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Ice Hockey                                                                                                              

"Professional ice hockey is an ideal way for the entire family to keep fit. There's something for everyone: the kids will love participating in a loose, freewheeling sport where everybody makes the playoffs and the only activity that is specifically prohibited is selling narcotics to your opponents on the ice; Dad will appreciate the fact that he's improving his cardiovascular efficiency while at the same time fleeing large vicious toothless stick-wielding men whose frontal lobes have been battered into prune-sized masses of scar-tissue; and Mom will be pleased to learn that many of the players come from Canada, so she'll have a chance to 'brush up' on such French phrases as Arretez vous! Je suis une femme! C'est ma balle d'oeil! ('Stop! I am a woman! That is my eyeball!')" – DAVE BARRY

"Last year we couldn't win at home and we were losing on the road. My failure as a coach was that I couldn't think of anyplace else to play.” -- HARRY NEALE (ex-coach of the Vancouver Canucks, and this should more logically have gone under LOSING, but I felt bad about having only one entry under ICE HOCKEY)

"In hockey, you don't talk to the guys from the other team at all. You don't pick him up if he falls, like in football." -- JIM "SEAWEED" PETTIE (A 1970s Boston Bruin hockey player advising his amateur pal George Plimpton)

Iceland

"We Icelanders are the descendants of the most boring people in Europe, the Norwegians, and the drinkingest, the Irish." -- BJORN FRIDFINNSSON (A Reyjavik city administrator in 1986, during the Reagan-Gorbachev summit.)

“Icelandic sounds like Benny Hill speaking Swedish.” – PETER BIDDLECOMBE

"In Iceland they don't have much to eat apart from fish so they eat any old bollocks, especially old ram's bollocks preserved in sour fat. They also eat whale (which is not so bad — like a kind of fishy beef) and puffin (which is really quite bad: think fishy, gamey liber.)" -- SEAN THOMAS    (a British author and journalist)

Idealism

“Only those who know nothing of life can even pretend to love mankind.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

“Just improve yourself – that is all you can do to improve the world.” – LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

“I’m an idealist without illusions” – JOHN F. KENNEDY (good one, Jack…..)

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

“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false face for the urge to rule it.” - H. L. MENCKEN

“To say that humans have fallen short of ideals is not an argument against ideals.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"We fall short of our ideals, but everyone always does (that’s why they’re called ‘ideals’)." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“The opposite of an idealist is not a realist. A realist is an idealist who is aware of the limitations of a particular idea and of his own abilities. A realist is a pragmatic idealist. The opposite of an idealist is a cynic, a nihilist, an idealist who lost faith in the power of ideas, maybe a hedonist and often a European.” – HANA SCHOLZ (a lady from Peterborough, Ontario, writing in THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR, in March ’08)

“There is no point or purpose in any form of political idealism.  Not only does socialism do nothing to improve the lot of the poor, making it in fact considerably worse, but capitalism also, by scattering plenty o'er a smiling land, creates as much vileness and havoc as socialism creates poverty and oppression.” – AUBERON WAUGH

“The Will to Believe is best confined to the Religious Venue, as, to practice it elsewhere is just too damned expensive.” – DAVID MAMET

“The first thing a man will do for his ideal is lie.” – JOPSEPH SCHUMPETER (notice he said the “first” thing, and not the “last” thing....)

"Idealism is the curse of man's existence." -- CHARLES McCARRY

“Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive.” – WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

“Our dreams go far back but they always turn into bloodbaths.” – BERNARD-HENRY LEVY

“Idealism inflates.” – ROY CAM     (a clever fellow on the twoot.)                                                                                                                

“When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath is passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them.” – ERIC HOFFER

"Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism." -- CARL JUNG

Ideas

“The trouble with most of the Big Ideas is that at heart they’re small, mean ideas applied on a huge scale.” – MARK STEYN

“Never believe any ideas that occur to you indoors.” – FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (sounds about as useless, baselesss and wrong – and quotable – as the rest of his bilge…)

“The technology world has loads of energy but not enough ideas. The art world has ideas but not enough energy.” – DAVID GELERNTER (the Harvard prof. and Unabomber victim. I include this because it’s a “sound-bite”, but actually it doesn’t say anything clever at al, really.  Gelernter’s usually much wittier than this…)

“Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” – MILTON FRIEDMAN

“An idea is not responsible for the people who hold it,” – DON MARQUIS                                                                            (1878-1937, American humorist, journalist and novelist. His thought, here, has been repeated by both JOHN  DERBYSHIRE and  JOHN CLEESE. And it happens to neatly encapsulate ANTHONY “A Clockwork Orange” BURGESS’ worldview as well.)

“Most of our ideas are not propagated by reason but caught by contagion.” – DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON

"Never go die for a word, if what is important is the idea behind the word." -- HERNANDO DE SOTO (the great Peruvian free-market economist, here discussing he merits of the word "capitalism")

“The only valuable ideas are those that most other people disagree with.” – PETER THIEL                                             (the famous German-American, outside-the-box thinker and libertarian billionaire. Co-founder of Pay Pal, and a rare, early billionaire Trump supporter.)

“Almost all interesting ideas arouse hostility for a long period before they become adopted. I'd go further: no idea can be considered worthwhile unless it creates horrified comment in at least three national papers and is denounced by leading economists.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

“Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it's the only one you have.” –EMILE CHARTIER (French philosopher and pacifist, 1868-1951)

“New ideas are commonplace, and almost always wrong.” – JON WAINWRIGHT (A Londoner writing to THE SPECTATOR, in January 2017)

“A poor idea well written is more likely to be accepted than a good idea poorly written.” – ISAAC ASIMOV

"When it comes to the law in general, and crime and punishment in particular, the facts matter more than the ideas." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"People don't have ideas, ideas have people." -- CARL JUNG

“What rules the world is ideas, because ideas define the way reality is perceived.” – IRVING KRISTOL

"No bad idea is ever truly dead." -- DAN McLAUGHLIN                                                                                                           (an attorney in NYC, in NR in June 2019)

“First ideas were always the best.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS (in his1990 novel “The Wimbledon Poisoner”)

"In some ways this idea is appealing. As all appalling ideas are." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY

"The carpenter knows when something he has made is good and he has a pretty fair idea of how it's going to be used. A teacher or a writer never knows what might happen to the ideas he expresses." -- PHILIP THODY

Identity

"Questions about identity always turn out to be questions about origins." -- TOM HOLLAND                          (the historian. And this is a no-brain virtual tautology, but I include it because it sounds important)

“Identity Politics”

“People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it.” – CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

“The enemy of progress is the doctrine of knowing your place, the principle that your identity comes from membership of a group.” – MICHAEL GOVE (the Conservative MP and Minister of Education, UK, 2014)

"Identity politics is what modern jazz used to be: Certain intellectuals feel obliged to pretend to care about it, but you can't really dance to it." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Every situation is analyzed in terms of the bad people acting to preserve their power and privilege over the good people. This is not an education. This is induction into a cult. It’s a fundamentalist religion.” -- JONATHAN HAIDT (an American social psychologist and Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business)

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

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

"This is the way identity politics always ends, with competing victims ripping each other limb from limb. Maybe one day the entire radical left will devour itself and all that remains will be a brownish, slightly damp stain on a sofa." -- ROD LIDDLE

“Identity might be thought of as the solution to the problem of individuality.” – LEON WIESELTIER

“An affiliation is not an experience. It is, in fact, a surrogate for experience. Where the faith in God is wanting, there is still religious identity. Where the bed is cold and empty, there is still sexual identity. Where the words of the fathers are forgotten, there is still ethnic identity. The thinner the identity, the louder.” – LEON WIESELTIER

" 'Identity politics' on its own is just stupid -- but when it's invariably linked to alleged victimhood, it becomes evil." — JACK JOLIS 

“Identity politics is the product of prosperity. The movement’s nitpicking about undetectable-to-the-human-eye ‘microaggressions’ is an indulgence, most commonly among affluent white people hungry for the illusion of having problems (and enemies) for a sense of meaning.” – LIONEL SHRIVER

“We’ve grown so numbly accustomed to raising category over character that we’re forgetting how depressingly regressive this primitive tribal mindset is.” – LIONEL SHRIVER

"In the past three decades, the nature of the left has fundamentally changed. For much of the 20th century, it was universalist. While the record of communism tended to be one of repression and mass murder, the promise of the left was for people to stand in solidarity: Jew and gentile, black with white. The most famous communist exhortation was for the workers of the world to unite -- not for them to form racially segregated affinity groups.

But when the promised revolutions didn't materialize, a section of the left became disenchanted with the notion of equality. Instead, they adopted a focus on categories of ascriptive identity: gender, race, sexuality and more. they came to believe that progress is possible only if how we treat each other -- and how the state treats us -- depends explicitly on the groups into which we were born." -- YASCHA MOUNK (the German-born American political scientist, in October 2023)

"A course that encloses St. Augustine, Toussaint l'Ouverture, Coleridge-Taylor, Paul Robeson and Papa Doc, because they were all black, is as ridiculous as one that deals with Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Stalin, Mark Twain and Salvador Dali because they all had moustaches." -- ANTHONY BURGESS (writing in the "American Scholar")

 “All this concern with identity politics, this idea that we can control this element of life when actually we can’t control fuck all.” – IRVINE WELSH (the Scottish author of “Trainspotting”)

“Identity politics empowers people to make all sorts of claims, not because they are true but because it makes them feel superior.” – PETER JONES     (the resident “classicist” at THE UK SPECTATOR)

Ideology

“These are the communist ideologues; first in Moscow, then in Barcelona, now in Mexico, these credulous pilgrims pursue their quest for the promised land; continually disappointed, never disillusioned, ever thirsty for the phrases in which they find refreshment – they flock to wherever the present rulers have picked up a Marxist vocabulary.” – EVELYN WAUGH (about communists in Mexico, in 1939)

“The ideologist denies the permanence of the imperfection inherent in the human condition.” – DANIEL J. MAHONEY (author and poli-sci prof at Assumption College in Worcester, Mass.)

