – TUCKER CARLSON (after a trip to India, in 2016)

 

"If you live in freedom, thank the British Empire" – H. W. CROCKER III (the American historian)

 

"When Englishmen first arrived in Mashonaland (Rhodesia) in the 1880s, the civilization they encountered there had not developed currency, written language, irrigation, beasts of burden, the plough, or the wheel. From the moment the British and King Lobengula met, a colonial relationship was inevitable. Any relationship between two civilizations of such disparate attainments will be colonial, almost by definition. The best option, from that point, is for the relationship to be made as benign as possible." -- HELEN ANDREWS

 

"Unlike other, less adventurous people, the British embraced the task of changing the world: occasionally by force, more often by example, and usually for the better." – DANIEL JOHNSON     (the great Paul Johnson's son)  

 

“The Empire is a millstone around our necks.” – BENJAMIN DISRAELI

 

“When the British Empire sank beneath the waves of history, it would leave behind only two monuments: one was the game of Association Football, and the other was the expression ‘Fuck off’.” – RICHARD TURNBULL (The second-to-last UK High Commissioner (Ambassador) to Aden, in 1965, to the visiting UK Defence Minister, Denis Healey. And incidentally, the dad of a good pal of mine, Julian Turnbull, who worked for DeBeers)

 

“Great Britain made the world.” – TIMOTHY SNYDER (American historian; Yale History Prof.)

 

“The British Empire was created as a by-product of generations of desperate Englishmen roaming the world in search of a decent meal.” – BILL MARSANO (the American food writer)

 

"The British seemed to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind." -- JOHN ROBERT SEELEY     (the "Victorian historian") 

        

"There is no vote, just their fat asses in big cars forever. Finish, that's all. Give me the British any day. At least they don't talk through their ass. Those British they say what they mean. If they think you bloody baboon they say straight out, 'I think you Africa chaps are bloody baboon.' British are too honest, you know.  That's why everyone likes them kabisa. But these politicians are bloody sheet." -- PAUL THEROUX     (Actually spoken by one of his African characters in his very funny 1968 novel "Fong And The Indians".  Oh, and "kabisa" is Swahili for "absolutely".)

 

"What is it, I wonder, which gives the Anglo-Saxons, alone among the colonists of the world, this ungenerous feeling of superiority over their neighbours?" -- EVELYN WAUGH (in 1930. And what's with "Anglo-Saxons"? He means British.)

"British imperialism takes on an odd complexion in some parts of the world. In East Africa its impetus was neither military nor commercial, but evangelical. We set out to stop the slave-trade. For this reason, and practically no other, public opinion forced on the Government the occupation of Zanzibar and the construction of the Uganda railway. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, zealous congregations all over the British Isles were organizing bazaars and sewing-parties with the single object of stamping out Arabic culture in East Africa." -- EVELYN WAUGH     (in 1930) 

“The male species of the Empire-builder, whether he is camping in the jungle or is at sea in a rowing-boat, always dresses for dinner, and by that I mean white shirt, black tie, dinner-jacket, black trousers and patent-leather shoes, the ful regalia, and to hell with the climate.” – ROALD DAHL (from his terrific 1986 autobiography “Going Solo”, referring to 1938 Tanganyika)

 

“The African knows no peace. One day you may see peace and plenty, well-tilled fields, and children playing in the sun; on the next you may find the corpses of the men, the bodies of the children half burnt in the flames which consumed the village, while the women are captives of the victorious raiders. Not against the slave-trade alone are our effords needed – the Pax Britannica which shall stop this lawless raiding and this constant inter-tribal war will be the greatest blessing that Africa has known since the Flood.”” – FREDERICK LUGARD (British colonial administrator, in East Africa in 1890)

 

“Britain’s empire was a moral force and one for the good.” – LAWRENCE JAMES (on page 638 of his 639-page tome “The Rise And Fall Of The British Empire)

"The British Empire maintained itself by force or the threat of force, as all governments ultimately do. But it brought the rule of law, honest administration, global trade links and economic and technical development long before those things would have been achieved by the rulers that the British displaced, many of whom (such as the Mughal rulers of India) were themselves outsiders, just like the British." -- JONATHAN SUMPTION       (the former senior British judge, as well as noted author and historian) 

Empire, (The French)

“The French, unlike the English, do not suffer from guilt about their colonial past.” – RICHARD WEST

 

“Anything must be better than to live under French colonial rule.” – FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT (he said this astonishing stupidity in 1941, and as one who has witnessed French colonial rule up close, I can attest that he was talking through his hat.)

 

"I go from one colonial capital to another and every time I feel the same marvel at the rise and decline — if such it is — of the French empire;" -- ROGER KAPLAN (A conservative Washington-based writer who is associated with the Hoover Institution).

"Despite being the world's second largest,  the French empire was loss-making until the 1930s. But what justified it -- the civilizational role apart -- was the grandeur it conveyed in French eyes from political left to right." -- JOHN KEIGER (a prof of International History at Salford Univ. in England, and I believe in the 1930s gold, oil, diamonds, phosphates, uranium and other valuable minerals were discovered in French Equatorial and French Occidental Africa -- but all that was ex-post-facto.) 

"Better than the English -- if you're going to be colonized, let it be by the French. Why? Because they liked us! They liked us for ourselves. They married our women. They had mistresses, black mistresses, lots of mistresses. They didn't make cricket clubs and snob clubs and bring their white women to Africa and set themselves apart. They even told us we were citizens of France -- and that was something, even if they didn't mean it. They liked us, they wanted to live here forever." -- MARCELLIN AGNAGNA     (a Congolese {Brazza} biologist and govt. official, to his friend Redmond O'Hanlon, quoted in 1996)

Empire, (The Habsburg/The Austro-Hungarian)

“As is the case with so many useful conservative institutions, the Habsburg empire worked in practice rather than in theory.” – SAM LEITH

 

"The Austro-Hungarian Empire really worked. And their uniforms were great." -- BARRY HUMPHRIES (the great Aussie comic)

"The Habsburgs were a remarkably hideous gang, if their busts and portraits are accurate. It seems as if God had designed them to be caricatures. If I'd been any of the monarchs who had been thus portrayed, I'd have lopped the artists' heads off." -- GEORGE COURTAULD (in his 1995 "The Travels Of A Fat Bulldog") 

Empire, (The “Holy Roman”)                                                                                                                     

“The Holy Roman Empire (a.k.a. The First Reich) may not have been holy, Roman or an empire, but it was still a bastion of Christian civilisations throughout the Dark Ages, and the distant ancestor of today's EU.” – WILLIAM COOK

 

Empire, (The Portuguese)

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

 

Empire (The Roman)

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

 

“(During the decline of the Roman Empire), bizarreness masqueraded as creativity.” – EDWARD GIBBON

" 'Pax Romana' was part of the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous." -- EDWARD GIBBON (well, he wrote this in 1776... of all years)

“Those Romans were so dreary, so greedy. All marching and plumbing and vomiting, and no imagination.” – DAVID NOBBS

 

“History shows that plagues tend to be bad for big empires with weak frontiers: ask the roman emperors Marcus Aurelius and Justinian.” – NIALL FERGUSON

 

“Rome began as a state and, as its power increase, became a civilization.” – SHIVA NAIPAUL

"It is possible, in strange times, for an entire people, or at least a majority, to deceive themselves into believing that things are going well when in fact they are not, when things are in fact farcical. Most Romans worked and played as usual while Rome fell about their ears." -- WALKER PERCY 

"Looting, butchery and violation they falsely call 'government', and where they make a desert, they call it 'peace'." -- CALGACUS (the old Caledonian -- Scottish -- chieftain.)

“Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.” — G. K. CHESTERTON

Empire (The Spanish)

“It is fashionable to play down the violence of the Aztecs, and even to cast doubt on the mass human sacrifices that took place in the capital, Tenochtitlan, the modern Mexico City. It is as if the devious and violent behaviour of the Spanish conqueror Hernàn Cortés must mean that the Aztecs were peace-loving folk who liked nothing better than sitting by the fire chewing corn on the cob and drinking spicy hot chocolate, while telling funny stories about kindly gods who for their part, drank human blood.” – DAVID ABULAFIA

 

Encryption

“The mistake that most people made when they wanted to stop someone from seeing material was to encrypt it, which meant that a person like me knew exactly where to look.” – TERRY HAYES (In his magisterial “I Am Pilgrim”)

 

“Ends justifying means”

“If the end doesn't justify the means, what does?” – ROBERT MOSES

 

“Some ends justify some means.” – WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.

 

Enemies

"You have no enemies, you say? Alas, my friend, the boast is poor. He who has mingled in the fray of duty that the brave endure, must have made foes. If you have none, small is the work that you have done. You've hit no traitor on the hip. You've dashed no cup from perjured lip. You've never turned the wrong to right. You've been a coward to the fight." -- CHARLES MACKAY (Scottish man of letters, author of "The Madness of Crowds", 1814-1889)

“I’ve got all the right enemies.” – JESSE HELMS

 

“It's important to have enemies, because everything depends on the kind of enemies you have.” – NORMAN PODHORETZ

 

“You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

 

“I hate the sound of an AK-47. It's only the bad guys that use them. If you hear one, you are already too close.” – JANINE DI GIOVANNI (the intrepid and semi-foxy war correspondent who is, surprisingly, not Italian but rather American, and even more surprisingly, not a lefty.)

 

“May we always be happy, and may our enemies always know it.” – SARAH PALIN

 

“Sometimes your enemy's enemy is even worse than him.” – HUGO RIFKIND

"Sometimes your enemy's enemy... is also still your enemy." — JACK JOLIS

“Enemies are more honorable than friends. Friends can be bought (or rented), but enemies must be earned.” – JACK JOLIS

 

“Judge a man by his enemies, rather than his friends: Friends can be bought (or rented), but enemies must be earned.” – JACK JOLIS

 

"Judge a man by his enemies, who must be earned. Friends can be bought." -- JACK JOLIS (I don't actually remember coining this, but my daughter Annie swears I did – but as far as I'm  concerned you can attribute it to her, as she actually used it – in a “Tweet”)

 

"Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate." -- MICHAEL GOVE (The only really good guy in the then, nominally "Conservative" government of Great Britain, who got shitcanned as Secretary of State For Education in July 2014)

 

"Tell me who your enemy is, and I will tell you who you are."-- CARL SCHMIDTT (Twentieth Century German “jurist” and political theorist . Also, a Nazi philosopher. Plus the man has two tt's in his name...)

 

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

 

"Many enemies, much honor." -- SIGMUND FREUD


 “You can tell a man’s vices by his friends, his virtues by his enemies.” – BEN DOMENECH (the publisher of THE FEDERALIST)

 

"A man who has no enemies is probably not a very good man." - JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA (the greatest jurist of our time. My man Kurt Schlichter has commented that his death, on 13 Feb 2016 will be seen as the event that set off the Second American Civil War....)

 

“You bury a friend – that gives you an enemy.” – DENIS JOHNSON

 

“Catholics must pray for their enemies, but they also have to be aware they have them [and] the duty to fight them.”-- JOHN O'SULLIVAN

 

"If there is an enemy, it is better to know who he is." -- WALKER PERCY    (this seems self-evident, but I make allowances for my man Squire Percy....)

"Not to know the name of the enemy is already to have been killed by him." -- WALKER PERCY    (he certainly has something about knowing the damn enemy, doesn't he...)

“Show me your enemies and I’ll tell you what you are.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS (ripping off Herr Schmidtt)

 

"Enemies notice more than friends." -- PETER JONES (The resident “classics” expert at the UK SPECTATOR)

 

"If you want to be treated kindly by history, it's helpful to choose the right friends, but crucial to choose the right enemies." -- STEVE CHAPMAN     (a columnist for the CHICAGO TRIBUNE, in the Amspec, 2006)                    

                                                                                                                                                                                      

"There is nothing like a shared enemy to foster friendship." -- HARRY MOUNT

 

“More enemies, more honor.” – ROBERT HARRIS (the novelist, in 1998)

 

Energy (and “Alternate energy” and “Renewable energy”)

"I think the cost of energy will come down when we make this transition to renewable energy." – AL GORE (I was sorely tempted to file this under “Lying”)

 

"'Alternative energy' is just that, an alternative to energy.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE (one of the more perspicacious young fogies over at the UK SPECTATOR, and the author of “Welcome to Obamaland” and, most recently, “Watermelons” – green on the outside; red on the inside)

 

“Talk to engineers about energy problems and they come up with technical fixes; talk to economists and it's all about bribing people.” – SIR CHRISTOPHER LLEWELLYN SMITH (A big deal physicist and Provost of University College London)

 

“The hills and dales of Britain are being forested with white satanic mills, and yet the total contribution of wind power is still only about 0.4 per cent of Britain's needs. Wave power, solar power, biomass – their collective oomph wouldn't pull the skin off a rice pudding.” – BORIS JOHNSON (Pre-Prime Minister, in 2013. He's been mau-maued by the econazis into retracting that comment since becoming Prime Minister, but ol' BoJo had it right the first time.)

 

“Whenever I try to think of an industry that's worse than wind-farms I keep getting unstuck. At least land-mines serve a useful purpose for force protection; at least Albanian prostitutes make a few men very happy. Wind, on the other hand, is a business entirely dependent on junk science, compulsory government levies and crony capitalist favoritism which produces nothing of real value. It is intrinsically corrupt.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

 

"110 meter-high wind turbines blight the unspoilt landscape for miles around, to the benefit of absolutely no one save the usual kind of rent-seeking spivs who grow rich and fat on this disgusting, taxpayer-subsidized Potemkin industry -- a veritably bestiary of chancers, second-raters, halfwits, eco-fascist ideologues and control freaks." -- JAMES DELINGPOLE

 

“There’s a big difference between energy independence and energy security.” – REX TILLERSON (Trump’s first Secretary of State may have been a dud in that job, but he knows his oil and energy.)

"The myth of global warming, which even if true, would call for nuclear energy, not making gasoline more expensive." -- ROY CAMERON

"The powerful like to tell us to use less power." -- LARA PRENDERGAST


“When it comes to energy, more is more.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON (on 11 May 2021)

"It’s fine to want to transition away from fossil fuels, but if you won’t include nuclear energy in your strategy, you’re wish-casting." -- JONAH GOLDBERG (in July 2022) 

"Any environmental or energy proposal that doesn't include nuclear at or near its top can -- and indeed must -- be dismissed as at best unserious and at worst part of the Cultural Marxist plague." -- JACK JOLIS

“Solar and wind are like eating celery. You expend more energy eating celery than you get from the celery. You expend more energy on green (make, operate, dispose) than you will ever get back.” – C. DENNIS PEEK (my Twoot pal who is an engineer by profession and knows whereof he speaks.)

 

              

Engagement

“Being engaged is like driving with one foot on the accelerator and the other foot on the brake pedal.”  –   FRANK MUIR

 

Engineering

“An engineer is a man who can do for ten shillings what any fool can do for a pound.” – NEVIL SHUTE (the great English novelist. If it weren’t for his “On The Beach” he’d be totally forgotten, as he was absolutely terrific. His “In the Wet” is a stone masterpiece.)

“Engineering or technology is the making of things that did not previously exist, whereas science is the discovering of things that have long existed.” -- DAVID P. BILLINGTON (who died in 2018, was an author and Prof. of engineering at Princeton) 

England

“Since moving to London, my romantic life has been characterized by last-minute text messages, incomprehensible drunkards, first-date coke-bingers and split bar tabs. I quickly learnt (sic) that if you let an English man pay, you’ll have to listen to him whine about it later.” – LEAH McLAREN      (an attractive Canadian author and newspaper columnist, in about 2000)                    

 

“The key to understanding the English man is the fact that he cannot go to bed with a woman without first getting drunk.” – LEAH McLAREN

 

“Self-mockery remains an intrinsic element of Englishness. The Englishman, unlike Queen Victoria, is always prepared to be amused. His characteristic response to the unbearable is to make a joke of it. This chronic lack of seriousness baffles the rest of the world, who see it as a kind of callousness.” – GERMAINE GREER

 

“Our (English) chronically low national productivity extends even to homicide, and our murder rate, though it has increased markedly in the last three decades, is still among the lowest in the world. Naturally, I blame the government.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

“It is when you see the English enjoying themselves that you realize the futility of life. Perhaps I should say trying to enjoy themselves: for in the attempt, rarely successful, they turn either glum or public nuisance.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

"Be like the English. It's not just a question of concealing your emotions. Don't even bother to have any." -- JOE QUEENAN 

“I don’ t think Englishmen are a visually literate race. That applies to everything; architecture, pain ting, clothes, furniture. Perhaps it’s because the visual sense is not innate in the English.” – JEAN MUIR (reputed to be a “fashion designer”. OK….)

 

“My spirit sinks within me when I reflect that William Shakespeare was an Englishman, and belonged to the most repulsive set of people that God in his anger ever created.” – HEINRICH HEINE (1797-1856)

"England is a country which the sea would have swallowed long ago, if the sea had not been afraid of getting indigestion." -- HEINRICH HEINE (The German "public intellectual", 1797-1856) 

“Londoners are noisy as ducks, eternally drunk." – PAUL VERLAINE (1844-1896)

“An Englishman’s mind works best when it is almost too late.” -- EDGAR VINCENT, "LORD D'ABERNON"      (1st Viscount D'Abernon, 1857-1941)

"Everyone in England is in a hurry to drink himself into insensibility." – FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY (channeling his pal, the cocaine addict Verlaine)

 

“They rampaged through the streets breaking windows, kicking in car doors, throwing stones, smashing up shops and, in general, exhibiting that special kind of nationalistic pride with which the English male has so consistently distinguished himself in his global travels.” – BILL BRYSON

 

“The French think of the English as being from another planet, but we don’t hold that against you.” – JEAN-PIERRE DE LUCOVICH

"An Englishman's monument should be the emptty tankard on a flaking window-sill, the single lost glove waving from a railing. An Englishman should depart as he arrived: guiltily, quietly, apologetically, anonymously. An Englishman's memorial isthe completeabsence ofany sign that he was ever there." -- A. A. GILL

"What was it the English saw in grass that eluded everyone else? The rest of Europe looked at grass and saw cheese and butter or a hotel; the English saw England." -- A. A. GILL

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

“The English know that the gods will always laugh at those mad enough to try and impose order and system upon the world. No nation on earth mocks itself so often, so well, so necessarily. Think of Wodehouse, the Goons, Steptoe and Son, Sid James and Hancock, Peter cook, the Pythons, Gervais. Smile, you lucky people: you’re English.” – MATTHEW d’ANCONA (the Editor of the UK SPECTATOR, in 2008)

 

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

 

"The British infantry is the best in Europe. It is good there is so little of it." -- NAPOLEON

 

“In England it is impossible to get anything done immediately and difficult to get anything done at all.” – MICHAEL CAINE

 

“The opening line of my letter from Tony Blair was ‘Dear Keith, you’ve always been one of my heroes…’ England’s in the hands of someone I’m a hero of? It’s frightening. » -- KEITH RICHARDS

 

«England is a country of 60 religions and one sauce.» – VOLTAIRE (well, both have multiplies since the old phart's day, but the ratio remains about the same, I'd say)

 

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

 

« English institutions should not be seen from too close. They are best observed from a distance and through an autumnal haze. » – ROGER SCRUTON

 

“The National Health Service is the closest thing that the English have to a religion.” – NIGEL LAWSON (Mrs. Thatcher's Chancellor of the Exchequer and, incidentally, once the Editor of THE SPECTATOR)

 

«It is, of course, fatal in English public life to make a joke.» – CHARLES MOORE

"An ordinary Englishman. He is a little battered by time. He is not, and never will be, fashionable. He lives in the suburbs. He has a regular job which he tries to do well. He bonked his secretary and then apologized for it like a white man. He has little interest in events over which he has no influence. He rarely travels abroad. He has no post-colonial guilt; he is proud to be British. He thinks about sex a lot. He is Everyman. He is out there, from Düsseldorf to Kingman, Arizona." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS (the comic novelist) 

«An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.» – GEORGE MIKES (in 1946)

"Have you ever imagined an Englishman with that (upper-class) accent actually in bed? I can't see it myself." -- PETER COOK (in 1946)

“There will never be socialism in England. You are safe so long as the people are devoted to (horse) racing. Here (in Prussia) a gentleman cannot ride down the street without 20 persons saying to each other, 'Why has that fellow a horse and I have not one?' In England the more horses a nobleman has, the more popular he is.” – OTTO VON BISMARK (to his fellow British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli)

 

"Like many Englishmen he cared little for what he ate or drank – a gin and tonic and banana sandwich would suit at any hour of the day." – WILLIAM BOYD

"Chronic social ill-at-easeness being the English middle-class status quo." -- WILLIAM BOYD      (and I should remind American users of this COMPENDIUM that when the English use "middle class", they mean what Americans understand as "upper class"…)

"Brighton functioned as a kind of rackety conscience-free zone for Londoners -- like the Las Vegas of England." -- WILLIAM BOYD 

“I was surprised, when I went to America to work, that the first thing people observed about me was that my way of expressing affection was by insulting people. I didn’t realise that was a uniquely English thing.” – LLOYD EVANS

 

“Englishmen are the only people in the world who boast that they never read novels.” – ELIZABETH JANE HOWARD (Kingsley Amis’  second wife, and a novelist in her own right...)

"Tthe English consider it effeminate to pronounce foreign words correctly." -- GEORGE ORWELL 

"That's one thing the upper class English know is your fucking tailoring. They can spot the cloth and the hand stitching a mile away. And all the time they talk to you they are staring at your lapels. And if they're the wrong lapels they hold it against you like a criminal offence. While they try to figure out what direction is fastest to get away from you." -- J. P. DONLEAVY (born in the Bronx, educated in Ireland, Donleavy actually loved England — well, London, anyway….)

"The day the Englishman can no longer cheat at croquet in his own back garden is the day this creases to be a land fit for heroes." -- SAM LEITH

 

"The English were superior without justification, defiantly monoglot and lived on a gruesom, unvarying diet of overcooked vegetables and bad coffee." -- ORLANDO FIGES (English historian and prof at Birkbeck College)

 

“England is, I believe, the only country in which, during a great war,  eminent men write and speak as if they belonged to the enemy.” – LORD SALISBURY     (Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd marquess of Salisbury)

 

“The English – a race bloated with beef and pudding and ale and indifferent alike to the claims of the spirit and the intellect.” – ANTHONY BURGESS (A native of Birmingham, England)

 

“Every red-blooded Englishman has believed that exercise in the open air is the finest prophylactic against popery, adultery and the fine arts.” – PETER JONES (the UK SPECTATOR’s in-house “classicist”)

 

“The English tourist is always happy abroad as long as the natives are waiters.” – ROBERT MORLEY (the very funny old round English comic actor)

 

“Bishops are a part of English culture, and horses and dogs are a part of English religion.” – T. S. ELIOT (in 1948)

 

"Remember you are an Englishman and you have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life." -- CECIL RHODES (The great imperialist – and Rhodesia’s namesake)

"The English Experience -- long hours spent as babies lying in the rain outside greengrocers' shops have made them tough." -- MALCOLM BRADBURY

"One has this terrible fear of undressing an Englishwoman and finding nothing there at all." -- MALCOLM BRADBURY    (an Englishman. And I must say, my one experience with an Englishwoman was rather the opposite to what he describes here....)

"Thus the English:  a mob of rain-soaked punks who couldn't buy beer when they wanted." -- RICHARD RAYNER (in his 1988 novel "Los Angeles Without A Map")

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

 

English (Anglo)-American Relations

«The Anglo-American relationship has always been hard-headed, not sentimental. American ideas of liberty, order and political representation are merely English ones refined. Serious disagreement between the two countries on any matter is an indication that one of them is reasoning wrongly.» – CHRISTOPHER  CALDWELL

 

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

 

“An Englishman thinks a hundred miles is a long way; an American thinks a hundred years is a long time” – DIANA GABALDON (in her book “Drums Of Autumn”)

 

“I was surprised, when I went to America to work, that the first thing people observed about me was that my way of expressing affection was by insulting people. I didn’t realise that was a uniquely English thing.” – LLOYD EVANS

 

“To Americans English manners are far more frightening than none at all.” – RANDALL JARRELL

“Americans send their celebrities to England and the Brits make them jokes. Brits send us their jokes and we make them celebrities.” – D. KEITH MANO (Harry and Meghan, anybody?)

 

“American dentists pray for British teeth.” – BERNARD CORNWELL (the author of the “Sharpe” and “Sea Lord” Napoleonic-era novels)  

 

“Americans mumble correct pronunciations while the British clearly articulate faulty ones. The Yankee may mangle the language, but at least he opens his goddamn mouth.” – PETER DEVRIES

"Americans are incurably literal-minded and nearly always assume you mean what you say." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS (the English novelist, who's spent a lot of time in America)

"Englishmen don't commit suicide - they move to the USA." -- IAN HUNTER (The English leader/singer of Mott The Hoople, who's still rocking in his 80s... and who lives in New Milford, Connecticut)

"In American journalism, to be right -- or, at any rate, to argue for the position that the right people consider to be reasonable at the time -- is much more important than to be brilliant or entertaining. For American journalists, the cardinal sin is to be wrong. For British journalists, the cardinal sin is to be boring." -- YASCHA MOUNK     (German-American political scientist, a prof at  John Hopkins' SAIS)


 “I’ve warned in the past about the dangers inherent in an American trying to out-thank-you an English person. The exchange of thank-you’s goes on and on, and the American may see no way to end it except to take out a semi-automatic rifle and shoot the English person.” – CALVIN TRILLIN

"American biscuits are quadruple the size of British ones and are useful for ballast." -- DAVID HEMPLEMAN -ADAMS      (A British explorer, writing about hot-air ballooning, which explains the "ballast" -- and "biscuits" was the giveaway that he's a Brit) 

English (Anglo) – French Relationship

“For an Englishman there is always the fear that the French will win in the end.” – ROBERT MORLEY (the very funny, portly, actor)

 

“British expats in France maintain that a French man and an English woman might work, but rarely the other way around.” – JEREMY CLARKE

 

“The French, unlike the English, do not suffer from guilt about their colonial past.” – RICHARD WEST

"England is a republican monarchy whereas France is a monarchical republic." -- ERIC ZEMMOUR 

English Language, the

“When I spoke English badly, people here (in England) never laughed, they always helped. That’s how they’ve persuaded half the world to speak their language.” – IRINA RATUSHINSKAYA (a lovely, brilliant and brave anti-Communist émigré poetess, and, incidentally, a pal of my dad’s…)

 

“Foreigners don't learn English to talk to us – they learn it to talk to each other.” – RORY SUTHERLAND (the amiable bloke who writes the “Wiki Man” column at the UK SPECTATOR)

 

“If anyone approaches you in old British territory speaking a totally unintelligible tongue of which even the basic sounds are quite unfamiliar, it is probably English.” – NIGEL BARLEY

 

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

 

“Americans mumble correct pronunciations while the British clearly articulate faulty ones. The Yankee may mangle the language, but at least he opens his goddamn mouth.” – PETER DEVRIES

"I frequent a place called the Olde Towne Taverne, though I usually avoid places with that many silent 'e's'. I think the government should allocate one thousand silent 'e's' to New England and Long Island, and when they're used up, no one can have any more." -- NELSON DEMILLE

 

“English is the international language of airports, terrorists, graffitists, pornographers, tourist traps, hotel receptionists and head posters, some waiters and fewer taxi drivers.” – KEITH WATERHOUSE (in 1989)

 

“English Lit.”

"The overall effect of making English a university subject had been malign. Has English literature got better or worse since it began to be taught at Oxford in 1894? Worse. And is its being taught at universities part of the reason for this decline? Yes indeed." -- KINGSLEY AMIS

"NEVER PURSUE LITERATURE AS A TRADE" -- SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE     (1772-1834, and the ALL CAPS are his...) 

Enlightenment, The

"The 'Enlightenment' was a conspiracy of dead white men in periwigs to provide the intellectual foundation for Western imperialism." -- ERIC HOBSBAWM (A notorious English Stalinist "historian" -- more like propagandist)

Enthusiasm

“Enthusiasm is a form of madness.” – SAMUEL JOHNSON

 

“You will be fired with enthusiasm, or you will be fired with enthusiasm!” – VINCE LOMBARDI

 

“Those who hated it hated it worse than the Devil; while those who loved it loved it not more than their dinner.” – LUCIUS HENRY CARY, 3rd LORD FALKLAND (1610-1643. Speaking of some law he'd proposed and which sank like a stone. Incidentally, this   was the same fella who uttered one of the great canonical underpinnings of conservatism,“When it      is not necessary to make a decision, it is necessary not to make a decision.”, and I must say, he was pretty young to have authored two such cool quotes....)