“Wars for territory have a finite end; wars for ideology do not.” – RAYMOND CARR

"Before you label something far-right, I kind of want to know what you think regular right is." -- FRANK J. FLEMING      (in June 2024) 

“I hate conservatives, but I really hate liberals;” – MATT STONE (Thesaintedco-producerandcreatorof “SouthPark”, aswellas “TeamAmerica”.  TheBrave. TheFew.  The Anti-liberals in Hollywood.)

“Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.” – ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN

“Ideology is not acquired by thought but by breathing the haunted air.” – LIONEL TRILLING

“Ideological certainty easily degenerates into an insistence upon ignorance.” – DAVID FRUM

"The 'end of ideology' has always been an ideological siren song for planners, an intellectual utopia for liberals desperate to cut short inconvenient debates. Its tune is a prelude to the chorus that pines for a 'New Politics' and even 'New Men'" -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“What does ‘ideology’ stand for?  Does it mean idiotism?” – JOHN ADAMS (commenting on the French Revolution.)

"The social liberalism always ends up burying the fiscal conservatism." – MARK STEYN

“Many of the nicest people deplore ideology in politics, but the problem is that, if nice people have no ideology, others do not follow their example. Nasty ideology has the field to itself. This is very marked in the sphere of Islamism.” – CHARLES MOORE

“When you cease to be aware that you have an ideology, it doesn’t make you a pragmatist, it makes you a dogmatist.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“Indeed, it is a constant trope of liberalism to believe — dogmatically, ideologically — that they are just empiricists and fact-finders doing what is right and good in a battle against dogmatic ideologues on the right.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“Ideology fills the hole left by the absence of a moral compass – which is why ideologues are often guilty of appalling misdeeds.” – TOBY YOUNG

“In the mainstream press a 'non-ideologue' is a liberal. (An 'ideologue' is a conservative.)” – ANDREW FERGUSON

“It is not surprising that ideology makes young men dangerous, for it is in the nature of ideology to answer all the difficult questions of human existence while giving believers the illusion of special understanding and destiny not available to others.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

“Human beings believe an ideology, as a rule, not because they are convinced rationally that it is true but because it satisfies psychological and social needs and serves, or seems to serve, individual or group interests.” – JAMES BURNHAM

“You can’t defend against what our enemies might do without studying what they believe.” – ANDREW C. McCARTHY

“Ideologies are to rational thought what viruses are to health. Both adapt and mutate in order to continue to target their enemies.” – JAMES W. CEASER (Prof. Of Politics at U. of Virginia.)

"Never attribute to incompetence what can better be explained by ideology. And it’s almost always leftist ideology." -- JACK JOLIS

"Instinctively non-ideological Americans are forever minimizing and underestimating the power of ideology... in our enemies -- (and always to our cost.)" -- JACK JOLIS 

"Ideology is the water we swim in." -- NINA POWER     (English philosopher, author of "What Do Men Want?"  Meanwhile, I think this is a thoroughly banal quote, but I include it just or its... "quotinesss"....)

Ignorance

“The ignorant are not just some separate group of people.” – THOMAS SOWELL

“It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.” – THOMAS SOWELL

“Everybody is ignorant, but just about different things.” – WILL ROGERS

“The most expensive thing we pay for in this country is ignorance.” – RUSH LIMBAUGH

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” – THOMAS JEFFERSON

“Learn to say ‘I don't know.’ If used when appropriate, it will be often.” – DONALD RUMSFELD

“It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.” – PIERRE BEAUMARCHAIS

“The deeper our belief, the wider our ignorance” -- DANNY DE BELDER (My Belgian polymath friend)

 "The real argument against aristocracy is that it always means the rule of the ignorant. For the most dangerous of all forms of ignorance is ignorance of work." – G. K. CHESTERTON (in 1918)

"There's nobody in the world who is right about everything. Those people simply do not exist. But there are plenty of people who are wrong about everything.” -- JOHN O'SULLIVAN (the urbane and erudite Liverpool-born O'Sullivan is one of only three people ever to have been Editor of NATIONAL REVIEW -- in between the founding Squire Fabuckley and the current ex-boss of Janie's, Rich Lowry.)

"We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid." -- BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

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

"Historical ignorance facilitates those who are already in power." -- JAY COST

"There are two important factors at play here: The first is ignorance of the past, and the second is ignorance of the present." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.” --  LEO TOLSTOY

"The day will come in which our descendants marvel at us  not knowing such apparent things." -- SENECA (THE YOUNGER)

"Ignorance makes a sweet, soft pillow" -- MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE (1533-1592)

“We are divided by our ignorance. In response to citizens’ lack of knowledge, politics has become tribal and reactionary.” – STEPHEN TOOTLE (a history prof at The College Of The Sequoias, in August 2019)

"Ignorance is the natural state of things." -- MATT RIDLEY (Goes nicely with poverty, which is ALSO the "natural state of things".)

"That's the best way to be. Ignorance leaves you without fear. It's a wonderful tool." -- JOHN LYDON (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten, of The Sex Pistols -- in 1994) 

Illinois

“It used to be 'The Land Of Lincoln'. Now it's just Venezuela with blizzards.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE (in Feb. 2016)

“Living next to Illinois is like living next to the Simpsons.” – MITCH DANIELS (When he was the GOP governor of neighboring Indiana)

Illusion (& Disillusion)

“The substance dies; the form remains.” --  OSWALD SPENGLER

"Unfortunately, between the idea and the reality always lies the shadow." -- JEREMY CLARKE

Imagination                                                                                                            

“Imagination, like thought for Hamlet, could be the enemy of action.” – ALAN JUDD

"Intelligence is a function of CuriositywhileCreativity is a function of Imagination." -- JACK JOLIS

Imitation                                                                                                                                                          

“Imitation can be as good as the real thing, when the real thing is itself bankrupt.” – RITA KOGANZON                          (a graduate student at Harvard, in 2014)                                     

Immigration (Immigrants)

“One of the reasons America has an illegal-immigration problem is that it has a legal-immigration problem.” -- MARK STEYN (have you, or someone you know, tried to immigrate into the US legally lately? D’you have any Idea how that works – or rather doesn’t work?)

"There are reasons why countries have borders... if you have no border, you have no country." – MARK STEYN

«You can't ask an illegal immigrant for ID, even at the voting booth or after commission of a crime, but a legal immigrant has to have his Green Card on him even when he's strolling in the woods behind his house.» -- MARK STEYN

“This is not an immigration issue. Rather, this is a fascinating template (to put it at its mildest) on how to subvert national sovereignty.” – MARK STEYN

“When you outsource the future, don’t be surprised if it doesn’t turn out the way you expected.” – MARK STEYN

“First rule of immigration: NUMBERS ARE OF THE ESSENCE.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

"Immigration is neither good not bad for the economy, but it's good for freedom. In principle, you ought to have completely open immigration. But with the welfare state it's really not possible to do that.  If there were no welfare state, you could have open immigration, because everybody would be responsible for himself. But you can't have open immigration without largely the elimination of welfare.” – MILTON FRIEDMAN

“In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language.. And we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.” – THEODORE ROOSEVELT (in 1907)

"The only people who care about immigration policies when the press coverage stops are those who don't want the law enforced." – KATE O’BEIRNE (Washington Editor of National Review, in August 2006)

«Any immigrant to America today can probably survive with mastery of only three idioms: (1) No problem, (2) Go screw yourself, and (3) Have a nice day.» -- JOSEPH EPSTEIN (in April 1999)

“A country with no borders is not a country.” – THOMAS JEFFERSON

“Immigration policy is a branch of mathematics, not weekend work for employees of the Hallmark Card Company.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

“The mythic American phrase ‘a nation of immigrants’ is either platitudinous (all nations are nations of immigrants if you go back far enough) or false (America is a nation of assimilated ex-immigrants and their descendants, or it would not be a nation).” – DIGBY ANDERSON (English food columnist and curmudgeon)

“We ethnics may have come from immigrants, know and like immigrants, etc., but, for me at least, having a generally positive image of it is vastly different from saying we should always, under all circumstances, have a steady stream of it. Without assimilation, immigration is not a force for good in a society like ours.” – ANDREW C. McCARTHY

“A dependence on immigration (as opposed to a preference for it as an attractive multicultural bonus) is always a sign of structural weakness and should be addressed as such.” – MARK STEYN

"Borders are the fundamental organizing principles for the modern world.” – MARK STEYN

“We say you may not enter the country illegally, but if you do, the following benefits are available to you.” – GOV. PETE WILSON (ex-Gov. of California. A liberal Republican, he nevertheless was pretty sound on immigration, for which pains he was branded a “racist”. Here recalling Milton Friedman’s sage observation that “the immigration problem is, in fact, a welfare problem”.)