 

“Entitlements”

"One of the consequences of such notions as ‘entitlements’ is that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that society owes them something, apparently just for being nice enough to grace us with their presence." – THOMAS SOWELL

 

“History shows us that government entitlements never crumble under their own weight. Rather, countries crumble under the weight of those entitlements.” – ERICK ERICKSON

 

 “You are either American or you aren’t. Living here is the only entitlement you need.” – ROGER AILES (the legendary boss of the FOX TV network)

 

“The worst word in the lexicon of government is 'Entitlements'. All anyone is entitled to is Air & Opportunity. The rest you have to earn.” – JIM HANSON (An ex-Green Bert and President of something called the “Securities and Studies Group”)

"Only war, or complete economic collapse, induces in a people the willingness to think again about what they're entitled to." -- MATTHEW PARRIS 

 "The best way to help your neighbor is not to live off your neighbor." -- ALFONZO RACHEL (a black conservative evangelist on YouTube and videos)

 

Entrepreneurs (and Entrepreneurship)

“Entrepreneurship is the launching of surprises. The process of wealth creation is offensive to levelers and planners because it yields mountains of new wealth in ways that could not possibly be planned. But unpredictability is fundamental to free human enterprise.” – GEORGE GILDER

Environmentalism, (-ists)

“I do my best to keep up with environmentalism, a field that has attracted a disproportionate share of lunatics.” – TOM BETHELL

 

“So many ecological crusaders remind me of Christian Scientists: you can’t doubt the sincerity of their faith, but an awful lot of people die as a result of it.” – MICHAEL VESTEY (an English radio-critic and journalist)

 

“Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

 

“Schneider (?) has made a career of telling the public that the climate is going to change drastically any time now, and indeed every spring and fall he’s been right.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

 

“Environmentalism is pretentious irrationality, a luxury of wealthy people and wealthy countries. It’s expensive to be an environmentalist. If you’re in Kenya you can’t afford it; you strip the hillside in order to keep warm in the winter.” – GEORGE GILDER

 

“Eco-fundamentalism is probably the greatest threat to our way of life after Islamism, and what’s so terrifying is the way that, more and more, its shrill and hysterical claims are passing unchallenged by a gullible public, bandwagon-jumping politicians, and a compliant media.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

 

“In the name of averting disaster, greens have been pushing the very policies most likely to cause it.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

 

“What fascinates me far more is the way the faddish preoccupations of a few green cultists have somehow come to dominate our entire culture, corrupting the intellectual current, suborning institutions, crushing dissent – much as Marxist, fascist and Nazi ideologies did in the 20th century, only with rather more widespread success.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

 

"110 meter-high wind turbines blight the unspoilt landscape for miles around, to the benefit of absolutely no one save the usual kind of rent-seeking spivs who grow rich and fat on this disgusting, taxpayer-subsidized Potemkin industry -- a veritably bestiary of chancers, second-raters, halfwits, eco-fascist ideologues and control freaks." -- JAMES DELINGPOLE

 

“Scratch any greenie and what you’ll invariably find underneath is just another whiny, misanthropic, anti-capitalist Malthusian who sees the natural world less as a source of joy and wonder than as an excuse to remind humans what a terrible, destructive blight on the planet we all are.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

 

“Environmentalists are the crazed, angry ex-wives of the planet: You can give them all the money you want, but you can’t shut them up.” – DENIS BOYLES (author of “Vile France”)

"Environmentalism is at root an upper class phenomenon." -- WILLIAM TUCKER (The noted American author and journalist, in 2006. And, true as this is, the same could be said about Leftism in general.) 

“The great danger of confronting peak oil and global warming isn’t that we will sit on our collective asses and do nothing while civilization collapses, but that we will plunge after ‘solutions’ that will make our problems even worse.” – JEFF GOODELL (writing in ROLLING STONE, of all places, on the great Ethanol boondoggle/scam/outrage.)

 

“The open socialist attack on property has now been replaced by an indirect ware in the name of the environment  But a deeply rooted antagonism to private property has remained a constant throughout.” – TOM BETHELL

 

“Who are the ‘greens’? They are invariably middle-class, though a few are scions of the plutocracy, and have inherited money which they spend lavishly to promote their dotty theories. I can’t think of one prominent green who has actually worked in commercial agriculture or industry. Their spheres are teaching, the media, bureaucracy, and it takes courage to stand up to them.” – PAUL JOHNSON

 

“The greens are more than a lobby since they now dictate the conventional wisdom in many areas, and are powerful in both the main parties, which have adopted their program. They have probably done more positive harm, over the years, than any other lobby in our history, and their latest ‘triumph’, the adoption of bio-energy schemes, financed by the taxpayer, in large parts of the world, is the principal reason why there is now a world shortage of food, with rising prices of basic commodities like rice. The poorest people, of course, are the chief victims, as always happens when a lobby or interest becomes too strong.” – PAUL JOHNSON

 

“Being an environmentalist, like being Catholic, is compatible with a limitless degree of hypocrisy.” – TOBY YOUNG

"The Left have a love affair with trees that knows no bounds. The Left have never been able to grasp that a tree is something that needs maintenance, and not just in order to look nice, but to thrive. Green is not what nature looks like if you leave it to nature. Green is not what nature looks like if you leave it to Lefties." -- MELISSA KITE

"We used to call these humbling outbreaks of arbitrary havoc 'natural disasters', but the expression is out of fashion now that every fit the planet throws is all our fault. A while back, the media were obliged to dredge up some well-funded activist 'expert' to justify this claim, but not any more. Newscasters are safe in their surety that no one will ever demand evidence of a causal link between a drought in the western US and petrol-fueled Land Rovers in Sussex." -- LIONEL SHRIVER (in June 2023)

"Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists." – MICHAEL CRICHTON

 

"The purpose of the environmental movement is not to save the fucking environment. Its purpose is to demonstrate the crimes and failures of capitalism." – CHARLES McCARRY

 

“The environment has become a catchment for all malcontents, from political gangsters and nihilists to sensible dissenters from the vulgarity of the consumer economy, to thoughtful conservationists with their binoculars and butterfly nets, to the ubiquitous ‘useful idiots’ of obstructionism, to the riff-raff of hooligans, charlatans and lunatics that now appear at all international meetings.” – CONRAD BLACK

 

"Before the Copenhagen conference, Gordon Brown said that there were only '50 days to save the world'. But the conference failed to agree, the world survived and already the whole venture looks like a satire by Jonathan Swift." -- CHARLES MOORE (Educated at Eton and Cambridge, the ex-editor of the DAILY TELEGRAPH, the SUNDAY TELEGRAPH and the UK SPECTATOR, he's a most extraordinarily lucid and phlegmatic chap.  He wrote this on 9 Jan. 2010)

 

“One of the annoying features of greenery is that it involves rich and powerful people telling poorer, less powerful people to get poorer still.” – CHARLES MOORE

"Net Zero/the Green New Deal is a recipe for mass suicide. Why would anyone vote for something that was going to result in the death of nearly all humans on Earth?. It would basically begin a process of cannibalisation." -- DR. PATRICK MOORE   (the GREENPEACE co-founder)

"Any environmental or energy proposal that doesn't include nuclear at or near its top can -- and indeed must -- be dismissed as at best unserious and at worst part of the Cultural Marxist ‘green’ death sentence." -- JACK JOLIS 

“It is an odd fact that Greens can be extremely hostile to the natural world when it gets in their way.” – CHARLES MOORE

"Frightened rich men with uneasy consciences who, in the Middle Ages, would have endowed monasteries, today spend fortunes on sacrifices to the goddess Gaia." -- CHARLES MOORE (in June 2006) 

“Suffering for the environment might be noble. Suffering in silence is unthinkable.” – MATT LABASH

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

“Environmentalism is Big Government on crack: If only we regulate the very heavens, we can reduce costs, eliminate inequalities in weather patterns, provide access to affordable reliable climate for all, and make pre-existing conditions a thing of the past.” – MARK STEYN

“Our elites live in big cities and are far removed from the fields. Whether it’s … the head of the Sierra Club or the head of Greenpeace, they’ve never been hungry.” – NORMAN BORLAUG      (the father of the “Green Revolution”)                                         

 

“Curiously, the people who call most strenuously for preservation of the environment are the same people who weep most copiously for starving mouths.” – JOHN GREENWAY (my old pal, the late renegade anthropology prof at the University of Colorado)

 

“The entire ecology movement is something cooked up by a passel of Marxist cranks who want us to go back to squatting in the dust and living on lentils.” – JAMES LILEKS (in 1991)

 

"You can build windmills with steel, but you can't build steel with windmills." -- CHRIS HORNER (American energy expert)

 

"The creation of wealth is not remotely a liberal goal. Rather than create it, intellectuals prefer to redistribute it, to allocate scarcity. Earth Day in 1970 was a turning point. The environmental movement encouraged liberals to impose scarcity on the lower orders." -- TOM BETHELL

 

"There's a concept in economics called the 'marginal value of wealth'. It means that the wealthier you become, the less each additional dollar means to you. That's why we have environmentalism -- because some people have grown so affluent that they really aren't much interested in further economic development." -- WILLIAM TUCKER

 

“You can give your heart to Gaia, but your ass still belongs to supply and demand.”– KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“History demonstrates that there is a vital link between industrialization, wealth and environmentalism. Only wealthy societies practice environmental protection on a significant scale.” – PATRICK ALLITT (In his book “A Climate Of Crisis”)

 

“Environmentalism is a faith without joy, a religion lacking hope of redemption.” – ROBERT MARANTO (In the Washington Examiner, April 2015)

 

“We get a tax credit if we build wind farms. That's the only reason to build them.” – WARREN BUFFETT

 

“Like the Viet Minh or the Taleban, the environmental movement has become hugely skilled in the art of assymmetric warfare. The number of true believers is much smaller than you'd think – but they've managed in recent years to punch massively above their weight by infiltrating all the key positions of influence and by terrorising those who disagree with them.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

 

"Almost all the major environmental problems in the world right now are the result or environmental policy." -- JAMES DELINGPOLE

 

"Environmental policy becomes so focused on one specific, fashionable problem that no one notices that the proposed solutions are, in other ways, making matters worse." -- ROSS CLARK (in the SPECTATOR, UK)

 

"Policymaking does not always follow logic. On the environment in particular it tends to dart between fashionable issues, ignoring complexities." -- ROSS CLARK

 

"Earth Day is about being scolded by celebrities. There's no point in saving the planet if nobody sees you doing it." -- JIM TREACHER       (of PJMedia.)

"An Evangelical who thinks the world is ending is called a religious fanatic; a liberal who thinks so is called an environmentalist." -- DENNIS PRAGER 

“The paradox at the heart of eco-fundamentalism: man mustn’t behave like a beast, but he mustn’t assume he’s any better than one either.” – MARY WAKEFIELD

 

“The whole business is eerily religious in feel. Back in the 15th century, the question was : Do you believe in Christ? It was required in Spain by the Inquisition that the answer should be affirmative. It is required today to believe that carbon-dioxide emissions threaten the ecological balance.” – WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR. (in 2007)

 

“Eco-signalling is becoming a luxury lifestyle choice, an economic affectation, Western women with money to burn – or should that be to compost.” – LAURA FREEMAN (in the SPECCIE, March 2020)

 "...he's the archetypal Marxist bore who puts his political dreams above human life. These days he'd be blocking ambulances on bridges to hinder oil production." -- LLOYD EVANS

"A startling revelation is that most climate activists are Marxists masquerading as environmentalists." -- CHRIS MARTZ      (Climatologist and climate-blogger, in June 2024)

Environmentalism — “Net Zero”

"Net-Zero laws are beginning to look like a form of economic self-sacrifice." -- ROSS CLARK (the author of "The Denial -- a satirical novel of climate change", in May 2023)

"Net Zero/the Green New Deal is a recipe for mass suicide. Why would anyone vote for something that was going to result in the death of nearly all humans on Earth?. It would basically begin a process of cannibalisation." -- DR. PATRICK MOORE   (the GREENPEACE co-founder)

"...he's the archetypal Marxist bore who puts his political dreams above human life. These days he'd be blocking ambulances on bridges to hinder oil production." -- LLOYD EVANS

Envy                                                                                                                                 

“One may admit to pride, avarice, lust, anger, gluttony, and laziness, and one may even boast of them, there is only one capital sin no one admits to: envy. ... Its symbol ought to be a mask.” – GONZALO FERNANDEZ DE LA MORA      (in his book “Egalitarian Envy”)

“Envy, the most pathetic of the seven deadly sins, is perhaps the most consequential.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“The politics of envy are always poisonous. They are what make it possible to define compassion as wanting to take someone else's money and greed as wanting to keep your own. Pull away the mask of Obama's ‘Hope’ and you find underneath it the slithering sheen of envy.” –JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“Private property is divisive. It arouses envy, and envy is a hugely powerful emotion, a driver of all manner of political evils.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“No American is ever made better off by pulling a fellow American down” – JOHN F. KENNEDY

 

“Yes, envy is one of the seven deadly sins, although I recognize only two as mortal ones, that and avarice.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

"Envy is a sin but it is the strongest of emotions." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

“Apart from being one of the seven deadly sins, envy is what splits nations, races and people apart.” – TAKI THEODOCOUROPULOS               

 

“Envy is the cancer that kills all republics.” – MICHAEL NOVAK

 

“Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.” – JOSEPH EPSTEIN (The author of a 2003 book called, fittingly enough, “Envy”)

 

“Free-enterprise so-called ‘greed’ created modern prosperity, while Leftist envy never created anything except festering mountains of misery.” – JACK JOLIS

 

“Whole societies, hobbled by envy, rejected innovation, and prosperity, preferring the arrested development of all to the advancement of the few.” – HELMUT SCHOECK (in his book “Envy: A Theory Of Social Behavior”)

 

“In primitive societies, no one dares to show anything that might lead people to think he was better off. Innovations are unlikely. Agricultural methods remain traditional and primitive, to the detriment of the whole village, because every deviation from previous practice comes up against the limitations set by envy.” – HELMUT SCHOEK

 

"Envy is above all a phenomenon of social proximity. Envy is always between neighbors. The envious man thinks that if his neighbor breaks his leg, he will be able to walk better himself." -- HELMUT SCHOECK

"The world is not driven by greed, it’s driven by envy." -- CHARLIE MUNGER (the "billionaire investor") 

"Why do we we get more exercised about CEOs' pay than about, say, actors' pay? The only salaries that cost us anything are those in the public sector, but we're oddly quiet about them." -- DANIEL HANNAN

 

“Blame is envy’s bad-seed baby. It’s trying to win by pretending to lose. And since we’re talking about bad seeds, victimhood is envy’s sibling.” – BRIAN T. ALLEN (an art historian)

 

“Envy and blame are states of being but also states of mind. When people don’t feel free and independent, envy and blame rear their ugly heads and toss their curls.” – BRIAN T. ALLEN

 

"So we come down to a basic struggle in human nature — between envy and ambition. We’ll do well if we can stick with envy as the lesser motivator and let ambition triumph." -- BEN STEIN

 

"Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, 'social justice'." -- THOMAS SOWELL

 

"We live in an age of envy. People don’t so much want more money for themselves as they want to take it away from those with more. Greed is bad enough, eating away at a person’s soul, but envy is far worse because it destroys not only individuals, but also communities.” -- DOUG BANDOW (reviewing "The Politics Of envy", in about 1994)

 

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

"Probably envy is the strongest human urge." -- C. BOYDEN GRAY (Lawyer and White House Counsel under Poppy Bush -- and it's good to remember that Envy, one of the three elements of Leftism, along with Wishful Thinking and Ruthless Bossiness, is one of the Seven Deadly Sins.)   

"In Washington, 'very rich' means just above the level a top-notch journalist." -- MEGAN MCARDLE     (the non-Leftist American journalist)     

 

E.P.A. (The)

“The EPA tries to ban basically everything but prune juice.” – LOU DOLINAR (a reporter/columnist for NEWSDAY)

 

“The EPA wants to control all the water on Earth, including your tears.” – LYNN RILEY (a lady on the twoot in the western USA)

 

Epochs

“No one in Paris ever said to one another, in 1895 or 1900, ‘We’re living in the Belle Epoque, better make the most of it’.” – JULIAN BARNES

 

Equality, (Egalitarianism)

“No one must put himself forward. Everyone must be the same and have the same. Social justice means we deny ourselves many things so that others may have to do without them too.” – SIGMUND FREUD (He said this approvingly, and quite apart from all the other criticism this moral idiocy fairly invites, one is tempted to wonder what, exactly, were the “many things” that old Siggie denied   himself so that “others could do without them too”. Which, apart from anything else, doesn’t even make sense, qua sense…)

 

“Or do we face a world in which some arrive in the world with saddles on their backs and others with boots and spurs?” – THOMAS JEFFERSON (Equality of opportunity. From the mouth of the horse that invented the thing…)

 

“All men are created equal but differ greatly in the sequel.” – FISHER AMES (one of the Founding Fathers. From Mass.)

 

“Equality perfected is a runaway steamroller that leaves every human complication in its path, every bemusing protuberance of character, flattened like an empty beer can.” – ALGIS VALIUNAS

 

“It is a melancholy fact which exponents of democracy must face that, while all men may be on a level in the eyes of the state, they will continue in fact to be preposterously unequal.” – JOHN BUCHAN

 

“There is a built-in tension between the ideal of equality of condition and the ideal of democracy. If equality is the ultimate and most profound political good, there is really very little to vote about.” – JUDGE ROBERT BORK

 

“Because of the inefficiency the effort to achieve equality imposes, it may, as in Communist countries, result in everybody having less, but what there is will still be distributed unequally” – JUDGE ROBERT BORK.

 

A Modern society whose predominant value is equality necessarily displays three related symptoms: a strong sense of guilt; a consequent feeling of personal insecurity; and, as a direct result of the first two, the spread of an oppressive and excessive legalism throughout the social body.” – JUDGE ROBERT BORK

 

“When inequality of conditions is the common law of society, the most marked inequalities do not strike the eye; when everything is nearly on the same level, the slightest are marked enough to hurt it. Hence the desire of equality always becomes more insatiable in proportion as equality is more complete.” – ALEXIS DE  TOQUEVILLE

 

"While democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." -- ALEXIS DE TOQUEVILLE

 

“Much better is this great irregularity than universal squalor. Without wealth there can be no Maecenas. The 'good old times' were not good old times.'" -- ANDREW CARNEGIE

“Equality is nowhere laid down as a governing principle of the institutions of the United States, neither the word, nor any inference that can be fairly deduced from its meaning, occurring in the constitution. Equality of condition is no where mentioned, all political economists knowing that it is unattainable, if, indeed, it be desirable. Desirable in practice, it can hardly be, since the result would be to force all down to the level of the lowest. The celebrated proposition contained in the declaration of independence is not to be understood literally. All men are not ‘created equal’, in a physical, or even in a moral sense, unless we limit the signification to one of political rights. This much is true, since human institutions are a human invention, with which nature has had no connection.” – JAMES FENIMORE COOPER

"You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it." – ADRIAN ROGERS     (the American conservative Baptist preacher)                                                                     

“Experience shows us that the denial of this right, or its limitation in the name of an alleged 'equality' of everyone in society, diminishes, or in practice absolutely destroys the  spirit of initiative, that is to say the creative  subjectivity of the citizen. As a consequence, there arises, not so much a true equality as a 'leveling down'. In the place of creative initiative there appears passivity, dependence and submission in the bureaucratic apparatus which puts everyone in a position of almost absolute dependence.” – POPE JOHN PAUL II      (Il Papa ilo Supply-Sider – quien sabeva?)                                                                                         

“Our public culture prefers services which are equal and bad to ones which are less equal, but better for all. It is not clear that this is what people themselves prefer.” – CHARLES MOORE

“Visible difference is a spur to improvement.” – CHARLES MOORE

“You can make a society twice as wealthy, but you can’t make everyone twice as wealthy as everyone else.” – RICH LOWRY

 

"Taxes create equality by discouraging the rich from earning income. The nation is not enriched when this happens"- BRUCE BARTLETT

"Egalitarianism means stifling excellence in support of mediocrity." -- DANNY DE BELDER (my grate Flemish pal)

  

“Liberals reject policies that foster unfettered equal opportunity because they invariably produce unequal results, being that human beings have different talents, capabilities, work ethic, and luck.” – ERICK ERICKSON (the “RedState” blogger)

 

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

 

“'All men are created equal says the American Declaration of Independence. 'All men shall be kept equal' say the Socialists.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

 

“I have come to see that disparity is inevitable – that there will always be rich and poor – but that disparity need be neither permanent nor systemic, and that programs designed to impose equality of result, though perhaps beautiful in prospect, have weakened every society in which they have been practiced, and lead, eventually, to dictatorship and tyranny.” – DAVID MAMET

 

"A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both." – MILTON FRIEDMAN

 

“And I'm rather sick of the great secular dominion of liberation and equality which reduces, when you think about it, to putting system over people and producing large piles of corpses.” – MALCOLM BRADBURY (The late comic English novelist, author of, among others, “The History Man”)

 

“Every soul deserves a shot at a Cadillac, but not everyone should be guaranteed a Cadillac… that way lie the tumbrels and the guillotine.” – BEN STEIN

 

“It's great to talk about equality, but hardly any of us really wants to be just 'equal'.” – BEN STEIN

 

“'Equality' is a code word for 'take away something from someone else and give it to me'.” – BEN STEIN

 

“The United States is different fundamentally from Europe – historically, culturally and politically. That we put much more emphasis on the individual, on liberty versus equality. There is a reason that in the New York Harbor there's a Statue of Liberty – it's not the Statue of Equality.” – CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

 

“The true democrat wishes to share the great works of culture with all who are able to appreciate them; the egalitarian, recognizing that genuine excellence is rare, declares greatness a fraud and sets about obliterating distinctions.” – ROGER KIMBALL

 

“The pursuit of equality itself is a mirage. Let our children grow tall, and some taller than others if they have the ability in them to do so.” -- MARGARET THATCHER

“People in Manhattan tell me passionately how America is so bad. So I asked them, ‘what is so bad about America that you hate so much?’ ‘We have inequality.’ The enemy is poverty, not inequality.” – YEONMI PARK (the North Korean defector young lady)

"Inequality is a sign of progress. Inequality means you can rise." -- YEONMI PARK

“Human differences are so profound, it is neither possible nor desirable to eliminate all inequalities, hierarchies and distinctions.” -- JAMES BURNHAM

 

“To defend others’ millions is to protect my own hundreds.” – JOHN CHAMBERLAIN (20thcentury American historian, columnist and conservative journalist. This is one of my favorite of all quotes in this Compendium, and I tried to use it – to little, I’m sure, effect – when I first went to the then-recently un-communized Russia in Feb. of ‘92.)

 

“There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal.” -- FRIEDRICH A. HAYEK

 

“America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the gum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.” -- ANDY WARHOL

 

"Egalitarianism is utterly evil. It's contra Darwin." -- JAMES LOVELOCK  (the chastened "godfather" of the green movement and inventor of "Gaia", to James Delingpole, as reported in the  9 Sept. 2017 SPECCIE)  

 

"The Declaration doesn't say that we're all equal, it says we are all created equal." -- AMBASSADOR ALAN KEYES

"A society that obsesses over equality sooner or later becomes a society of looters and falls apart." -- JAVIER MILEI (President-elect of Argentina, in Nov. '23)
 

"The only way to achieve economic ‘equality’ is by coercively imposing restraints and limitations. There simply is no other way." -- JACK JOLIS

 

“Equality of opportunity is our concern -- but equality of outcomes is your problem.” -- JACK JOLIS

 

"As soon as there is freedom, there is disparity." -- DENNIS PRAGER

 "American society is based on  the principle of 'benevolent inequality', an inequality that is passionate, creative, dynamic. Equality is static; it squelches all hope for a new and different life. In the Soviet Union you are doomed to the life of a state employee, and unless you turn thief, nothing in your life will change. After all, everyone is equal (except, of course, for those who are more equal). In America, the land of inequality, your chance -- the chance for your to change your life -- is waiting for you somewhere in  the chaos of economic freedom. You may never find it, but the fact that it  is there gives your life an entirely different perspective." -- VASSILY AKSYONOV (in 1985)

"In their campaigning zeal, egalitarians have always hated learning since real learning discriminates, and the result is a deadly weapon in the battle against knowledge." -- ROGER SCRUTON 

“Equity is not the same as equality of opportunity. In fact, it inevitably means the unequal, disparate treatment of individuals based on their category membership in order to ensure equality of outcome. Potentially restricting the high achievements of some to ensure the representation of others who happen to be from minority backgrounds is not only deeply unjust, but also an insanity that will end up stifling creativity.” – THOMAS CLEMENTS (An English writer – author of “The Autistic Buddha”)

 

"We are born equal but different." -- ROD LIDDLE

 

“I regard inequality as an inevitable by-product of limited government, which history teaches us is preferable to excessive state power.” – TOBY YOUNG

 

“A great deal of effort to reduce inequality is wasted because it merely provides people with more means to compete for the same limited things.” – JOSEPH FISHKIN (described by Rory Sutherland, who was quoting him, as a “legal academic”)

 

“Just as there’s no point widening a road between junction 8 and 9 if there’s always a traffic jam at junction 10, there’s little value in giving every child the ‘opportunity’ to study biology when the medical authorities artificially limits the number of medical school places.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“Civil rights used to be about treating everyone the same. But today some people are so used to special treatment that equal treatment is considered to be discrimination.” ~THOMAS SOWELL

"Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days." -- THOMAS SOWELL 

"Those who attempt to level never equalize." -- EDMUND BURKE

 

"You couldn't help but be struck by that besetting embarrassment -- embarrassing for the Revolution and for all utopian dreams, including yours: human inequality." -- MARTIN AMIS

 

«Equality is a state of mind.» – JOHN UPDIKE

 

«Our equality is a matter of rights, not circumstances.» – JOHN UPDIKE

 

«It’s hard, though, to vacation with out hierarchy. Someone is the best tennis player, the best story teller, the best gossip, has the best body, gets along best.» – STEPHANIE BROWN (apparently a poet, and the above was, apparently, a poem. Or part of one.)

 

“Equality means no special breaks. Equality means treating people the same.” – MICHAEL CRICHTON

 

"Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal; if they are equal, they are not free." -- ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN

"Prosperity, the Left screams, creates inequality, and indeed it does; another name for inequality being prosperity." -- DAVID MAMET

“Nothing living wants equality, not even the people who burn down their squalid neighborhoods in struggling for their civil riots. Contending organism want clear superiority. Failing that, they will accept in most cases clear inferiority. Equality is an expedience tolerable only for the briefest time.” --PROF. JOHN GREENWAY (the late, great “Gonzo Anthropologist” from the Univ. of Colorado)

“Equality, Income”

"It is one thing to be against poverty; it is something else to be against inequality. One could end poverty and still have plenty of inequality; one could end inequality by impoverishing everyone." -- ROGER CLEGG (Clegg is the boss of something called The Center For Equal Opportunity, and he served in the Departments of Justice of Reagan and Papa Bush. But I'm not sure he's completely right about ever "ending" poverty -- in a land where everyone has 2 million devalued Yellen$, the man with only 1 million is "poor")

 

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

 

“To say there is less private-sector experience in the Obama administration than in any other of the last century hardly begins to convey the particular pool of smarts on which this president has drawn. Nearly 60 percent of Eisenhower’s cabinet appointments had private-sector; Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes scored well over 50; FDR and Truman smack on 50/50; in Obama’s cabinet, fewer than 10 percent have real-world business experience. None of Obamacare’s begetters have ever created anything – certainly not a dime of real wealth.” – MARK STEYN

 

“If income inequality is the problem, then income equality is the goal. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need, to coin a phrase (or to each according to his or her fanciful desires, if we are to adopt the Sandra Fluke addendum to the original Marx).” – LARRY THORNBERRY   (A writer from Tampa, in the AMSPEC, JAN ’14)

 

“Would you rather live in a 1000 square foot house where everyone else’s was 800, or a 1200 square foot house where everyone else’s was 1400? I sometimes think it’s the most elemental question in politics. Where we stand on equality versus prosperity depends, more than we usually admit, on personality traits rather than logic. We start with an intuitive feel for what makes sense, and we elevate that instinct into a principle.” – DANIEL HANNAN (America's favorite English Conservative member of the European Parliament – not counting Nigel Farage, who's UKIP – in 2014)

 

“To defend others’ millions is to protect my own hundreds.” – JOHN CHAMBERLAIN (20th century American historian, columnist and conservative journalist)

 

“Far from having the 21st-century equivalent of an Edwardian class system, the United States is characterized by a great deal of variation in income: More than half of all adult Americans will be at or near the poverty line at some point over the course of their lives; 73 percent will also find themselves in the top 20 percent, and 39 percent will make it into the top 5 percent for at least one year. Perhaps most remarkable, 12 percent of Americans will be in the top 1 percent for at least one year of their working lives.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal.” – FRIEDRICH HAYEK

 

“There is no hope for a sensible discussion on inequality until we properly distinguish between wealth and income. The idea that you can reduce wealth inequality by taxing income no longer makes sense.” -- RORY SUTHERLAND

 

"A society determined to enforce perfect economic equality has only one choice: to impose uniform poverty." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“Equity”

"The only 'equal outcome' is the grave. And with ‘equity’, you get there quicker." -- JACK JOLIS

"It's impossible to make everyone equally intelligent; but it's quite feasable to force everyone into equal stupidity." -- JACK JOLIS

“These are the only examples of ‘Equality of Outcome’ on earth: 1/ lowest common denominators, 2/ North Korea, and 3/ the grave.” — JACK JOLIS

"Americans are so consumed with 'equity' that our answer to plummeting educational attainment in public schools is to make sure no children can read, write or do math, and we address these incidental shortcomings of perfectly equal students by no longer administering standardized tests; problem solved." -- LIONEL SHRIVER

"Equity means that everybody should end up in the same place."-- KAMALA HARRIS

"Human beings are born with different capacities, if they are born free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free." -- ALEXANDER SOLZEHNITSYN

"Equity is equality without freedom." -- MARK LEVIN (8 March 2023)

E.S.G. ("Environmental-Social-Governance")

"When you hear ESG, think CCP." -- PETER THIEL (Of course, "ESG" is the recent leftist buzz-totalitarianism, and it stands for "Environmental, Social and Governance")

"E-vil S-ocialist G-arbage." -- JAMES A. LINDSAY (the anti-leftist American mathematician, author and hoaxster)

“I am once again reminding you that ESG (including DEI) is designed to prevent American manufacturing from coming back. The purpose is the intentional suiciding of the West while the Global South and China (Belt and Road) rise to global superpower status.” -- JAMES A. LINDSAY

"Communism, or commonly known as DEI, has become the guiding principle for pretty much all our institutions including our government. We have indeed become a Communist state." -- XI VAN FLEET (the Chinese-American emigé from Red China, author of "Mao's America", in June 2023. Oh and by the way -- ESG, DEI -- same-same.)