“When government officials throw taxpayers’ money out of the window, it makes no sense to blame those who gather beneath to retrieve it.” – TOM BETHELL

"I have come to the depressing conclusion that the white ethnicities that constituted the nations of Western Civilization have degenerated into such insouciance and stupidity that they have no possibility of survival. They sit mindlessly in front of TV absorbing their brainwashing and indoctrination.They can’t pay their rent, mortgage or car payments, but they pay endlessly for care of immigrant-invaders who are overwhelming their communities." -- PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS    (an Assistant Treasury Secretary under Reagan, in ZERO HEDGE on 29 Janury 2024) 

“Keep the immigrants. Deport the Columbia faculty.” – JASON RILEY (Black American pro-immigration author and journalist. Here, anyway ,in Sept. 2008,  he was certainly not wrong…)

“Like the motto of the immigration bar says: It ain't over til the alien wins.” – MARK KRIKORIAN

“Shrinking government, like enforcing immigration laws, is like broccoli to the political class, whereas getting more revenue is, along with amnesty, the dessert — our representatives will eat as little of the broccoli as they can get away with to clear the way for dessert.” – MARK KRIKORIAN

                                                                                                                                                                                                "There are winners and losers from immigration. The small economic gain arises from a large-scale redistribution of wealth from Americans who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants. And that small economic gain may be entirely canceled out by the fiscal burden of providing government services for immigrants." -- MARK KRIKORIAN

“Happy the country which has a long queue at the door.” – ROSS CLARK                                                           (a columnist for the UK SPECTATOR)

“Unhappy the country which has long queues inside its door – for housing, buses, trains,; doctors' appointments, operations, social security and schools.” – NICK BOOTH                                                         (a reader of the UK SPECTATOR, in answer to Mr. Clark, above. And this exchange occurred in early 2012)

“If you are descended from immigrants, ask yourself: Why did they come to America? To find a fairer system of forced income redistribution? Unlikely. Rather, they came in search of a system that would reward their hard work, innovation and ambition.” – ARTHUR C. BROOKS (best-selling conservative author and the boss of the American Enterprise Institute)

“The ability to live and work legally in America is the most valuable commodity in the world; it’s the Hope Diamond of the universe.” – ANN COULTER

“There are many negative consequences to amnesty, but the one that I think ought to concern (Republicans) is that if amnesty goes through, America becomes California and no Republican will ever win another national election.” – ANN COULTER

“Illegal immigration is to immigration what shoplifting is to shopping.” – JERRY AGAR       (A Canadian commenter on SUN-TV up there in March ’13)

“When I was a Revolutionary Marxist, we were all in favour of as much immigration as possible. It wasn’t because we liked immigrants, but because we didn’t like Britain. We saw immigrants — from anywhere — as allies against the staid, settled, conservative society that our country still was at the end of the Sixties. Also, we liked to feel oh, so superior to the bewildered people – usually in the poorest parts of Britain – who found their neighbourhoods suddenly transformed into supposedly ‘vibrant communities’. If they dared to express the mildest objections, we called them bigots.” – PETER HITCHENS

“Impressive feats of sophistry have become the norm in discussions of illegal immigration. For example, we are told that there is no way that the government can find all the people who are in the country illegally and deport them. Does anyone imagine that the government can find all the embezzlers, drunk drivers, or bank robbers in the country? And does anyone think that this is a reason why the government should stop trying to enforce laws against embezzlement, drunk driving, or bank robbery? Or let embezzlers, drunk drivers, and bank robbers ‘come out of the shadows’ and ‘normalize’ their lives?” – THOMAS SOWELL

"Immigration laws are the only laws that are discussed in terms of how to help people who break them." – THOMAS SOWELL

" 'We are a nation of immigrants,' we are constantly reminded. We are also a nation of people with ten fingers and ten toes. Does that mean that anyone who has ten fingers and ten toes should be welcomed and given American citizenship?" – THOMAS SOWELL

“It’s easier to blame other people than to blame yourself. You can export your problems to the unwitting United States. But it’s not good for Mexico when American politicians don’t stand up for their own dignity. Instead they just say, ‘Yes, of course, we should help the illegal Mexicans’.” – FREDO ARIAS-KING (A foreign policy adviser to ex-Mexican President Vicente Fox)

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

“I accept that you could give illegal immigrants amnesty after 12 years, but the key thing is to kick them out before they reach first base.” -- BORIS JOHNSON          (It would seem curious that the UK Prime Minister and former Mayor of London should use a phrase such as “reach first base” until you remember that he was born in the U.S. and was for a long time a dual U.S.-British citizen. Incidentally, three other interesting things about him are 1/ he actually speaks French and before going to Eton he attended the International School in Brussels; 2/ his paternal great-grandfather was Ali Kemal Bey, the Minister of the Interior in the last government of the Ottoman Empire; and 3/ his middle name is "de Pfeffel".)

“Wake up an amnesty supporter in the middle of a muggy Washington D.C. night and the first words out of his mouth will be, ''It’s not amnesty''.” -- – DANIEL GREENFIELD                                                              (In FrontPage Magazine, August 2013)

“People in the US illegally already have citizenship. It's just in a different country.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

“You can't be in favor of a particular immigration policy if you're not willing to enforce any immigration policy.” - JONAH GOLDBERG

“Legal immigrants have been required under federal law to carry their papers for generations. If you’re for that in theory but against it in practice, you’re against enforcing any kind of immigration policy at all.” - JONAH GOLDBERG (a variation on the previous quote.)

“During the mass migration of Europeans across the Atlantic, all the cheery souls with get-up-and-go just got up and went, leaving the gloomy folk behind.”  -- MATT RIDLEY (The English “popular scientist” and author)

“Immigration is the most important subject facing this country, but I cannot get any of my ministers to take any notice.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL (in 1955)

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

“I don’t mean to be obtuse, but why is it a crisis that illegal aliens are 'living in the shadows'? . . . It is not a crisis for Americans that other people have come into their country illegally and now find it uncomfortable to be living here breaking the law. It’s supposed to be uncomfortable to break the law. Perhaps illegal aliens should have considered that before coming.” – ANN COULTER

“Immigration is how the Left decided to punish America.”– ANN COULTER

“Amnesty advocates complain that crossing a US boundary, (their word) is dangerous for illegals. Whadaya want – bus service?” -- MICHAEL GRAHAM

“As a graduate of Oral Roberts University, I don't recall Jesus saying anything about deport not the illegal immigrants'."     -- MICHAEL GRAHAM

«Given the unpopularity of liberal policies, the blue-state solution is to bring in the Mexicans and put them on the voter rolls.” – TOM BETHELL

“Open borders” isn’t an epithet -- it’s an actual world view, one all but universal among the leaders of one of our two political parties (and not rare in the other). This is why we haven’t been able to have a normal political debate over immigration: we don’t agree on the basic parameters." -- MARK KRIKORIAN

«Only two things really matter on immigration: who you take in, and in what numbers. We refuse to discuss the former and our governments botch the latter.» -- DOUGLAS MURRAY

"Migration is that thing that more than any other affects the future of a nation." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY 

"If you have open borders and no checks on who is arriving, a certain uptick in rape and other crimes will inevitably occur. We all know this, but because politicians from every main party have presided over or actively enouraged it, the whole business becomes just one of those unacknowledged downsides of diversity. We permit peopleto breakinto our countries, we put them up in hotels, let them disappear, and blame ourselves if their lives don't go right." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY

“We are not a nation of immigrants, we are a nation of citizens.” – MARK LEVIN

"The 'cause' of migration? Biden's the 'cause' of migration!" -- MARK LEVIN     (Jan "24) 

“By the way, ‘sanctuary’ from what? A government that refuses to take the nation’s borders seriously and refuses to protect American citizens is evil.” -- MICHAEL WALSH

“Ultimately, no nation can continue to thrive if its government refuses to enforce its own laws.” -- VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

"The illegal-immigration project will ultimately fail because although its politics are transparent, its practice is incoherent, and chaos is therefore its only possible end. With the exception of an ailing European Union, no other country in the world — certainly not Mexico or China — would allow its open borders to become as politically weaponized as America’s. Yet no other nation is so faulted as illiberal as is the uniquely liberal United States. The result is a growing American exasperation. Ingratitude and hypocrisy stir human passions like few others traits." -- VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

“You Americans invented freedom. You invented freedom. And you’re on your way to losing it, not because of newcomers unwilling to become Americans, but because of natives unwilling to teach them.” – PETER SCHRAMM (Who was brought to America by his family from their native   Hungary in '56 when he was 10. Like me, and bout the same time that I was “hosting” Ishtvan Lehel in Paris and becoming a lifelong anti-communist and anti-leftist conservative at that young age. Schramm died in 2015)

“Immigration without assimilation is invasion.” -- BOBBY JINDAL

"They came largely to get away -- that most simple of motives. To get away. Away from what? In the long run, away from themselves. Away from everything. That's why most people have come to America, and still do come. To get away from everything they are and have been. 'Henceforth be masterless.'  Which is all very well, but it isn't freedom." -- D. H. LAWRENCE

“We must insist on assimilation. Immigration without assimilation is an invasion. We need to tell folks who want to come here that they need to come here legally. They need to learn English, adopt our values, roll up their sleeves, and get to work. I am tired of the hyphenated Americans.”– BOBBY JINDAL

“The Left would rather blow up the whole country than admit the stupidity of thinking a nation can remain the same after inviting in millions of people who despise its values.” – SARAH PALIN

“Whenever a government is seen to have immigration flows under control, public support for immigration increases. When the reverse occurs, hostility to immigration rises.” – JOHN HOWARD (the ex-conservative Prime Minister of Australia. Their Ronald Reagan)

“We will decide who comes to our country.” – JOHN HOWARD (Aussie. See above.)