"The 'S' in ESG stands for Satanic." -- ELON MUSK

E.S.P. (Extra-Sensory Perception)

“Just as dogs can smell fear and the opposite sex can smell desperation, mechanical objects can scent hast, and it is then that they choose to show you how much you take their compliance for granted.” – JAMES LILEKS

 

Espionage

"I was reminded of the everyday boredom of a life in espionage. One is always waiting for someone who does not show up, for something that does not happen." -- CHARLES McCARRY (For my money, the greatest-ever American spy novelist)

 

"Like more respectable pursuits such as scientific research and brokerage and practicing law, espionage is an organized search for windfalls." – CHARLES McCARRY

 

“Idealists make brave Agents, but they are bad Intelligence Officers. They cannot exist for long without the company of like minds.” – CHARLES McCARRY

 

"Lies are the truth of spies." -- CHARLES McCARRY

 

"The home truth about the clandestine life is that it clothes itself in subtlety but lives by the raw truths of human nature." -- CHARLES McCARRY

 

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

 

"Only spies and others with something to hide act as if they want you to know everything about them on first meeting." -- CHARLES McCARRY

 

"No one can spend half a lifetime as an intelligence officer without acquiring the skills of an actor." -- CHARLES McCARRY

"In movies, spies meet by dark or night in spooky abandoned factories or under elevated highways in a dangerous part of town. In real life they are far more likely to hold clandestine meetings in crowded restaurants. This is true not only of decadent Americans but also of everybody else, including the Russians and the Chinese and even terrorists, though the latter usually choose places run by their cousins, who are also terrorists." -- CHARLES McCARRY

"In our day gunfire was regarded as the sound of inexcusable failure. The mission back then was to tiptoe in and tiptoe out, leaving no one the wiser. The adversary (never rudely called the enemy) wasn't supposed to find out what you'd done to him until it was too late, if ever." -- CHARLES McCARRY

"Secret operations always exasperated me -- the wasted motion, the misspent energy, the pointless anxiety, the trivial results that remind you how little good you've done for all your trouble and how foolishly you are wasting your life. It's a young man's game, of course, and by the time you realize all of the foregoing you're too old to change careers. Not to mention having a résumé that would frighten any personnel director in the world out of his wits." -- CHARLES McCARRY

"In penetration operations the key to success is not subtlety and maneuver but brazening it out. A skulker is more likely to be nailed than a lunatic who behaves as though he is in no danger, has no fear." -- CHARLES McCARRY

"Everyday life is a cover identity for operational types." -- CHARLES McCARRY

"What we had done did not really matter. Our work did not exist, had never existed, not in the annals of history or in the memory of those who had asked us to do it. All of it, going back to our dewy youth, was a laugh, a prank, a game, and like any other game, the one we had just played had not changed a thing." -- CHARLES McCARRY  (even if there are occasional situations where this doesn’t apply, the business is set up so that the intel officer often feels like this...)

"The way to a great man's secrets is through the orifices of his private secretary." -- CHARLES McCARRY      (this is Spookery 101 -- as anyone who watched the great US tv series "The Americans" can attest)

"How usual it is for buffoons to be used as spies."-- ROBERT CECIL      (1563-1612, 1st Lord Salisbury, was a master spy and statesman during the transition of Elizabeth I to James VI.... and he certainly would have livened things up at the Agency's "Farm" when I was there in 1970....)

“The essential points about spying are that it requires total immersion in the culture observed, and a deep understanding of human nature.” – RUDYARD KIPLING

 

“The perfect spy is one who has trouble getting the headwaiter's attention.” – BOB BURTON (A bounty-hunter and general all-round mercenary type, writing here in “Soldier of Fortune” magazine, and may I say, in my professional capacity, that no truer words were ever spoken on the subject of espionage.)

 

“You spend half your time lying to the enemy, and the other half lying to your friends, because they don’t need to know.” – TONY MENDEZ (25-year CIA Clandestine Service officer – a cover and disguise specialist)

 

“Running spies is among the world's most boring occupations.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“The art of it was to forget everything except the ground you stood on and the face you spoke from at that moment.” – JOHN LE CARRE

 

“I am writing a book about intelligence in the second world war, my first venture into the world of spooks. It is striking how many of the characters involved seem to have been unhinged.” – MAX HASTINGS (English author and historian.)

 

“The lasting impact of the Snowden effect is the inability of foreign intelligence to believe anything they tell the Americans will remain a secret.” – GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN (About the only guy I can think of offhand who was the boss of both the CIA and the NSA. And he said this about the worst spy in American history in the summer of 2015. Of course, Hayden himself turned rotten in the ensuing years as well….)

 

“Spying is a branch of philosophy.” – SINCLAIR McKAY (reviewing Max Hastings' “The Secret War” in the 7 Nov 2015 SPECTATOR)

 

“That's the wonderful thing about our (spy) business. Our mistakes always come back to haunt us, and eventually all debts come due.” – DANIEL SILVA (in his “The English Spy”)

 

“The life of a professional spy is one of constant travel and mind-numbing boredom broken by interludes of sheer terror.” – DANIEL SILVA

 

“Our parents don't allow us to choose our names, and neither does MI6.” – DANIEL SILVA

"When two or more people are left alone in someone else's office, just assume you're on the air." -- NELSON DEMILLE

"Espionage is an effort to find windows into men's souls." -- FRANCIS WALSINGHAM (1532-1590 -- Queen Elizabeth I's rather infamous Chief Spook)


 "When it comes to espionage, whatever your brilliant new idea is, the Russians have already done it. Probably rather well." -- JOHN SCHINDLER

 

“A spy is useful only if anonymous.” – WILL COHU (This is both tautological and, paradoxically, not always true – it doesn't apply in the rare case when the spy is also a celebrity, like Cary Grant, for example....)

 

“Like others who spy, he relished the feeling that he had a hand on the levers of history.” – WILL COHU (English author and Daily Telegraph journalist)

 

“My default view of espionage is to never believe anyone because everyone is trained in deception. This is not a value judgment; it’s a job description.” – CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

"In my experience, questionable defectors were/are like habitual drinking: If you think you might have a problem -- you do." -- JACK JOLIS

"The sight of handguns made the nervous people in the business of espionage nervouser: the nervouser they got the more likely it was that someone would wind up shooting someone, which was from everyone's point of view a disagreeable dénouement to any operation." -- ROBERT LITTELL


"What you do won't turn up in headlines on the front page -- it won't appear on any page -- unless you foul up." -- ROBERT LITTELL


"You can't judge a man by the company he keeps if he works for an intelligence organization." -- ROBERT LITTELL

"In our line of work, coincidences don't exist." -- ROBERT LITTELL


"Patterns, as any spy worth his salt grasps, are the outer shells of conspiracies." -- ROBERT LITTELL


"It was a given in the world of espionage that everyone broke sooner or later." -- ROBERT LITTELL

"A covert officer can ill afford ego or pride." -- TED GUP (the leftist journalist's nevertheless useful and not un-interesting 2000 "The Book Of Honor: Covert Lives And Classified Deaths At The CIA") 

"The compulsive talker has, at best, a short career in the clandestine service." -- TED GUP

"We are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing concepts of 'fair-play' must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us. It may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy." -- GEN. JAMES DOOLITTLE (the 3-star General, famous for his WWII raid on Tokyo -- in a 1954 classified "report" he was asked to do on the CIA by Ike)

"This is neither a Boy Scout game nor a boxing bout fought by the Marquess of Queensberry Rules. It is a job to be done." -- ALLEN DULLES

"They just don't want to state in public the truth that you can have compliance with the law, or you can have agents and fight terrorism effectively -- but not both." -- ALASDAIR PALMER     (a British journalist, here pinpointing the problem inherent in "penetrating" enemy and/or terrorist organisations. When I was in the old Outfit, we'd joke about how the only other people who knew the skills we were being taught were criminals)

“Spying, which people associated with lying, was relatively straightforward and clear: you lied for truth; you deceived in order to discover hidden truth. It was in his personal life that the distinction became blurred, too deeply embedded to disentangle.” – ALAN JUDD     (For my money, the greatest-ever English spy novelist. His real name, by the way, is Alan Edwin Petty, and he’s my age.)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

“It's difficult to do anything even mildly clandestine without feeling and looking as if you're doing something worse.” – ALAN JUDD

"With agent relationships, you went for it: no generalities, no hypotheticals, no holding anything back for later. There might not be a later." -- ALAN JUDD

"Spies are the midwives of truth." -- ALAN JUDD


"People enjoy spying. Hard to give up, once you've got the habit." -- ALAN JUDD

 

"Clandestinity breeds intimacy. " -- ALAN JUDD


"Espionage -- I can imagine no other work. It's not work, it's life, it's being more vividly alive." -- ALAN JUDD


"Espionage, like war, was ninety percent waiting." -- ALAN JUDD

 

"The trick in evading surveillance was not only to get away but to give the impression you weren't looking for surveillance because you were innocent of anything that would merit it." -- ALAN JUDD

 

"Espionage itself is a sort of legalized illicit affair. Gives people a kick. Partly why we do it." -- ALAN JUDD

 

"Never lie to the Office (MI6). That is the great thing. Once you do, you're lost. Everything is skewed from then on. And if the Office is not honest with itself, it is lost. Professional deceit demands clarity of thought, and clarity is impossible without honesty. This is as near to an institutional religious creed as we have. Honesty is the first and last quality one looks for in an intelligence officer." -- ALAN JUDD

 

"Above all, loyalty is the most important quality in an intelligence officer. Lack of any other quality could be compensated for or worked around but lack of loyalty undermined everything." -- ALAN JUDD

 

"As spies, we are midwives to truth. We have to be, that's our mission. We deceive to reveal. Our obligation is to deliver, however unpalatable." -- ALAN JUDD

 

"Spying -- successful spying -- makes the world a happier place for everyone." -- ALAN JUDD

 

"A criminal cast of mind is necessary, perhaps, for a good operational officer; you need guile, a willingness to bend or break rules, an eye for the main chance and a fallback, always a fallback. At least one. But you needed integrity, too, honesty and the self-discipline to use criminal tactics for good ends only." -- ALAN JUDD

 

“Perhaps all over the world spies were keeping each other in business by spying on other spies and pretending not to. Perhaps spying made for greater universal happiness. Perhaps all was well so long as everyone went on spying; anguish and anger would come about only if someone blew the whistle, or defected, or simply stopped.” – ALAN JUDD (in 1989)

 

“Appearances count in this business (spying) even more than in others.” – ALAN JUDD

 

“(Espionage is) Like a war, it’s not all battle, it’s mainly just keeping going and waiting. Only this war never ends.” – ALAN JUDD

"Everybody always talks too goddamn much. Always." -- WILLIAM J. CASEY (when he was Director of the CIA, in conversation with a small group of about 5 or 6 people -- which included me)

"Whenever there is any doubt, there is no doubt. That's the first thing they teach you."                             "Who taught you that?"                                                                                                                                                           "I can't remember. That's the second thing they teach you." -- J. D. ZEIK     (the screenwriter for 1998's “Ronin”, and that bit of dialogue is between Robert DeNiro and Jean Reno, just before the greatest car chase in movie history.... how, by the way, do you "write" a car   chase?....)                                                    


“The problem with the spy business is that while you can resign, you can never leave.” – TERRY HAYES      (the author of the notably thriller “I Am Pilgrim” – and this sounds like he cribbed it from The Eagles' “Hotel California”)  

                                                    

“In the spy business you can't learn by your mistakes. You don't get a chance.” – TERRY HUGHES

“There's nothing worse than cops with war stories. Except maybe spooks.” – TERRY HUGHES

“The mistake that most people made when they wanted to stop someone from seeing material was to encrypt it, which meant that a person like me knew exactly where to look.” – TERRY HAYES (In his magisterial “I Am Pilgrim”)

 

“Espionage, properly conducted, never announces itself. The 'Spy' is a trusted Civil Servant; The 'Spymaster' betrays no sign of special knowledge." – THOMAS POWERS

"It's like the boiling frog, You get exposed to a little bit of evil, a little bit of rule-breaking, a little bit of dishonesty... you can come to justify it." -- EDWARD SNOWDEN       (the spy-who-got-away-with-it -- by running off to Russia -- and he could be describing his own behavior, here.)

"Fitting into your environment is more a matter of state of mind than of attire, and trying to be inconspicuous draws attention." -- NELSON DEMILLE

 

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


"When they send someone to interrupt a private conversation, it means that they weren't able to eavesdrop." -- NELSON DEMILLE

“Spy stories are what we tell ourselves when we're peeping behind the fabric of national life.” – MICK HERRON (a rather amusing English spy novelist)

 

"Women were born spooks, and could smell betrayal before it happened." -- MICK HERRON

 

"In the world of spooks -- as in those of politics, commerce and sport -- the fact that everything has been bollocksed up beyond belief doesn't result in anything changing." -- MICK HERRON

 

"It was best to regard everything as a test. He'd learned that during training, and had yet to be told to stop." -- MICK HERRON

 

“Surveillance work is like watching television with the sound off.” – KRISTEN LEPIONKA (author of the novel “What You Want To See”)

"Gentlemen should not read each others' mail." -- HENRY STIMSON     (Herbert Hoover's Secretary of State, famously harrumphing over the establishment of an intelligence service in 1929)
 

“You don’t want to get too sentimental about the operatives, you know. They’re a pretty crude lot. They seem to like dirt.” – DAVID LODGE

 

"Telling the truth with a jesting air, he had discovered, was the safest way of protecting your secrets." -- DAVID LODGE

“What do spies do, for all anyone knows or cares? They behave suspiciously.” – MICHAEL FRAYN (in his 2002 novel titled, funnily enough, “Spies”)

 

“Tell people they can look, and of course they don’t bother.” – MICHAEL FRAYN

 

“Just as there is nothing rational about terrorism, so there is nothing rational about counter-terrorism" – CHARLES COGAN (ex-big deal in the CIA, later a professor at Harvard. A liberal – natch – and I think he’s wrong here – both terrorism and counter-terrorism can indeed be perfectly “rational” – but it makes for a nice aphorism) (ex-big deal in the CIA, later a professor at Harvard. A liberal – natch – and I think he’s wrong here – both terrorism and counter-terrorism can indeed be perfectly “rational” – but it makes for a nice aphorism)

 

"There is one evil I dread, and that is their Spies" -- GEORGE WASHINGTON      (24 MAR 1776)                                              

 

“A key to success in clandestine operations is sobriety.” – WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR

"In today’s world, if we shot every Russian and Chinese spy operating around the world  in non-official capacities we’d run out of ammunition." -- DR. CHIP BECK (my old pal, in July 2024)


 

"Think of an espionage service as a highly specialized employment service. Intelligence officers are head-hunters." -- JAMES JESUS ANGLETON (said to my great friend, the great author and investigative reporter EDWARD JAY EPSTEIN)

"It's not enough just to steal a secret. It must be done in a way that the theft remains undetected." -- JAMES JESUS ANGLETON

"The final move in any sophisticated intelligence game is obscuring a success." -- JAMES JESUS ANGLETON      (see above) 

“There’s a sort of romantic satisfaction of having the secret authority in dealing secretly with things that seem important. But there’s the downside – the headquarters staff always jockeying for position, the auditors arguing about every penny spent for special funds, the charades and maneuvering before being able to spend an hour stroking some ratty little clerk who is hawking state secrets because his boss hates him.” – WILLIAM HOOD (the American counterintelligence officer, turned spy novelist)

 

“At best it was only the wartime operatives whose achievements might eventually be trumpeted by historians. In peacetime, the annals of espionage rarely amounted to more than a handful of discreetly ghosted defector memoirs, a congeries of newspaper clippings footnoting blown operations, and a string of noisy editorial allegations of malfeasance. By consigning its success stories to the secret archive, the racket consumed the best of its own history, and left its heroes unsung.” – WILLIAM HOOD

 

“When he was a kid, his parents probably got him into the habit of talking things over with them – to treat them as pals, and confide in them, the way the books say happy children should do. Now that he’s supposedly all grown up, he still has to talk things over with someone – anyone. This may have made for a nice warm relationship with his parents, but it’s the sure mark of someone who ought to stay the hell away from the espionage racket.” – WILLIAM HOOD

 

“Secret operations make strange bedfellows.” – WILLIAM HOOD (I can confirm that this is true.)

 

“Moles needed to believe that their agency handlers shared the risks they took.” – ALEX BERENSON (On the other hand, I can confirm that this is not true – it should read “Moles wanted to believe...”)

 

“To follow somebody, without them knowing that you’re doing it, is not the doddle they make it seem in films.” – HUGH LAURIE (the English comic actor – and he’s damn right about surveillance, if you don’t want them knowing that you’re doing it – which is 99% of the whole point of the exercise.)

 

“Just about the worst way to fuck up a covert operation on foreign soil is to get a speeding ticket.” – HUGH LAURIE (he meant “clandestine” instead of “covert”, but never mind. Non-spooks often get the terminology wrong.)

 

“There is nothing mysterious and complicated about the spy business. The requirements are a lot of common sense, a reasonably broad education, a modicum of brains and above all the will and motivation to accomplish the tasks.” – DUANE “DEWEY” CLARRIDGE (the famous CIA under-boss. A good guy. In 1997.)

 

“The divorce rate is high in the Clandestine Services, due to any number of factors: the long hours, the travel, the stress, the fequent drinking. Much activity occurs at night, and if a marriage is already rocky, a wife can get all kinds of suspicions about what’s really going on. Sometimes, these suspicions have a solid foundation.” – DUANE “DEWEY” CLARRIDGE

 

“Officers with PhD’s are not usually successful in the Clandestine Service because they rarely can see black or white, only complex, murky grays. Thus they never seize the moment to make a successful recruitment. Their ability to overanalyze prevents them from acting.” – DUANE “DEWEY” CLARRIDGE

 

“It’s inbred into anybody who’s in the spy business not to ask a lot of questions until you know you’re entitled to the answers.” – DUANE “DEWEY” CLARRIDGE (this, boys and girls, is “need to know”.)

 

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

 

“Spies keep down the mischief.” – SIR ROBERT MORLEY (the great English comic actor, in his book “The Pleasures Of Age”)

"What on earth is the point of spies? I've been asking myself this question over the past few weeks as the Fifth Man has (supposedly) been revealed; as the entire West German secret service turns out to have been the East German security service with the word 'East' crossed out and 'West' written on top in purple crayon and as some idiot turns up in Moscow saying he's defected from the FBI

It's clear to see that western intelligence has been a complete joke for the past forty years. these chaps in the Kremlin knew everything. They knew where all our bombs were. They knew who killed Kennedy. They knew who shot J.R. They knew a lot. and they still lost.

Or look at it another way around. We had an MI-6 that was entirely staffed by drunken nellies from Cambridge and daft old buggers in hats with corks around the rim. And the Yanks had the CIA which was populated by lunatics and -- for awhile at any rate -- run by George Bush. And the last few German chancellors haven't even been able to nip out for a quick pee without East Berlin knowing all about it. And we still won." -- DAVID THOMAS (the comic English trans-sexual writer, when he was still publicly a guy, back in 1990)

"I hate to pay the little son of a bitch anything, but if there's one thing I've learned over the years of agent handling, it's always leave them smiling." -- E. HOWARD HUNT

 

"The pure hearts in Washington may blanch at the description, but case officers are in fact second-story men, thieves who steal other countries' secrets. The (CIA's) Department of Operations is the only arm of the Federal government dedicated to breaking the law -- foreign law, but still the law." -- ROBERT BAER

 

"When asked the number one lesson the years had taught him, he would answer honestly:  really the only lesson the years had taught him was never ever to leave the last of your Christmas shopping until Christmas Eve. Because something always happened on Christmas Eve. Sometimes big, sometimes small.  But always something. Everything else changed all the time. Christmas Eve seemed to be the only constant in the intelligence world." -- LEE CHILD       (the English author of the Jack Reacher books)
 

“A baby was as good a cover as any spy could wish to have.” – NEVIL SHUTE (in his 1945 novel “Most Secret”)

"At first it's a job like any other. A fairly boring job, to tell the truth. There's no glamor in it. Most of the time, you feel dirty, soiled. You enter other people's lives by the back door. It's like a continuous adultery." -- BRYAN FORBES

"Spying left no tell-tale lipstick-smears on the adulterous face across the breakfast-table." -- BRYAN FORBES 

"Spying depends on pretense, dishonesty and subterfuge." -- DAVID HARE     (the left-wing Brit playwright, and while he's not wrong, other things come into it as well:  such as, for instance, resourcefulness, courage and,... well... intelligence.)

"Secret Intelligence is premised on inconspicuous access." -- BEN SCHOTT     (seems self-evident, but elegantly stated nevertheless)

Espionage (Covert Action)

“When we were fighting Communism, the most useful weapons didn’t explode – they had pages, a volume control, or a great personality. They still do.” – E. HOWARD HUNT

 

“Establishment, The”

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

 

"It is comparatively easy to be brave when you have the entire establishment behind you." -- ROD LIDDLE

 

“It isn’t enough for the ruling class to rule – it wants to feel good about itself too: Its members want to feel like they deserve to rule, by virtue of their own... virtue. The actual facts of the case are a bit more complicated than that.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“Words like ‘serious’ and ‘grownup’ are used mostly by pompous and self-righteous politicians and commentators who regard themselves as such, yet prove by their actions and words that they are silly.” – CHARLES MOORE

 

“The danger comes from the top. Not the bottom.” – ROY CAMERON (in Dec. 2019)


Eternity

“Words are the only things that last forever.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

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

 

Ethics

“Ethics you learn; morality you believe.” – A.A. GILL

 

"We used to ask ourselves whether something was right or wrong. Now we just ask whether it's legal." -- ALAN JUDD

"Ethics are a matter for every single human being and cannot be delegated to a priestly caste, often taxpayer-funded." -- CHALRES MOORE 

 

"If ethics aren't gray, they aren't really ethics." -- DAVID MITCHELL    (the serious novelist, not the comic actor)

“Is the pleasant the good, or not quite?” – JOHN UPDIKE  (Italics in the original – in 1974’s “A Month Of Sundays”)

 

Ethiopia

"Ethiopia has been for 14 centuries a Christian island in a sea of pagans.” — MENELIK II (The Emperor of Ethiopia to the "European Powers" in 1886)

“Ethiopia serves as a riposte to the deluded, or lying, progressives who insist that Africa’s problems are largely or entirely the consequence of western colonialism. Ethiopia suffers from the same malaise as the countries in Africa which surround it. Appalling and often brutal governance, corruption, periods of starvation, the lack of an entrepreneurial class, riven by tribalism and semi-perpetual warfare. But here’s the point, of course – Ethiopia was never colonised.

And then there is Liberia, suffering exactly the same problems as those previously colonized countries  which surround it. Also never colonized.

All of which suggests very strongly to me that, objectively, colonialism is not remotely the cause of Africa’s problems, given that African countries which were not colonized suffer exactly the same depredations as those which were, nd that colonized countries outside Africa seem to be doing perfectly well.” – ROD LIDDLE (in Sept. 2021)

“Ethnic Cleansing”

"The Manchu people have been annihilated, the Mongols, Muslims and Tibetans are suddenly longing for death." -- MAO TSE-TUNG  

Etiquette

"When a man opens a car door for his wife, it's either a new car or a new wife." -- PRINCE PHILIP, THE DUKE OF EDINBURGH

 

Eugenics

“Evolution is just the basis for all of modern eugenics.” – DANIEL FOSTER

 

“There are 150,000 feeble-minded people in Britain. Let's look after them but insist upon a complete and permanent loss of all civil rights including civil freedoms and fatherhood.” – WILLIAM BEVERIDGE (the founder of the British welfare state – “the Beveridge Report” – here speaking in 2008)

 

“The idea of a biological divide between the fit and the unfit was no Nazi invention. It was the conventional wisdom of the developed world.” – FRASER NELSON (the editor of the SPECTATOR, in April 2016)

"The 20th century will be known in the future as the century when the eugenics ideal was accepted as part of the creed of civilisation." -- LEONARD DARWIN (Charles' son, speaking to the British Eugencis Society, of which he was President, in 1911) 

“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

"Eugenics is a thing no more to be bargained about than poisoning." -- G. K. CHESTERTON

"Margaret Sanger was the founder of Planned Parenthood, which, like all organizations, expanded its brief (originally one of control of subhumans) into control of all conception." -- DAVID MAMET 

Euphemism

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

 

“In my experience, anything with the word 'natural' in it always turns out to be anything but, and anything purporting to be a 'journey' usually has you going round in circles.” – MELISSA KITE (the horsey “Real Life” columnist for the UK SPECTATOR)

" 'Centered' to describe a child, it can mean anything from 'has scads of grade-A munis in his trust fund' to 'takes less drugs than his peers'. When the term 'high maintenance' is used to describe a woman, it can mean anything from 'sensitive' to 'high strung' to 'coke-snorting bitch'. And the term 'vulnerable' can mean anything from 'probably gay' to 'read way too much Sylvia Plath in college'." -- JOE QUEENAN 

Euro, The

"The EU owes its existence to the notion that Europe should avoid repeating the catastrophes of its 20th-century past. Yet by imposing a single currency on a large number of very difference countries, it was blending elements of two lesser disasters -- fixed exchange rates and central planning -- into a combination that history suggested would end very badly indeed." --  ANDREW STUTTAFORD

          

     

Europe

"A European is one who is nostalgic for Europe." -- MILAN KUNDERA

“Britain and Germany are natural allies because the other large European nations are not white men.” –  PRINCE HEINRICH OF PRUSSIA     (1862-1926, the younger brother of Kaiser Wilhelm II. And I say, steady on old chap.)                

 

“The continent’s capitals are worth seeing but not studying.” – THOMAS JEFFERSON (…and he was an architect, par dessu le marché….)

 

“As a rule, we develop a borrowed European idea forward, and Europe develops a borrowed American idea backwards.” – MARK TWAIN (man, is this ever true…)

 

“They’re a weak lot some of them in Europe, you know; weak, feeble.” – MARGARET THATCHER

 

“Frankly, if you can pick only one place to be out of step with, Europe’s an excellent choice.” – MARK STEYN

 

“I don’t give a shit what the Europeans think.” – GEORGE W. BUSH (quoted by George Tenet, his CIA Director, in the 31 Aug. 2002 UK SPECTATOR when asked to comment on how W “felt” about the state of US/British intelligence “cooperation” in the run-up to the Iraq War. Bien parlé, patron!, I say….)

"In Europe, extramarital affairs are considered a sign of good health, a feat." -- JEAN-PIERRE DETREMERIE (Belgian politician) 

“The farther south you travel in Europe the more obvious the sex is.” – ALFRED HITCHCOCK (Whose good name, I’m ashamed to say, gets inexcusably rendered as “Albert Hitchip” in my fabulous, prize-winning play, “Are We Having Fun Yet?”)

 

“Europe’s two great passions are peace and security – but you cannot have peace unless you are will to prepare for war, and you cannot have security unless you are willing to take risks. Few signs indicate that Europe is willing to do these simple things.” – MICHAEL NOVAK (of the American Enterprise Institute, here speaking in Venice, Italy, in Nov. 2005)

 

“Europe thinks that to achieve peace no price is too high: not appeasement, not massacres on its own soil, not even surrender to terrorists. Europe is impotent. A foul wind is blowing through it…. the idea that we can afford to be lenient even with people who threaten us… This same wind blew through Munich in 1938… It could turn out to be the dath rattle of a continent that no longer understands what principles to believe.” --  MARCELLO PERA (The President of the Italian Senate, no less, in a 2006 book called “Without Roots: the West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam”)

 

“French arrogance, Italian corruption, German tunnel-vision, Spanish bloodymindedness, Dutch obstinacy, Belgian cowardice, Austrian anti-Semitism, Portuguese evasiveness and Danish cop-outing, not to speak of the new Slav contributions, Polish irrealism, Czech confusion, Slovak evasion, all topped up by Hungarian deviousness.” – PAUL JOHNSON (he might have added “British hypocrisy”.)

 

"While Europe has a high degree of tolerance for intolerant imams, it won't tolerate anyone pointing out that intolerance." -- MARK STEYN

 

“The perpetual peace to which Europe aspires has its source not in Europe but in the United States. If America were to collapse tomorrow, Europe would fall like a house of cards; it would return to the tergiversation it showed in Munich in 1938 and be reduced to a deluxe sanatorium ready to allow itself to be torn apart, piece by piece, by all sorts of predators.” – PASCAL BRUCKNER (one of the Frogue “Nouveaux Philosophes”, in his “The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay On Western Masochism”)

 

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

 

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

 

“Europeans are fearful of the future because they fear the past.” -- THEODORE DALRYMPLE (From his book “THE NEW VICHY SYNDROME: Why European Intellectuals Surrender To Barbarism”)

 

“The difference between Britain and the continent (is): unlike their European counterparts, the English elite could never take Fascism seriously enough to fall for it.” – MARK STEYN

 

"Totalitarianism is Europe's great modern innovation, its gift to the world, and Europeans consciously or unconsciously resent that the United States has been preventing them from fully developing this great modern innovation of theirs." -- JEAN-FRANCOIS REVEL (obviously, he said this in the less baleful pre-Obama era)

 

“Europe is an allegory for the ages of man. You're born Italian: they're relentlessly infantile and mother -obsessed. In childhood you're English: chronically shy, tongue-tied, cliquey and only happy kicking balls, pulling legs off things, or sending someone to Coventry. Teenagers are French: pretentiously philosophical, embarrassingly vain, ridiculously romantic and insincere. During middle age, we become either Swiss or Irish. Old age is German: ponderous, pompous and pedantic. And finally we regress into being Belgian; with no idea who we are at all.” – A.A. GILL (The London Times columnist and well-known bon-vivant, boulevardier and provocateur)

 

“'Post-Christian Europe' is a bubble of 50-year-old-retirees, 30-year-old students, empty maternity wards, and a surging successor population already restive to move beyond its Muslim ghettoes.” – MARK STEYN

 

“If white people are so smart, then how do you explain Europe?” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE (lest he be taken for a total Philistine, here, I hasten to say that he was referring specifically to the socialist-induced European financial crisis, in 2012)

 

“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

 

“Europe never has been comfortable with democracy.” – DAVID GELERNTER

 

“Europe is lost. For 50 years, the anti-semitism was held at bay by post-Holocaust guilt. Not anymore.” – CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