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

“This ‘immigration’ is an organized replacement of our population. This threatens our very survival. We don't have the means to integrate those that are already here. The result is endless cultural conflict.” – MARINE LE PEN

“Immigration is like Turkey, as an 'issue': very important, very boring to research, document, and debate, and prone to conflagration when general equilibrium is disrupted.” – ANNE JOLIS

“For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country.” -- ENOCH POWELL (the "rivers of blood" chap, so reviled by the Left. Although i also turns out he was a bit of an anti-American, in his spare time...)

“Rather than pursuing an immigration policy that would protect vulnerable American workers and bring in skilled immigrants while disavowing Trump's divisive tone and his impractical and overbroad prescriptions, the Republican Party 'establishment' is promoting a quasi-open-borders policy that will perhaps keep maid service cheap for GOP donors – while electing a generation of Obamas.” – JEREMY CARL (a fellow at the Hoover Institution, in January 2016)

“Anti-immigrant sentiment is not at large among the public. There is just anti-immigration sentiment, which is a very different thing. People do not hate immigrants or wish to see them persecuted. They simply wish to stop the uncontrolled numbers flooding in.” – ROD LIDDLE

"A nation 'redefining itself' from being an homogenous, disciplined and decent nation which once ruled a third of the globe to a fetid open sewer full of morbidly obese, illiterate, tattooed chavs (louts in sweatsuits), primitive and neurologically diverse jihadis, sexual perverts, Balkan pickpockets, pink-haired student activists with the IQ of an ill-maintained fridge freezer, mithering, stupid, self-flagellating, Actimel-swigging middle-class liberals, drug lords from the dusty arid wastes of what was once called Turkestan, weird and troubled men-women and women-men, and excitable hordes from the Mahgreb and the Levant who have fled terror and repression in their own lands and now wish to establish both here, inshallah." -- ROD LIDDLE 

"Our canny policy of allowing into the country anybody who wants to come, especially if they are from some maniacal, fly-blown, Stone-Age-desert theocracy and would quite like to kill us, is paying dividens. Ever onwards and upwards." -- ROD LIDDLE

“When a people emigrate, the rulers are the surpluses.” - JOSE MARTI ("Cuando un pueblo migra sus gobernantes sobran". Cuba’s George Washington.)

"We wanted workers, but we got people instead." -- MAX FRISCH (About his native Switzerland)

"There is a powerful lobby for which all migration is an unalloyed good, and any attempt to thwart it is evil. For this group of lawyers and campaigners, no migrant has ever sought to misuse the asylum system by claiming to be in danger when they are not; no criminal or terrorist has ever tried to slip into the country under the guise of false claims of persecution in their homelands -- and anyone who  claims they do is bigoted." -- THE SPECTATOR (EDITORIAL) (the UK Spectator, 28 October 2023) 

“Mass immigration under the banner of multiculturalism does not enrich nations but reduces them to squabbling enclaves.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

“America has been a nation of restricted and interrupted immigration as much as it has been a nation of immigration.” – SAMUEL HUNTINGTON (the celebrated American author and Harvard political scientist)

"How does the United States continue as a recognizable United States after reaching a critical demographic mass of aliens who do not want to assimilate?" -- SAMUEL HUNTINGTON (in 2008, the year he died)

"But meanwhile, the omnipotent media is missing something huge: the whole world wants to come to America. The Muslims want to leave their Muslim countries and come to Christian America. Doesn't that tell us something about how valuable this country is as it is? If we’re a fascist, racist state, why do the people from Yemen and Iran want to come here?" – BEN STEIN

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

“They are not sanctuary cities. They are criminal hideouts.” – JAMES WOODS (the excellent Hollywood actor and rare Hollywood conservative.)

“To welcome into the house people who will then make it unlivable is the stuff of some  grim fable of moral instruction.” – DAVID PRYCE-JONES

"The bad news? It's all amnesty all the time in both parties. The good news? We're rapidly becoming a 3rd world country so there wont be a need for any more illegal migration." -- DAVID HOROWITZ (the ex-60s revolutionary commie, turned good guy – author of “Radical Son”)

“If the expression of tribal loyalties is encouraged among incomers but denied to natives there'll be trouble. And there is.” – LLOYD EVANS (in October 2017)

“Even a Shining City on a Hill Needs Walls.” – TOM COTTON

"The Democratic party establishment and donors broadly agree with their grassroots on nearly every issue; in the GOP the donors and establishment not only disagree with their grassroots, they think they’re stupid, especially on issues like trade and immigration.” – STEVE BANNON

“Of course, no barrier would be foolproof, but it doesn't have to be. It simply has to reduce the river to a manageable trickle – and once we do, everything becomes possible, including dealing with our eleven million illegal immigrants. We can't grant them citizenship – that's a bridge too far. But any of their children born here would be American, so eventually that problem would solve itself. So let's do that. Track the visas, do E-Verify, build the damn barrier – it's ridiculous to say that it can't be done.” – CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

"I ask for no special treatment ― I just want to be treated like an illegal immigrant." -- HOWIE CARR (the semi-legendary talk-show guy out of Boston, in March 2018)

"Illegal immigration is a classic Marxist redistributionist plot. In this case, what’s being redistributed is America’s wealth to third-world nationals with no discernible skills and no intention of becoming 'American'.” -- MELISSA MACKENZIE     (in the AMSPEC, Feb '24)

“Most immigration statistics are untrustworthy – because they're too low. With all immigration figures, round up. Government has a/ no idea how to track people with every motivation to keep off the radar, and b/ every motivation itself to underestimate an unpopular social phenomenon with a range of adverse consequences, that it cannot seem to control.” – LIONEL SHRIVER

"Word to the wise: never trust immigration figures. those are only the people the government knows about." -- LIONEL SHRIVER

"We keep searching for a hidden agenda, but imputing a covert ulterior motive to these folks (who favor illegal immigration) gives them too much credit. They want to flood our countries with foreigners because they want to flood our countries with foreigners. Mystery solved." -- LIONEL SHRIVER

“Anywhere, when the proportion of the ‘other’, however they might be defined, crosses a critical and perhaps even quantifiable statistical line, people who were born in a place stop getting excited about all the new ethnic restaurants and start getting pissed off.

Most people want to live around people like themselves. Most people are capable of hospitality towards foreigners who arrive in modest numbers, but balk when outsiders are so populous that they seem to be taking over.” – LIONEL SHRIVER (in August 2021)

"Any country that exercises no discretion over who crosses its borders isn't just not a democracy, it isn't a country." -- LIONEL SHRIVER 

"The welfare state is supposed to be a modern nation acting like a big family or community, but families and communities have boundaries that make clear who's in and who's out." -- WILLIAM VOEGELI

“For everyone who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there that weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” -- STEVE KING                                                                                                                                 (ex-Republican congressman from Iowa's 4th district. And his enemies thought this was just frightfully “racist” and beyond the pale... whereas I don’t.)

"The southern border wall should be electrified, with the kind of current that wouldn’t kill somebody but would be a discouragement.  We do that with livestock all the time.” -- STEVE KING

"We can't restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies." -- STEVE KING

"And this whole 'we're a nation of immigrants' crap burns my ass, in any case. For fucks' sakes, with the possible exception of bits of Iraq and Ethiopia, every country on earth is 'a nation of immigrants' -- so what? Does that mean we renounce borders? and citizenship?" -- JACK JOLIS

"Wanting 'open borders' is like wanting to be a conjoined twin." -- PHILIP SCHUYLER                     (on the Twoot)

“Farm jobs are a trivial share of the modern US labor force. At most, 2% of all immigrants (legal and illegal) are farm laborers. Among illegal immigrants, Pew Research has estimated, it is just 5%. To be sure, immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, make up a large share of farm workers, but farm workers are a tiny share of workers overall and even of immigrant workers. The farm lobby may keep concerns about agricultural labor front and center in the immigrant debate, but in truth, farm workers are largely irrelevant to deliberations about immigration’s impact on American workers.” -- STEVEN CAMAROTA                                       (Director of the Center For Immigration Studies, in Sept. 2018)

“The Left is the Third World on Wheels – and it’s here.” – CHRIS PLANTE                                                         (on the wireless on 29 November 2018)

“A simple matter of border security, which along with delivering the mail and defending the nation against all enemies (foreign and domestic), are the purposes of government, seems to cause panic in Washington.” – ROGER KAPLAN 

“Without illegal immigration, Democrats cannot survive as a viable political party. Illegal immigration is rewarded with free perks, and illegal fraudulent voting is the tacitly accepted quid pro quo.” – JAMES WOODS                                                                                                                        (the famous actor – a rare Hollywood good guy)

"What has changed my mind about immigration now—even legal immigration—is that our culture has weakened to the point where it’s no longer attractive enough for people to want to assimilate to, and we don’t insist that they do assimilate. When I was a kid, I lived in a neighborhood that had immigrant Jews, immigrant Italians (mainly from Sicily), and immigrant blacks—that is, they had come up from the South recently. It was incidentally one of the things that made me a lifelong skeptic about integration because far from understanding each other and getting to know each other, all we did was fight."-- NORMAN PODHORETZ

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

"...if they cannot accommodate themselves to the character, moral, political, and physical, of this country, with all its compensating balances of good and evil, the Atlantic is always open to them, to return to the land of their nativity and their fathers."— JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

“The 9/11 hijackers would have been caught a dozen times over by a society that enforced its immigration laws.” – DAVID FRUM        (in NR in June 2007)

“It saddens me to see the white man beating his breast over and over, too emasculated to put up any resistance to people who’ve come to threaten him on his own doorstep.” – ERNEST TIGORI (the Ivoirian author and “political activist” and winner, of all things, of the 2017 Nelson Mandela Prize For Literature)

“It was fun thirty-five years ago to travel far and in great discomfort to meet people whose entire conception of life and manners of expression were alien. Now one has only to leave one’s gates.” – EVELYN WAUGH (in 1963)

“Perhaps a nation is an abstraction whose one solidity is customs and immigration.” – ANTHONY BURGESS (in his short story “The Endless Voyager”)

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

“When people say ‘I don’t recognize the place’, they’re usually talking about the effects of immigration.” –  JULIE BURCHILL (Yup.)