 

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

 

“Europe lost faith in itself and today has little desire to reproduce itself, fight for itself or even take its own side in an argument.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY (in his 2017 book “The Strange Death of Europe”)

 

“We have a unified Europe now, dominated by Germany, based on a joint surrender of sovereignty, but we all know who calls the tune and pays the bills. There has been no need to send in the cavalry or Panzers to make this latest conquest; diplomacy, and the case with which so many European countries have accepted a loss of democratic power, have done it for them.” – SIMON HEFFER (in March, 2019)

               

“The real ruins of Europe are her great men.” – LAWRENCE DURRELL (I don’t even know what this means – and suspect it’s meaningless – but it sounds portentous, so it makes the cut)

 

“Everything in Homer (700 BC) is a ‘first’ for European literature, Europe being illiterate at the time.” – PETER JONES

 

“Unlike in America, all European cultures (which, of course, include Japan) are based on the idea of accepting one’s limitations.” --NIGEL WILLIAMS    

"Whereas the United States is certainly a better place to earn and accumulate money, Europe is, on balance, still a better place to spend it."-- RORY SUTHERLAND

Europe, Central

"Central Europeans who wore epaulets and bearskin helmets and killed themselves in cafés or jumped out of windows with drinks in their hands." -- MARK HELPRIN (in his 1991 novel "A Soldier Of The Great War")

Europe, Eastern

“The countries of Eastern Europe are the guests from Hell. Misery and poverty followed wherever the Soviet Union either forced its influence, as in East Germany, or was granted to it – President Truman handing Poland over to Russian control at Yalta in 1945.” – HARRY MOUNT (reviewing a book by William Hitchcock called “The Struggle For Europe”, in 2003)

 

“In most parts of Eastern Europe you spend your time leaping over the sewage seeping across the pavements, basking in the warm glow of radioactivity leaking from the local power station, and trying to work up an appetite for another dinner of marinated parrot.” – PETER BIDDLECOMBE (in 1994)

 

«In Europe the people become nicer as you travel eastwards, but their dogs get nastier.» -- NICK HUNT (An Englishman who, in fact, walked across Europe and wrote a book about it called «Walking The Woods And The Water»)

"We discovered that there were some East Europeans who could defeat the polygraph at any time. Americans are not very good at it because we are raised to tell the truth and when we lie it is easy to tell we are lying. But we find a lot of Europeans can handle the polygraph without a blip." -- RICHARD HELMS (my old Agency boss. And funny he should mention East Europeans -- because when I first started with the Agency, in the early 70s, our Middle East Division didn't bother polygraphing Muslims AT ALL -- on the grounds that "lying" wasn't even a useful concept with them. Strewth.  And, for what it's worth, I was twice polygraphed by the Agency: onex I told the truth and failed, and the other time I lied and passed. So... go know....)
 

«It’s probably a bit like those currencies they have in eastern Europe. Not even worth earning.» – NIGEL WILLIAMS (in 1992)

"Eastern Europe is the graveyard of empires. Rome failed on the Danube. Napoleon on the Dnieper. The epic struggle between the empires of Austria, Russia and Turkey in the first world war ended in the destruction of all three and the fragmentation of eastern Europe, giving rise to the word 'Balkanisation'." -- JONATHAN SUMPTION       (the great British jurist)


 

Europe, “Old”

“The United States believes it has worldwide obligations.  Our European friends have never felt that that was their destiny or their obligation.” – COLIN POWELL

 

“The appeasers, conciliators and cowards in Europe would much rather someone else fought their battles for them, while they fanny about introvertedly,  regarding only themselves and their increasingly absurd, corrupt and irrelevant ‘project’”. – SIMON HEFFER (An English journalist for the Daily Mail and an absolutely splendid fellow.)

 

“If the ‘sleeping giant’ is hard to wake up, his European pals aren’t sleeping so much as in irreversible comas.” – MARK STEYN

 

“Close to the borders of Germany, Bohemia and Poland, this important duchy (Silesia) attracted the interest of kingdoms and empires. During the early Middle Ages it proved a veritable apple of discord to be fought over by local and family rivals, from Boleslaw the Wry-Mouth to Kazimierz Sprawiedliwy the Just and Mieszko the Flat-Footed.” – ANTONY BEEVOR (Boleslaw the Wry-Mouth? Didn’t we last encounter him in a Monty Python sketch?)

 

“When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld spoke about an ‘old’ and a ‘new’ Europe a few years ago, Europeans got very angry. Probably because he was right.” – ARNOUT BROUWERS (the Dutch publisher of the “Volkskrant” newspaper, in March 2007)

 

“Europe seemed to me a potential battleground between the Protestant work ethic and the almost perpetual siesta, a marriage which could not possibly work.” – ROD LIDDLE

 

"When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe , we shall become as corrupt as Europe." – THOMAS JEFFERSON

 

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

 

"The postmodern European cultural ideal is to avoid childbearing, most religion, and national defense." -- VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

Europe, Western

“West Europeans have long abandoned all-encompassing struggles – the French because they have always lost them, the Germans because they have become afraid of themselves.” – ARNOUT BROUWERS

 

"The postmodern European cultural ideal is to avoid childbearing, most religion, and national defense." -- VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

 

"America lost every war in the last three generations because we were willing to die, but not to kill. The Europeans are neither willing to die nor kill. And so, the continent is being overrun by those who are." -- DANIEL GREENFIELD     (In FRONTPAGE Magazine, March 2020)                                                                                                                                      

 

European Union, The EU, (ex-EEC)

“I was sent to cover the EU Parliament in Strasbourg. The only pleasure to be found was in the city’s architecture and superb cuisine which became an antidote to the sheer everyday Swiftian hideousness of this unspeakable assembly, the greatest waste of time and space I have ever encountered anywhere in the world.  It is stuffed full of self-important nonentities speaking in tongues like the inmates of a Victorian asylum and chasing paper through endless corridors.” – MICHAEL VESTEY (British radio critic, in 1999.)

 

“You will find Europe in the mouths of those politicians  who want something, but dare not ask for it in their own name.” –  COUNT OTTO VON BISMARK

 

“The widespread opposition to the European Currency Unit (ecu) suggests that it should be named the Unpopular Currency Unit (ucu). If this is felt to understate the case, it could be called the Frightfully Unpopular Currency Unit, which would also describe the relationship of Europe’s bureaucracy to its citizenry.” – L. H. NIGEL (think about this one a bit… heh. L.H. is a member of the Royal Air Force Club, in London)

 

“Those whom the gods would destroy, they first grant the presidency of the European Council of Ministers;” – MARK ALMOND (Brit journalist)

 

“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)

 

"Of course there will be transfer of sovereignty. But would I be intelligent to draw the attention of public opinion to this fact?" -- JEAN-CLAUDE JUNCKER (also a famous what my mother used to call dipsomaniac)

 

"We decide something, leave it lying around, and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back." -- JEAN-CLAUDE JUNCKER

 

“Construction of the European Union resembles a glacier – you never see it moving. But at some point somebody has to sit up and say that it has moved.” – SARAH HELM

 

“I have long had a visionary plan for the common market: that every member of the community should shift its population round by one country, anti-clockwise. The French should move to Germany, improving the food; the Germans to Britain, making the place work, and the Spaniards to France, adding a much-needed sense of relaxation. With the expansion of the EC, though, there is the frightful prospect of a Scotland populated by Norwegians, making it even gloomier than it already is.” – STEVE JONES (in 1994)

 

“ ’Europe’ is the worst thing to happen to Europe since the two world wars it started.” – PAUL JOHNSON (in May 2007)

 

"The French are lousy at politics but good at cooking. The Italians are useless at war but good at food, both cooking and serving. Not bad at operas either. The Germans and the Belgians were appalling colonists but the Germans were good at industry. What the Belgians were good at is not known. We (Brits) used to do what we do best, win wars and rule people and were content to let them cook for us and entertain us. The new idea is to let the French, Germans and even the Belgians rule us. That is bad enough. Surely we don't have to eat English food too?" -- DIGBY ANDERSON (noted Brit curmudgeon writing in The Spectator on the latest EU treaty/constitution, in 1996)

 

“The fundamental principle on which the EU was formed (is): everybody gets everything.” – JAMES LILEKS

 

“A famous economist once said there are two types of money: mine and yours. The EU constantly reminds us that there is a third type: theirs.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY

 

“Being loyal to the EU would be like pledging eternal fealty to your condo's managing board.” – FRED SCHWARZ

 

“One of the great pleasures of being a Eurocrat is that all the news is good, especially the bad news, because whatever problem arises leads to the same conclusion as to what is necessary to solve it, namely every closer union.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE (It's a bit like “global warming” and any natural phenomenon – whatever happens it's due to global warming.)

 

“We must re-establish the primacy of politics over the market.” – ANGELA MERKEL (The German Chancellor, in early November 2011, and in those 10 succinct words the ex-East German lady managed to distill the essence of why the EU is in its – much deserved – terminal death throes.)

 

“The secret of the European Union is the way it uses boredom as a weapon. Even those of us predisposed towards thinking ill of the EU are unwilling to apprise ourselves of the full, tedious details because our brains would explode at the sheer, grinding dullness of it all.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

 

“The EU’s armed might: two cappuccino machines and a tennis racket” – ANDREW STUTTAFORD

 

“Whether there is support for this among the public, I do not know. But we do it anyway.” – HERMAN VON ROMPUY (European Council President, in April 2014, on the establishment of a “United States Of Europe”)

 

“The European Community is a study in nugacity.” – PAUL JOHNSON (look it up.)

 

“We take a decision, then put it on the table and wait to see what happens. If there is no protest, because most people have no idea what we are doing, we take step after step until we are beyond the point of no return.” – JEAN-CLAUDE JUNCKER

 

"The EU has a flag no one salutes, an anthem no one sings, a president no one can name, a parliament whose powers subtract from those of national legislatures, a bureaucracy no one admires or controls, and rules of fiscal rectitude that no member is penalized for ignoring." -- GEORGE WILL

 

"The European Union was a 1970s solution to a 1940s problem." -- MARK STEYN

 

“The European Union, as misbegotten an exercise in applied cultural destruction as there ever has been, first eliminated the border controls within most of its territory; now, since the German chancellor effectively threw open not only Germany but the EU to prolonged cultural 'enrichment' from the Third World, the EU’s borders are mostly notional—and 'Italians' are no longer Italian as a result.” – MICHAEL WALSH (in April 2018)

 

"The EU is a terrible idea that only serves two countries: Belgium and Germany." -- MICHAEL WALSH

 

"If one big government is bad, imagine how how bad two big governments would be... That's the European Union." – NIGEL FARAGE

 

 “Brexiteers in Britain and the Trump administration in the U.S. recognize the EU as, like Nazi Germany and the USSR, a misbegotten imperial project – an ideologically rooted effort, conceived and driven by an arrogant and self-regarding elite, that has steadily encroached on individual liberties, steadily weakened economies, and steadily evolved into something that looks increasingly like a suicide pact. If twentieth-century Europe was almost destroyed by various totalitarianisms, twenty-first-century Europe now risks destruction either at the hands of Islamic totalitarianism, to which the EU honchos have kowtowed for two generations, or at the hands of the burgeoning totalitarianism of the EU itself. Or both. ‘Europe as an idea,’ Bernard-Henri Lévy tells us, ‘is falling apart before our eyes.’ Good.” – BRUCE BAWER

 

"Only a united Europe could assure the continent's peace and prosperity. In the absence of popular enthusiasm for such a union, it will have to be built by zig and by zag, obliquely and quietly." -- JEAN MONNET (the French economist and diplomat who was considered to be one of – if not the – “founding father of the European Union”)

 

"Up until I was 20, I thought Luxembourg was a radio station. I didn't even know it was a country, and now he's running my country, and he doesn't seem to like us." -- MICHAEL CAINE

“The EU is doomed to fail. Everyone will be better off when it does. Everyone, except Russia.” -- VLADIMIR BUKOVSKY 

“France has a heart. Germany has a heart. Britain has a heart. The EU does not.” – WILLIAM SHAWCROSS

 

“The European Union, of course, unwilling even to pay for its own strategic defence, is an embarrassing irrelevance.” – FRANCIS PIKE (historian and author of “Empires At War”)                                                                                                                                                                

 

“The problem with the E.U., it seemed to me, was the same as the problem with the Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s car: it is very difficult to put in reverse.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

"The EU, the profoundly anti-democratic institution that has mismanaged everything except the salaries of the elites it employs." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

"The European Parliament is only good for funding illegals and calling us 'racists'." -- JORGE BUXADÉ      (Jorge Buxadé is a European MEP from Spain's "Vox" party, and he said this in Oct 2023)    

“The great European adventure (the EU) will end in tears, if it doesn’t end in blood.” – RICHARD LITTLEJOHN (the columnist for the UK “Sun”, in 1995)

"Dealing with the European Union was among the most unpleasant tasks of my tenure." -- MIKE POMPEO       (Trump's superb SecState and CIA boss -- the only guy to ever hold both those positions)

“Eurozone”

“But the danger is that the Eurozone becomes like the Warsaw Pact, an organisation dedicated to not recognising the truth, and so, when the truth finally intrudes, it collapses.” – CHARLES MOORE

 

“If white people are so smart, then how do you explain Europe?” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE  (lest he be taken for a total Philistine, here, I hasten to say that he was referring specifically to the socialist-induced European financial crisis, in 2012)

Euthanasia

“Compassion easily slides into contempt. The helpless are often not very appealing: It is all too easy to think the world would be better off without them.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

"For all these years, the Left has told us we must butt out of end-of-life decisions because they are so intensely personal; turns out they're only intensely personal if you're decision is to die — if you want to live, that's up to the bureaucrats."  -- ANDREW C. McCARTHY

 

“No murder is as cold-blooded as euthanasia, which lacks even the passion of hate.” – DAVID LODGE

 

Evidence

“Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.” – HENRY DAVID THOREAU

 

“When you have eliminated the impossible, what remains must be the truth.” – ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE (Through Sherlock, of course, and this may sound loftily perceptive, but when you think of it, it’s nothing but a nonsensical tautology.)

 

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

 

“Whenever somebody claims there's 'no evidence of that' I assume they made sure of it.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

 

"It's not the nature of the evidence; It's the seriousness of the charge" – RUSH LIMBAUGH

 

«Evidence is a list of the material you've got. What about the things you haven't found? What do you call that – unimportant?» – TERRY HAYES

“There's a difference between not having the evidence and not hearing the evidence.” – EVAN KILGORE (conservative novelist and screenwriter)

"Nothing spoils a good story like the arrival of an eyewitness." -- MARK TWAIN

"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") 

"Nobody lies like an eyewitness."-- JOSEPH STALIN (I don't stone guarantee this, I've only seen it reported in a publication called "The Barnes Review”, in 2001, and repeated by Guy Walters in the UK Spectator – but it was reportedly said by Stalin to Churchill, in response to accusations that the Soviets were murdering returning POWs at the end of WWII)

   

            

Evil

“To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he is doing is good.” – ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN

 

“Evil is not good’s absence but gravity’s everlasting bedrock.” – GEOFFREY HILL (Phew, hea-vy. In Mr. Hill’s defense, this was a line of poetry. He’s an English poet.)