“If the enemy leaves a door open, you must rush in.” – SUN TZU

"No sane 1st World country opens its borders to the world." -- TUCKER CARLSON

"How can you say you're a nation of laws if people from other countries don't have to obey your laws?" -- TUCKER CARLSON

"You can always get into those places (central African countries). What is hard is to get out." -- V. S. NAIPAUL

"Demography determines our destiny." -- ERIC ZEMMOUR

“Immigration is war. They want to invade our European countries. That’s all. It’s nothing else. It’s war.” – ERIC ZEMMOUR                                   (in November 2021)

“It was a grave mistake to let in so many people of totally different cultures and religions” -- HENRY KISSINGER (in Oct. 2023. Now he tells us....)

“Borders should be inviolate, and sovereignty should be respected.” -- JONATHAN FINER (Deputy National Security Adviser to the Biden administration, 25 Jan 2022. Of course, he was referring to Ukraine, not the U.S.A.)

“There's no end to it. It’s a movement of individuals from third world countries, into our country. But the farther you get into it, the more you realize it’s all done by design—and it’s at the design of the federal government. We’re in a transformation of America from a free Republic to moving to something that’s more of a Marxist state." -- SHERIFF ROY BOYD (of Goliad, Texas, in July 2022)

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

"We're no longer a sovereign nation, with defended borders -- we're a globalist landing-spot." -- JEANINE PIRRO (On WABC radio, Noo Yawk, on 22 May 2023)

"While it is trivial to enter the United States illegally, it is insanely difficult for legal immigrants to move to the United States. This is madness!" -- ELON MUSK

"An undocumented immigrant is not a criminal." -- KAMALA HARRIS     (er, I would refer the feckless Kahaha Mattris to 8 U.S. Code §1325)

" 'Legal' immigrants tend to vote for Republicans while 'illegal' migrants tend to vote for Democrats." -- KELLY REK      (an insightful truism from my X-pal, a lady with Finnish roots from Arizona)

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

Impeachment

“All in all, the framers would probably agree that it's better to impeach too often than too seldom. If presidents can't be virtuous, they should at least be nervous.” – JOE SOBRAN

"I impeached myself by resigning." -- RICHARD M. NIXON

"Impeachment may soon become the norm for any president whose opponents happen to control the House of Representatives." -- FREDDIE GRAY (The Deputy Editor of the UK SPECTATOR, in June 2022, and he's absolutely right and we only have the Democrats' outrageous behavior towards Trump to thank for this) 

Imperialism, Empires

«I’m a subject of Her Britannic Majesty and  in my country, Canada, insofar as any of our institutions work, they do so because they derive from Britain.  That’s true of a lot of the world – St. Lucia, Australia, Mauritius, Singapore, South Africa, Tuvalu…. It’s worth considering, for example, what the Indian subcontinent would be like if it weren’t the world’s biggest Westminster-style democracy.  Without the long British experience, it might look something like the Middle East – a patchwork of princely states presided over by sultans and maharajahs, Hindu and Muslim, punctuated by thug dictatorships following Baath-type local variations on fascism and Marxism.  It would be a profoundly unstable region with a swollen uneducated citizenry of little use for call centers or tech support.» -- MARK STEYN

«The foundation of empires are often occasions of woe; their dismemberment always.» -- EVELYN WAUGH

“In fact, aside from a small number of connected businessmen, nobody made all that much money off of empires. Overseas empires were more an effect of industrialization than a cause. Industrial success enabled European nations to acquire overseas empires on the cheap, given steamships and machine guns.” – JAMES C. BENNETT (the author of “The Anglosphere Challenge”.)

“All empires run themselves, or they don't run at all. That, in practice, means that they rely on the local bigwigs to do what local bigwigs have always done, but under the direction of their new masters.” – PETER JONES (the UK SPECTATOR's resident “classicist”. And on of my favorite examples of this truism is Pontius Pilate’s agreeing to the will of the Sanhedrin)

“It is terrible to see an empire put together but it is even worse to see what happens when they fall apart.”-- THEODORE MOMMSEN (German historian)

“Empires end, usually more quickly than expected. They're not always replaced by something better. Worth remembering at election time.” – TUCKER CARLSON

“Russia’s borders do not end anywhere.” -- VLADIMIR PUTIN   (on a billboard in Moscow in January 2024)

"Modern times are too quick for empires, which can form and hold together only in a world of slow pace." -- MARK HELPRIN

 "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

“An empire is at the point of eclipse when it allows its border policy to be handled by local warlords.” – HRISTO IVANOV (a Bulgarian ex Justice Minister and head of “anti-corruption”, in 2020)

“Every invincible empire in the history of humanity was, uh, vinced.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"The history of humanity is surely the history of competition for imperial hegemony, which has gradually propelled the form of empires from their original local nature toward the current tendency toward global empires, and finally toward a single world empire." -- JIANG SHIGONG (Of Peking University Law School, in 2020. Pretty well describing her régime in 2020)

“These half-civilized Governments such as those of China, Portugal, Spanish America, all require a dressing down every eight or ten years to keep them in order. Their minds are too shallow to receive an impression that will last longer than some such period and warning is of little use. They care little for words and they must not only see the stick but actually feel it on their shoulders before they yield to that argument which brings conviction.” – LORD PALMERSTON (HENRY JOHN TEMPLE) (Hear hear. Britain’s Foreign Minister said this in 1850)

“Empire cannot be built on rickety and flat-chested citizens.” – LORD ROSEBERY (ARCHIBALD PRIMROSE) (the delightfully-named Archibald Primrose was British Prime Minister 1894-95, and he said this around the turn of the century. Given the mores of the time, one can only assume that the flat-chested citizens he was referring to were male ones....)

“A democracy is incapable of empire.” – CLEON (This chap, Cleon, was an Athenian general in the 5th century BC, and while I’m not so sure these words of his proved accurate, I am confident that they’re thought-provoking.)

“When does an empire begin to die? When its privileged citizens begin to disdain war.” – JOHN UPDIKE

"Empires have no interest in operating within an international system; they aspire to be the international system." -- HENRY KISSINGER

“The closer the collapse of the Empire, the crazier its laws are.” -- CICERO (MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO)

"Imperialism was the only antidote to the East African slave trade." -- THOMAS PACKENHAM (a grudging admission from the liberal historian, in his 1991 tome "The Scramble For Africa")

"A great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges." -- BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (in 1773)

"The history of the world is the history of empires. Ancient China, Greece and Rome, the Islamic, the acquisitive states of precolonial India and Africa were all imperial powers long before the great European empires. Violent migration in search of resources disrupts existing patterns of indigenous life. But it has also served to unlock the riches of the world, to spread technical knowledge and to enlarge cultural horizons, all processes which have immeasurably benefitted mankind." --JONATHAN SUMPTION     (the former senior British judge, as well as noted author and historian)

“Imperialism” (American)

«The nature and history we Americans lack the patience and perseverance of imperial peoples.  We are not the party of empire; we are the party of liberty.» -- PATRICK J. BUCHANAN

“We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years and we’ve done this as recently as the last year in Afghanistan and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in.” – COLIN POWELL

“People love to say, ‘America can’t be the world’s policeman.’ Fine. But what if there’s a world criminal?” – JEANNE KIRKPATRICK

"The world becomes more dangerous, not less dangerous when America gets less involved." – CHUCK HAGEL (The Corpseman's 1st SecDef―a sort of isolationist/dovish Republican senator from Nebraska who had to be one of the most naïve pols alive when he accepted the gig, but he showed quite a bit of integrity after he left office.)

“The world does not go away when America retreats.” – HENRY R. NAU                                                                             (Poli-sci prof at Geroge Washington Univ. and author of “Conservative Internationalism; in Sept. 2013)

"Be the world's policeman, not its priest." -- BRET STEPHENS

"The 'world's policeman' is now tooting about in little anti-hate-crime cars covered in rainbow colors." -- LIONEL SHRIVER  (On 11 September -- !! -- 2021)

“You’re not going to like what comes after America.” – LEONARD COHEN (of all people. And a great quote – it’s certainly brought me a lot of profit....)

"If I have to choose between a drug dealer and United States imperialism, I prefer the drug dealer." -- GRAHAM GREENE (The old piece of shit divulged this when the U.S. was deposing Manuel "Cara de Pina" Noriega, under the Reagan administration.)

"People have lived in more freedom under the aegis of US Power than ever before in the History of Man." -- KEVIN O'NEILL (A fellow on the Twoot -- in fact, this is taken from his Twoot-profile)

"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) 

“It is natural to ask, if America will not bear the burden, who else will – and find no answer.” – CHARLES MOORE (well, in Sept. 2021, when he asked the question, there was an answer: Red China.)

Imperialism, British

«Having fought two wars to slay the German beast, the British Empire fell on the corpse.” – PATRICK J. BUCHANAN

“If you think some people wouldn't welcome a return of imperialism, you might take a trip to Zimbabwe and see what the starving folks there have to say.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

"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)

"What do bad manners have to do with the end of imperialism, you might well ask. In a nutshell, nothing and everything. Moral authority disappeared with the empire, just as its successor socialism undermined the authority of the family and the pursuit of excellence." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

Imperialism, Chinese

"If you doubt that China is seeking to take over empire 1.0, the Anglo-American liberal version, and turn it into empire 2.0 based on an explicitly illiberal model, then you are not paying attention to all the way this strategy is being executed." -- NIALL FERGUSON (in May 2021)

Importance

"I have one rule in life: never think about anything important while lying in bed in the morning. If you do, chances are you'll never get up. There's something about the prone position." -- ROBERT PLUNKET

"Few things are funnier than somebody on the screen to whom everything in life means so much." -- STEVE TESICH

"Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.’ This is often known as the ‘focusing illusion’.” -- DANIEL KAHNEMAN      (an Israeli-American author, psychologist and economist who died in March 2024 -- and this is apparently known as the focusing illusion")

"Importance is not important, that's what I've been trying to say all my life." -- JOHN UPDIKE

"Many things in life are not nearly as important as we think they are while we are not thinking about them:" -- RORY SUTHERLAND     (answering Herr Doktor Kahneman, above.)

"There is a world of difference between what is important and what is newsworthy."  -RORY SUTHERLAND

"No one is indispensable." -- CHARLES DE GAULLE (as he was dying, actually)

Incentives

«When everyone gets something for nothing, soon no one will have anything, because no one will be producing anything.» – CHARLES KOCH

Inclusivity

«Inclusivity does not imply homogeneity: indeed, it demands the opposite. It demands that we get along despite some people having views which might upset us, if we are easily upset by things like opinions.» – ROD LIDDLE

"Inclusion is merely the new soft, cottony term for marginalizing, shutting down, and kicking out the disfavored." -- KYLE SMITH

"If it is a judgment about fairness or inclusion, I will always fall down on the side of fairness." -- SEBASTIAN COE (an otherwise rather un-remarkable statement except that it was spoken by the one-time greatest long-distance runner in the world. And he said this in conjunction with the whole trans-sexual foofaraw, in June 2022)

"You can tell how much you truly care about something by how 'inclusive' you want it to be. If your child needed emergency brain surgery, you wouldn’t care about the color or gender of the surgeon. You’d want the best. If you want it 'inclusive' you don’t care about it." -- JESSE KELLY (in January 2022)

Indecision

«It wouldn't surprise me if she doesn't have the slightest idea what she thinks about anything, except what she thinks she thinks she should think.» -- BENEDICT KING (a letter-writer to THE SPECTATOR on 1 July 2017 regarding PM Theresa May)

«There is a civilized heroism to indecision.» – JOHN UPDIKE

“Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind.” -- RENE GIRARD (French philosopher 1923-2015)

"Taking too long to say yes is worse than saying no." -- MATT RIDLEY

«Independent (-ce)» (political)

«’Independent’ is an Americanism that means ‘attention-seeking Democrat’.» -- CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL

"If being independent meant being one's own master, it must also mean, by extension, being one's own victim. Self-sufficiency in all things!" -- SHIVA NAIPAUL

“Independent (-ce)” (national)

“Are you sure you want to go through with this, old boy?” -- PHILIP, DUKE OF EDINBURGH (To about-to-become President Jomo Kenyatta, as the British flag was coming down and the new Kenyan flag was going up on Kenyan Independence Day in 1963)

"Four years after Independence he discovered that the less said about progress the better." -- PAUL THEROUX     (in his most amusing 1968 post-Independence Africa novel, "Fong And The Indians") 

"Africa, going back to its old ways with modern tools, was going to be a difficult place for some time." -- V. S. NAIPAUL     (heh -- "for some time"....)

"If being independent meant being one's own master, it must also mean, by extension, being one's own victim. Self-sufficiency in all things!" -- SHIVA NAIPAUL

“Self-government is better than good government.” – SIR HENRY CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN (this is the classic anti-colonial argument, here made by the Liberal British Prime Minister, 1905-08, and I know quite a few unhappy  blokes in Africa who have volubly disagreed with this rather Ignorant opinion – telling me personally.)

Indignation

“Indignation creates verse.” – JUVENAL

Indians - «Feathered»

«North American usage (of terminology) remains puzzling. Negro is out, black is démodé, African-American is in, as is Native American, even if it is assumed that those people wandered in from Asia. Red Indian is definitely out, although it is hard to see why, except that they are neither red nor Indian.» -- DOT WORDSWORTH (English etymologist, and yes, Dot, they did «wander in from Asia» -- I’ve been to their starting point in northern Siberia. This all reminds me of good old W. C. Fields’ grateful words as he emerged from under the bed of the Indian Chief, where he’d been hiding to escape the wrath of Mae West in «My Little Chickadee»: “Red man, you’re a real white man!”.)

"They (Indians) didn't have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using. What was it that they were fighting for, when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their 'right' to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it. Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent." – AYN RAND

"There is no spot more like an Indian reservation than a college campus, with its subsidized life-style, taxpayer support, separate-seeming nationhood, and heavy alcohol use." -- ROB LONG (NATIONAL REVIEW columnist and executive producer of "Sullivan and Son" on TBS,   commenting on why it should make sense that the world's most famous 1/32nd Cherokee squaw, Elizabeth "Fork Tongue" Warren, eventually pitched up at Harvard's State Semiversity.)

"Any man who thinks he can be happy and prosperous by letting the Government take care of him; better take a closer look at the American Indian." - HENRY FORD

“Stripped of the beautiful romance with which we have been so long willing to envelop him, transferred from the inviting pages of the novelist to the localities where we are compelled to meet with him, in his native village, on the war path, and when raiding upon our frontier settlements and lines of travel, the Indian forfeits his claim to the appellation of the 'noble red man'. The white men on the Plains see the Indian as he is, and, so far as all knowledge goes, as he ever has been, a savage in every sense of the word. The Indian is not worse, perhaps, than his white brother would be similarly born and bred, but one whose cruel and ferocious nature far exceeds that of any wild beast of the desert.” – GEORGE A. CUSTER

"D. Chief Eagle he say he invade, white -brother own hunting ground and castum lance at white brother. What kind talk this?   Maybe D. Chief Eagle heap big silly humbug; maybe better watch out, you thinkum? White brother maybe lift up Injun hair pretty damn smart, hey? Maybe bury hatchet in D. Chief Eagle head, he come up here steal land, steal woman. Ugh! John Greenway, Heap Big Chief Medicine Man, Professor of Anthropology" -- JOHN GREENWAY (The late, great Anthropology prof at the University of Colorado, who was a pioneer in “political incorrectness” and who wrote a great book, on Aussie “Abos”, called “Down Among The Wild  Men”). Here, he'd  written an article in NR in 1969 challenging the notion of "the Noble savage"  and been attacked by a Sioux generalissimo called D. Chief Eagle)

“The Indian of history was ferocious, cruel, aggressive, stoic, violent, frenetic, unltramasculine, treacherous and warlike, though these are anemic adjectives to describe the extent of their Dionysianism.

As for our treatment of the Indians, the only real injury the white man ever did the Indian was to take his fighting away from him. Indians did not fight to defend their land, their people, or their honor, as the popular writers maintain. Like the Irish, they fought for the fighting. Without war and raiding and scalping and rape and pillage and slavetaking, the Indian was as aimless as a chiropractor without a spine. There was nothing left in life for him but idleness, petty mischief, and booze.” – PROF. JOHN GREENWAY

“Never in the entire history of the inevitable displacement of hunting tribes by advanced agriculturalists in the forty thousand generations of mankind has a native people been treated with more consideration, decency, and kindness than the American Indians.” – PROF. JOHN GREENWAY

“Real Indians sweat, they smell bad, they take hallucinogenic drugs, they belch after they eat, they covet and at times steal their neighbor's wives, they fornicate, and they make war.” – NAPOLEON CHAGNON (American anthropologist and author of “The Fierce People” on the Yanomamo Indians on the Brazil-Venezuela border, and a brave dude who's been much reviled for his un-trendily un-lefty views – a kind of worthy successor to Prof. John Greenway.)

"Plains Indians and New Yorkers always survived best the rigors of war, the former as tough as snow-crusted buffalo, the latter as wily and indomitable as rats." -- MARK HELPRIN

"America, largely through the luck of an Indian heritage it has until recently disowned, is blessed with poetic place-names." -- MARK LAWSON

“There is nothing figurative, or moonshiny, or sentimental about (the Indian’s) language. It is very simple and unostentatious, and consists of plain, straightforward lies.” – MARK TWAIN

"The more Indians we can kill, the less will have to be killed in the next war, for the more I see of these Indians, the more convinced I am that they all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers." -- WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN (And I didn’t even mention “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” — which was, of course, Gen. Phil Sheridan’s.)