 

“The discovery of the reality of evil and the battle against it are at the basis of all gaiety and even of all farce.” – FRANCOIS RABELAIS

 

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” – ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN

 

“We must know that when evil has power, it is almost too late.” – ELIE WIESEL

 

“I don't think there are any really bad people. Just awful ones. The bad ones are all in books.” – KINGSLEY AMIS

 

"Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable." -- G.K. CHESTERTON

“An evil man will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over the ashes.” -- SUN TZU (I don't like quoting Sun Tzu, if he even ever existed, too much -- but this one pretty well describes the Democrat Left in America in the 21st century....)

"What is evil if not sickness celebrating itself?" -- EDWARD ST. AUBYN

"Evil has a self-exalting aspect." -- ROY CAMERON (he actually said this in response to St. Aubyn’s quote, above)

"One of the fringe benefits of associating with evil is that by comparison to it I come out feeling semi-decent, virtuous almost." -- STEVE TESICH

“I don’t think goodness depends on evil, but it depends on the possibility of evil.” – P. D. JAMES

 

“Create a villain and you become a villain.” – ANTHONY BURGESS

"It's like the boiling frog, You get exposed to a little bit of evil, a little bit of rule-breaking, a little bit of dishonesty... you can come to justify it." -- EDWARD SNOWDEN       (the spy-who-got-away-with-it -- by running off to Russia -- and he could be describing his own behavior, here.)
 

"There is no law against bad people." -- RICHARD BROOKHISER (in 9 July 2020)

 

"Villainy wears many masks, none so dangerous as the mask of virtue." -- WASHINGTON IRVING

 

“Evil, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.” – RICHARD LITTLEJOHN (the columnist for the UK “Sun”, in 1995, and although I think he’s wrong, here – it makes a snappy little quote.)

 

Evolution

“From the scientific point of view, the problem with natural selection is not that it leads to any particular outcome but that it  can be used to ‘explain’ any outcome whatever. The concept of ‘fitness’ is undefined, so that ‘the survival of the fittest” means nothing more than the survival of the survivors.” – TOM BETHELL (in THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR June 2005)

 

“Things don't evolve; they peak quickly and inconspicuously, and then they fall apart.” – TOM BETHELL

 

“During the last 50 years, we have seen something that is directly opposed to the faith in progress – actual disparagement of the human race. Misanthropy became fashionable. We repeatedly deplore our supposed 'hubris'. Few have noticed that our modern misanthropy is at odds with the evolutionist faith. And for that reason, that secular faith, which the intelligentsia is so eager for us to embrace, is going to be harder and harder to instill.” – TOM BETHELL

 

“Mankind is supposed to have evolved in the treetops. But I have examined my sense of balance, the prehensility of my various appendages, and my attitude toward standing on anything higher than, say, political principles, and I have concluded that, personally, I evolved in the backseat of a car.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

 

“For all that they understand of their own true origins, more than a third of Americans might as well believe themselves to be descended from hamburgers.  Few countries do all that much better on this score.” – ANTHONY GOTTLIEB (a Brit writing in 1995)

 

“Sadly, evolution seems to be making humans ever more dull and pretentious. In the future we will all be NPR hosts.” – ED MORRISSEY (On the “Hot Air” blog)

 

"If our furry and scaly friends were still evolving, none of them appeared to be gaining on us."--- JOE SOBRAN

 

“Nothing is more comical about Darwinians than the contortions they get into in trying to explain those 'altruistic' aspects of human nature which might seem to contradict their belief that the evolutionary drive is always essentially self-centered.” – CHRISTOPHER BOOKER               

 

“The real problem with Darwinians is their inability to see just how much their beguilingly simple theory simply cannot explain.” – CHRISTOPHER BOOKER

 

“Evolution is just the basis for all of modern eugenics.” – DANIEL FOSTER

"Those who think we descended from the apes -- probably did." -- EMILIO BAZOOM, (The Heir To The Napalm Fortune)  (actually Don Emilio was a college invention of mine who proved very useful as a source for epigrams on term papers)

"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

“Darwin's theory is basically natural history plus statistics – it's true, it's just much less interesting than everybody seems to think.” – JERRY FODOR (American philosopher and professor at Rutgers)

 

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

 

“Evolutionary change proceeds through small isolated populations; widespread species tend to stagnate in their own success.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

Exaggeration

“You can only exaggerate the truth, you cannot exaggerate a lie. An exaggerated lie is simply an even bigger lie.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

Example (and Bad Example)

“Example is the school of mankind, and he will learn at no other.” – EDMUND BURKE

 

“Old men give advice because they can no longer set a bad example.” – FRANCOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

 

Exasperation

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

 

Excellence

"All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare." -- SPINOZA

 

Excess

“You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.” – WILLIAM BLAKE

 

"Always go too far, because that’s where you’ll find the truth." -- ALBERT CAMUS

 

“Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.” – MARK TWAIN

"Avoiding excess in all things is a recipe for dullness and mediocrity." -- DAVID OGILVY 

"More is more, but less is a bore." -- IRIS APFEL      (a famous American fashionista and, incidentally, textile tycoon)

Excuses

“He that is good at making excuses is seldom good for anything else.” – BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

 

"The deadline is when you have to have your alibi ready." – DONALD WESTLAKE

"It is vital to always keep open that little possibility that it was all an accident, to unnerve any accuser, since no accuser can ever be 100% sure." -- JAMES HAWES

Exercise

“Skating on thin ice is a far better exercise than jogging” – JEFFREY BERNARD (silly, but cute…)

 

“Regular exercise is important. I do some every morning. Up down, up down – then the other eyelid.” – KEN DODD (old Brit comic)

 

“I don't generally like running. I believe in training by rising gently up and down from the bench.” – SATCHEL PAIGE

 

“The only exercise I take is at funerals – following the coffins of my friends who liked to exercise.” – PETER O’TOOLE

 

“The way to make coaches think you're in shape in the spring is to get a tan.” — WHITEY FORD

 

“A vigorous walk will do more good for an unhappy adult than all the medicine and psychology in the world.” - PAUL DUDLEY WHITE     (Famous 20th century cardiologist, from Massachusetts-- I think he looked after JFK, at one point)                   

 

“Look at the gym, where, by using the exact same equipment, women hope to become smaller and men hope to become larger.” – KYLE SMITH

 

"All the fat guys watch me and say to their wives, 'See, there's a fat guy doing okay. Bring me another beer'." -- MICKEY LOLICH (a roly-poly Detroit Tigers pitcher)

 

“When I saw my first jogger in Wales in the early 1970s I assumed he was running away from the police. Presumably joggers were familiar in California by then, but not elsewhere. I can’t imagine any of the characters in Goodfellas going jogging, any more than I can imagine Rick in Casablanca going to a spinning class.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

"Exercise and jogging -- it's all rather undignified and vain." -- HARRY MOUNT

 

“When I left the Army, I vowed never to run again, unless I was:

1/ Late for a train or plane or important meeting;

2/ Being chased by someone of manifest ill-intent;

or 3/ Involved in a game or sport that requires it, such as running with the bulls in Pamplona.” – JACK JOLIS

"Funny how much the pursuit of fitness has in common with the infliction of pain. I gaze at a gymnasium where men, grimacing with effort and glistening with sweat, are exercising on machines that, apart from their hi-tech finish, could be engines of torture straight out of a medieval dungeon." -- DAVID LODGE
 

“Every red-blooded Englishman has believed that exercise in the open air is the finest prophylactic against popery, adultery and the fine arts.” – PETER JONES (the UK SPECTATOR’s in-house “classicist”)

 

Exhaustion/Fatigue

“Fatigue makes cowards of us all.” – VINCE LOMBARDI

 

«What really mattered in combat was what people were like when they were exhausted.» -- KARL MARLANTES

 

«The unexpected is tiring.» – FAY WELDON

Exile/Emigration

"Exile is a negative condition: one is not living in a place so much as not living in a place." -- ANTHONY BURGESS (a self-exile himself)

"Emigrating is something like going to your own funeral, the only difference being that after your funeral your nervous system calms down." -- VASSILY AKSYONOV (the Russian writer who emigrated to America)

Existentialism

“D’you ever get the feeling that there’s something going on here that we don’t know about?” – BARRY LEVINSON      (Actually, Timothy Fenwick Jr., -- Kevin Bacon – in “Diner”. Levinson was the screenwriter.)                                                         

 

"You can't talk about nothing without treating it as something." -- NICHOLAS FRANKOVICH

 

“He was becoming invisible in his own eyes. Is there a terror greater than that?” – SHIVA NAIPAUL

 

Expectation (and the Unexpected)

“Expectations are premeditated resentments” – M. SCOTT PECK (a supposedly noted shrink and author, and I kind of like this....)

 

“Don't go around saying the World owes you a living; the World owes you nothing, it was here first.” – MARK TWAIN

 

“The unexpected is tiring.” – FAY WELDON

 

Experience

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

 

“Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.” – OSCAR WILDE

 

"Experience trumps brilliance." – THOMAS SOWELL

 

“Humanity never learns a lesson, in an enduring way, because –  this may make you laugh – people keep being born. And those who know, die.” -- JAY NORDLINGER

 

"A gram of experience is worth a ton of theory." -- LORD SALISBURY

 

“A fool learns from his experience. A wise person learns from the experience of others.” – OTTO VON BISMARK

 

“Life must be seen, before it can be known.” – DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON (This may well be the most banal entry in this whole Compendium, but... it looks handsome...)

 

“Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson after.” -- VERNON SANDERS LAW (the great 1950s-60s Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher)

 

"The old are not really smarter than the young, in terms of sheer brainpower. It is just that we have already made the kinds of mistakes that the young are about to make, and we have already suffered the consequences that the young are going to suffer if they disregard the record of the past. Those who glorify the young today do them a great disservice, when this sends inexperienced young people out into the world cocksure about things on which they have barely scratched the surface. Back when I taught at UCLA, I was constantly amazed at how little so many students knew. Finally, I could no longer restrain myself from asking a student the question that had long puzzled me: 'What were you doing for the last twelve years before you got here?'." -- THOMAS SOWELL

 

"All human institutions are essentially a reboot of high school." -- KURT SCHLICHTER

 

“The life of the Common Law has not been logic; it has been experience.” – OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

 

“If experience taught us anything, it was not to think too much, but to sharpen up the responses.” – LIONEL DAVIDSON (the moral – written, indeed, on the last page – of his superb 1960 spy novel, “The Night Of  Wenceslas”)

 

Experts/Expertise

“Guru is just another word for people who can’t spell charlatan.” -- MICHAEL FULLAN     (A Canadian professor and an education “guru” to British PM Tony Blair)                           

 

“If an expert says it can't be done, get another expert.” – DAVID BEN-GURION (Israel's first Prime Minister, of course.)

 

“If I wanted to kill the opposition by unfair means I would endow the opposition with experts.” – HENRY FORD

 

“No one ever considers himself an expert if he really knows his job.” – HENRY FORD

"There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get significant market share. No chance." -- STEVE BALLMER (Microsoft CEO... in 2007)

"By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the internet's impact on the economy will have been no greater than the fax machine's." -- PAUL KRUGMAN (the Nobel Prize-winning genius, hah hah I don't think... in 1998)

 

“I am only an expert at sounding like an expert.” – ISAAC ASIMOV

 

“Everyone is an insider somewhere.” – RICHARD CONDON (the lefty author of “The Manchurian Candidate” — makes a good point here.)

 

"Even when all the Experts agree, they may well be mistaken" -- BERTRAND RUSSELL (too bad the old boy wasn’t around to see the GlobWarm hoax.....)

 

"Just like a virus takes over a healthy cell, eviscerates it, and turns it into a factory to create more viruses, so the plague of experts has taken over all our systems of science, education, and even the arts, and turned them into factories to turn out more phony 'experts'." -- SARAH HOYT

"Experts come to know more and more about less and less." -- A. J. P. TAYLOR

 

“For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert; but for every fact there is not necessarily an equal and opposite fact.” - THOMAS SOWELL

Explanation (Explaining & “Mansplaining”)

“If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” – LEE ATWATER (the famed Republican gunslinger of the 80s…. And I should also add that this has been attributed to many others, at least 2 that I know of, RONALD REAGAN and the ex-football star and ex-GOP  Congressman from Texas, J. C. WATTS)

 

“There are some people who don't understand what an explanation is, never have, never will. Funnily enough they all seem to be women.” – KINGSLEY AMIS (from “The Folks That Live On The Hill”)

 

“Never explain. Your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe it.” – ELBERT HUBBARD (the 19th century American author of, amongst much other stuff, “A Letter To Garcia”)

 

“The only ones you maybe owe an explanation to are your commanding officer, your boss, or your family. Everyone else can get bent.” – JACK JOLIS

 

"Mansplaining means telling someone, often a woman, something they don't want to hear." -- ROD LIDDLE

"Real leaders didn't explain." -- TOM WOLFE      (I'm not sure if I'm entirely on board with this, but on the other hand, it's my man Tom Wolfe...so it goes in...)

Exploration

“Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time that has been devised.” – APSLEY GHERRY-GARRARD      (other than his splendid name, I know nothing about this splendid Brit…)    

 

“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

 

“It is not all pleasure, this exploration.” – DAVID LIVINGSTONE (De famous explorer, writing in his journal a few days before his wretched death in 1873 in a mud hut in some misbegotten chabonga in what became Northern Rhodesia in what is today's Zambia. In the words of Lucy Vickery, writing in the UK SPECTATOR, “his final days had been plagued by pneumonia, malaria, foot ulcers, piles, rotting teeth, leeches, hostile African tribesmen and a large blood clot in his gut.” Jeez. Well, at least he didn't end up in a stew-pot, like my poor old Cpt. Jaicintho dos Tortugas in P. N. Gwynne’s “Firmly By The Tail”....)

 

"To discover new lands you must first lose sight of the shore/" -- ANDRE GIDE (this may sound all nice and poetic, but as a good old imperialist, I'm not sure I buy it -- it sounds to this old colonialist like "going native". Unsound in the extreme.)

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


 “Sometimes science is the excuse for exploration, but I think it is rarely the reason.” – GEORGE MALLORY (of the first Mt. Everest expedition)

 

Extremism

“Extremism is the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” – BARRY GOLDWATER      (Barry's main slogan in his '64 campaign for president, for which, of course, he was resoundingly mocked by all the Usual Suspects....)        

 

“So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hat or for love?  Will we be extremists for the preservqtion of injustice, or for the extension of justice?” – MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. (From his “Letter From A Birmingham Jail”, in 1963, a year BEFORE Barry see above – and it should go without saying that he was most emphatically NOT mocked by all the usual Suspects....)

 

“No country was ever saved by good men, because good men will not go to the lengths that may be necessary to save the country.” – NICK SHORT (US blogger, “Politically Short”)

 

“We live in a narcissistic society, and for the narcissist, any form of criticism of their political position is 'hate speak' and 'extremism'. But they are neither of those things; they are simply opposing views.” – ROD LIDDLE