 “That’s a funny little tic of American culture: The Indians are, as a matter of popular culture, whatever we need them to be at any given time. We speak of a vague ‘Native American’ spirituality in much the same way Hillary Rodham Clinton invoked mythical ‘African’ proverbs. The Americas and Africa are big places.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"Indians tend to be very direct. That's why there's so few of us left." -- LAURENCE SHAMES (an Indian called Tommy Tarpon in the 1996 comic novel "Tropical Depression")

"One of my epiphanies was when I was in Montana years ago with some Native Americans. They hated the term 'Native Americans'. The much preferred to be called Indians. 'If we are Native Americans', they said, 'what are you? Cultural Americans?'. They preferred to be called Indians because it's a sign of white people's stupidity." -- SLAVOJ ZIZEK (Squire  Žižek is a Slovenian Marxist philosopher. He shoulda stayed in Montana)

“We do not want to work and don’t know how. Indians are too old to learn that when five years old.” – CHIEF MOSES (of the Sinkiuse-Columbia Tribe, 1829-1899)

"I would like to apologize for spontaneously yelling the word 'savages!' after losing six thousand dollars on a roulette spin at the Choctaw Nation Casino and Sports Book. When I was growing up, the usage of this word in our household closely approximated the the Hawaiian aloha, and my use of it in the casino was meant to express 'until we meet again'." -- STEVE MARTIN

"I got the greatest racket in the world. I'm selling toupees to cowardly Indians. they hang them up in their teepees for scalps. It gives them social prestige." -- W.C. FIELDS

“No other race gets drunk like this.” – JOHN UPDIKE (He’s not wrong, you know. It’s true up in Siberia, too.)

“I think most tribes live in poverty and that’s due to socialism. I see socialism as a failed structure across the country, and on [Indian] reservations." -- MERISSA TURCOTTE (A Saginaw-Chippewa "activist" young lady, in Dec. 2022) 

“Leaving the Navajo reservation is a bit like checking out of East Berlin back in the early 80s.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS

"Red Man, you're a real White Man!" -- W.C. FIELDS (to the Indian Chief under whose bed he was allowed to hide to get away from Mae West, in "My Little Chickadee" of 1940) 

Indian (Feathered) War(s)

“How many military men have reaped laurels from their Indian campaigns? Does he strive to win the approving smile of his countrymen? That is indeed, in this particular instance, a difficult task.” -- GEORGE A. CUSTER

“There were but two kinds of Indian battles, one where the troops surprised and killed the Indians, and the other where the Indians surprised and killed the troops. If an Army officer failed in an expedition he was ridiculed and sneered at, and if he succeeded he was vilified as a barbarian and murderer.” – MAJOR MARTIN MAGINNIS (a contemporary of Custer's, in the 1870s)

“Gone to Florida to fight the Indians. Will be back when the war is over." – COL. ARCHIBALD HENDERSON (of the USMC, in 1837, in a note he pinned to his door as he left to go and command his troops in the Battle of Hatchee-Lustee)

"The more Indians we can kill, the less will have to be killed the next war, for the more I see of these Indians, the more convinced I am that they all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers." -- WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN (And I didn’t even mention Gen. Phil Sheridan’s “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”)

“I give you some of the facts as to my men, whose bodies I found just at dark. Eyes torn out and laid on rocks; noses cut off, ears cut off; chins hewn off; teeth chopped out; joints of fingers, brains taken out and placed on rocks with other members of the body – private parts – severed and indecently placed on the person; entrails taken out and exposed; hands cut off; feet taken off; arms taken out from sockets....” – COL. HENRY B. CARRINGTON (22 Dec. 1866, in his report of the massacre of his men, under CPT Fetterman – known as The Fetterman massacre – on the Bozeman Trail in Wyoming during “Red Cloud’s War”.)

“There is no doubt who started that day’s fight, though it is often called a massacre. Forsyth may have been clumsy and his soldiers have been rude and provocative, but deliberate Sioux action, so timed as to indicate that it had been well plotted, initiated the slaughter. Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee may be a lovely phrase. It is still a false and misleading sentiment, dignifying conspiracy and honoring treachery.” – BRIG. GEN S. L. A. MARSHALL (the soldier-turned-historian – who himself had served in the 7th Cavalry – in his history of the Indian Wars, “Crimson Prairie”)

India, (-ns) -- “Toweled”

“India is a club, he says, where the poor have the votes and the rich have the membership.” – TARUN J. TEJPAL (this sounds cute and clever, but when you think about it, it could be said of any democracy…)

“India is one of the easiest countries in the world to invade; since the beginning of recorded history there have been 21 attempts of which 18 succeeded.” – PHILIP HENSHER (in Jan. 2001)

“All real travel bores have been to India, or at least around the Rajasthan circuit, where the food is reasonably safe.” – NICHOLAS HARMAN (English journalist)

“To me, India does not look like a country with a great future. It looks like an enormous country always on the verge of enormous trouble.” – SAM LEITH (English writer, in June 2008)

"Every single time India celebrates anything en masse, people get trampled, usually by the hundreds." – ANNE JOLIS

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

“If our country was created by our founding fathers with fine tipped feather quills, India was created with the largest, brightest box of crayons in the arts and crafts aisle.” – TIM JOLIS

“To think that India had the chutzpah to join the worldwide protest against apartheid in South Africa. If an untouchable in India had the choice to be a black under apartheid, he would take it in a New York minute.” – THOMAS SOWELL

“There is no point in India growing economically since all the gains would be spent on ever-more elaborate weddings.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

"The incidence of sexual crime in India is abnormally high because of the extraordinary degree of sexual repression, and the prevalence of cousin marriage and so on." -- DAVID STARKEY

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

“I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL (in 1942, to his Secretary Of State For India, Leo Amery.)

 “India is a geographical term; It is no more a united nation than the equator.” -- WINSTON CHURCHILL 

“Speed, like personal space and hygiene – and everything else – in India, was a relative concept.” – PETER MOORE (the Australian travel writer)

“Though the Indians are often sharply critical of Americans and Europeans for our racial prejudices, they are the most color-conscious people I’ve ever met. The caste system is attuned to skin-tone. Indian newspapers still carry a lot of advertising by young men and women looking for prospective spouses. Skin tone is one of the first attributes mentioned.” – DUANE “DEWEY” CLARRIDGE (the CIA honcho who was, among much else, “responsible” for India for awhile)

"In India, everything is always late." -- BERNARD LEVIN (the long-time columnist for the Times Of London)

 ‘Third class train rides in India are not restful.” – PATRICK MARNHAM

"Alvays vanting -- neverr getting!" -- RALPH HOFFMANN (the constant complaint of Indian diamond dealers, as per a great -- and knowledgeable -- South African pal) 

Indiana

"You don't expect much to happen in Indianapolis." -- JOHN UPDIKE

Indifference

"It is hard to cope with the rest of the world's indifference to your experience, and upsetting to see how unmarked it is. You cannot understand its relentless preoccupation with the mundane." -- WILLIAM BOYD

Individualism

“If you are in the right, it matters not if you are in a minority of one.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

“Individualism is a hindrance to the pursuit of ideals in an absolute sense. The individual, with his quirks and quiddities, his mixture of good and bad, intelligence and stupidity, longing for justice but anxiety to promote his own selfish interests, does not fit into a utopian community.” – PAUL JOHNSON

“I do not choose to be a common man. It is my right to be uncommon if I can. I seek opportunity not security. I do not wish to be a kept citizen, humbled and dulled by having the state look after me. I want to take the calculated risk; to dream and to build, to fail and to succeed/ I prefer the challenges of life to the guaranteed existence; the thrill of fulfillment to the stale calm of utopia.” – CARL W. HIRSCHMAN (I don’t know anything about this guy except that if you Google him it says he was “a successful   entrepreneur”. He lived from 1920-1995)

“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those that deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.” – AYN RAND

“Identity might be thought of as the solution to the problem of individuality.” – LEON WIESELTIER

“Divided we stand; united we fall.” – EVELYN WAUGH

“Youth should learn to think and act as a mass. It is criminal to think as individuals!” – CHE GUEVARA (idol of American college yoots.)

“What do automobiles, guns, and home-schooling all have in common that makes the liberals hate them? All these things reduce individual dependence on the government and on the grandiose schemes for other people's lives created by liberals and imposed by government.” — THOMAS SOWELL 

“There is virtually nothing – indeed nothing I can think of – at the level of the individual employee that clearly drives revenue and so forth. There are far too many steps in the chain.” – PETER CAPPELLI (a professor of Management at the Wharton School of Business, and this is damn bad gnus for the individual, what....)

"If a country is going to do well, it will not be by government diktat. In fact it is most likely to e in spite of such a thing. It will happen because remarkable people are created who are then encouraged and inspired to do even more remarkable things with their lives." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY

Indoctrination

“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)

“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

"There is a reason that the atmosphere and protocols of the corporate human-resources office are a great deal like those of the junior-high vice-principal’s office: All reeducation facilities have a little something in common." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“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

"These people will not revolt. They will not look up from their screens long enough to notice what's happening." -- GEORGE ORWELL    (in, naturally,"1984", published in 1949) 

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

Inertia                                                                                                                                    

"The most powerful force in politics is not capital or labour (sic); it's inertia." -- MICHAEL GOVE      (the excellent Brit conservative politico, in July 2016)

Inevitability/Finality

"If something cannot go on forever, it will stop – Steyn's Law" – MARK STEYN

Infidelity                                                                                                                                

“Do you seriously expect me to be the first Prince of Wales in history not to have a mistress?” – PRINCE CHARLES, THE PRINCE OF WALES (in case there were any doubt, he was speaking to his then-wifey, Princess Diana)

Inflation

“If real wealth isn't actually increasing, the only way to pretend it's increasing is by inflation. The government prints more money. With more money going around, everyone feels better off... for awhile.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

"Inflation is the systematic destruction of wealth by government." – PETER F. DRUCKER                              (the famous management consultant and self-described “social ecologist”)

"Inflation, a tax which hits the poor." – PIERRE BEREGOVOY                                                                               (French Finance Minister in the '80s)

"Without question, inflation is the most deadly of economic evils. It knows no geographical boundaries. It respects neither sex, nor race, nor creed, nor state of health or wealth. It has a more destructive effect on the lives of individuals than all other forms of plunder put together." – JOHN A. PUGSLEY                       (American economist and investment guru....)

“Inflation is what kills wealth, unless the goodies are in property, ships or other such solid matter, but let's not get academic about it. The only ones inflation helps are debtors. Did you know that one pound sterling back in 1923 is the equivalent of £623 today? One dollar back then could buy what $220 buys today.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

“Gold is probably the best refuge against the inflationist scoundrels that pass for our economic savants, in that it is the one currency that cannot be printed on a whim in the name of political expediency.” – TIM PRICE                                                                                                                                                    (a director at something called PFP Wealth Management, in October 2011)

“But every few years you need to re-learn the lesson: Governments cannot resist the temptation of trashing their money.” – STEVE FORBES

“The best that can be said of this destructive force of inflation is that, at least, it is a tax which is demonstrably 'fair', for it impoverishes everyone.” – DAVID MAMET

"Once the money in a country becomes 'funny' it’s too late to fix it." -- MARALYN BURSTEIN (an astrologer on the Twoot -- and she's spot-on, here.)                                                                                                                                    

"Inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber, and as deadly as a hit man." -- RONALD REAGAN

"Inflation is taxation without legislation." -- MILTON FRIEDMAN

“Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.” -- MILTON FRIEDMAN (Well, this is the "textbook" definition -- in any decent textbook, that is) 

“Inflation is made in Washington because only Washington can create money. It’s always and everywhere a result of too much money, of a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output. Inflation in the United States is made in Washington and nowhere else.” -- MILTON FRIEDMAN (And as far as I'm concerned, "Washington" is polite-talk for "liberal Democrat")

“Inflation is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. It floods banks with money, which they use to pay themselves bonuses. The banks have money, and assets, so they can borrow easilty. The poor guy, who is unemployed and can't borrow, is not going to benefit from it. Inflation pushes asset prices up, which is great for those who own stocks, shares and expensive houses, but the state is subsidizing the rich. It is the top 1% who benefit from inflation, not the 99%. Printing money is like a ketchup bottle: nothing comes out, nothing comes out – and then everything splashes. This is how it works. Inflation doesn't arrive in a nice, manageable way, so don't mess with it. Anyone printing money is trying a kind of stimulus with money they don't have. You have this illusion that it is going to create growth, but all you create is runaway prices – if you think you are creating employment, you're not. Every single person who has tried inflation, or a form of printing money, has effectively lost the argument.” -- NASSIM TALEB (A former derivatives trader who's not an econ professor at NYU, a, reportedly, a guy that David Cameron listens to. If only.)

“By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.” – JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES                                                                                        (This quote is what's known in the trade as a “keeper”, folks....)

“Inflation means the gradual impoverishment of the working and middle classes who are paid with lagging wages and salaries, and of pensioners who subsist on fixed incomes.” – LEWIS LEHRMAN                                            (an investment banker who ran unsuccessfully as a Republican/Conservative against Mario Cuomo for Governor of NY – and a thoroughly good guy.)

“Designed as an emergency measure, QE ('Quantitative Easing') has since become a lifestyle choice, the financial and political equivalent of crack cocaine.” – LIAM HALLIGAN                                                                        (Brit economist, in THE SPECTATOR in July 2014)

“Inflation reduces the value of everything.” – KYLE SMITH                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

“The public has grown inured to the notion that a functional economy mysteriously requires their currency to rot like meat. This is a lie. The British pound in 1797 was worth about exactly the same amount in 1914 – bouncing up and down a bit but suffering no inflation whatsoever for 117 years.” – LIONEL SHRIVER (Excellent young American lady writer)

“The only real check on inflation: every other country is also playing the printing-press game, competing over whose money is the more worthless.” – LIONEL SHRIVER 

“The purposeful inflation of fiat currencies, the very measure of which is rigged to underestimate the degradation of a people's savings, amounts to a steady, deliberate usurpation of a nation's wealth, and constitutes the ultimate stealth tax.” – LIONEL SHRIVER

“Any currency that costs nothing to multiply, when its manufacturer actively benefits from running the presses, will inexorably fritter to confetti.” – LIONAL SHRIVER 

"Language inflation has the same effect as the monetary kind: your words grow rapidly worthless." -- LIONEL SHRIVER

"Inflation is often described as a tax, but I have a better word for it; stealing. Heavily indebted governments adore inflation, though politicians will never say so in public; it so magically melts the debt." -- LIONEL SHRIVER

"In classical economics, 'going for inflation's jugular' entails hiking interest rates above the rate of inflation. Grim, if you need a mortgage. Still, that's what genuine determination to shove the beast back in its cage looks like." -- LIONEL SHRIVER (A lady who understands economics as few human beings do)

"Inflation is a violation of contract between the citizenry and the state. Such rank betrayal invites what politicians euphemistically call 'social unrest' and I call 'collapse'." -- LIONEL SHRIVER

"With a piddling average of 2 per cent inflation rate, the pound has lost 99.6 per cent of its value since 1751 -- but nearly all of that loss has occurred since 1970." -- LIONEL SHRIVER (She wrote this in October 2022, so the £ lost most of its value in 52 years -- a "piddling" 2% inflation indeed....)

"Hyperinflation is horrific to witness. But when it's somebody else's country, it's just disaster porn. When it’s your country, it’s total ruination – it’s like being buried alive.” – JACK JOLIS

“Inflation is a lot more than just ‘too much money chasing after too few goods’. It's the government-created ruination of an entire economy; the spoliation and robbery of every honest citizen, rich or poor. It benefits only the government (which crookedly saves on debt repayment).” – JACK JOLIS

“They tell you that inflation is ‘too much money chasing too few goods’, but that doesn’t really mean anything to anyone. People need to know that inflation is a deliberate policy, almost always created by Democrats in America or leftists elsewhere, in order to cheapen the interest they need to pay on the national debt – and to rip off the people with an unlegislated tax.” – JACK JOLIS

"Inflation is created when governments (in the US, invariably Democrat governments) deliberately print far too much money to pay for their incontinent spending -- and, incidentally, to cheapen their own huge debts. It's also a huge unlegislated tax, and it ruins and immiserates everyone, rich as well as poor." -- JACK JOLIS

"Inflation is the most evil punishment of the people in the Democrat Party's arsenal: Some call it an 'invisible tax' but it's even worse than that -- with a tax you at least (theoretically) get something -- but with inflation you get zip. Squat. Your $ just goes up in smoke... Everyone's $." -- JACK JOLIS

"Inflation is the worst economic crime there is." -- JACK JOLIS

"When countries whose inflation rate soars beyond the national IQ giggle editorially, you know you've screwed things up." -- JOHN BUCKLEY (author, in 1990, of "Statute Of Limitations")

 “Borrowing someone’s (money during inflation) is like borrowing a horse and returning it after it’s had its leg broken – it still looks like a horse, and it still smells like a horse, but when it comes down to it, it’s not really worth anything to anyone.” – EVERETT EHRLICH (in his 2000 book “Grant Speaks”)

“History is largely a history of inflation, usually inflations engineered by governments for the gain of governments.” -- FRIEDRICH VON HAYEK        (the great man said this in 1960, and he could have specified that, at least as far as American history's concerned, it's not just "governments"  that "engineer inflations", but DEMOCRAT governments -- viz., in the 1970s and in the 2020s...) 

“If the tiger of inflation is freed he will eat us up; and if we desperately hang on as he runs faster and faster, we are still finished.” – FRIEDRICH HAYEK (to the Mont Pelerin Society Conference, in 1969)

 “Inflation is a tax, and the poor and middle classes bear the brunt of it.” – CAROL ROTH (the author of “The War On Small Business”)

"One of the biggest taxes is one that is not even called a tax — inflation. When the government spends money that it creates, it is transferring part of the value of your money to themselves." -- THOMAS SOWELL

"Inflation is a quiet but effective way for the government to transfer resources to itself without raising taxes." -- THOMAS SOWELL (but of course, while immiserating the people in the process.)

"We can endure neither our vices nor the remedies needed to fix them." -- LIVY (I don't think he was referring to inflation, here, but he might have well have been. In his "The History of Rome") 

"Inflation is the most regressive tax of all, yet is advocated by those who claim to be progressive." -- ELON MUSK (on 17 Nov '21)

"Progressives spent much of the last decade convincing themselves that inflation isn’t a thing — or if it is a thing, it’s a good thing. Modern Monetary Theory was one facet of this magical thinking. Remember the $2 trillion coin?" -- JONAH GOLDBERG (On 3 June 2022)

“The first panacea of a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.” -- ERNEST HEMINGWAY (in ESQUIRE, Sept. 1935)

"All that money pumped into the economy has been the fundamental cause of inflationary pressures, but no government is prepared to admit that its excessive spending and the quantitative easing by central banks over the past two years have cause inflation." -- ALEXANDER DOWNER (the ex-Australian Foreign Minister, in May 2022)

"Inflation is like toothpaste: once it's out of the tube, it is all but impossible to get it back in." -- KARL OTTO POHL (The head of the Bundesbank in the 80s, and I'd say to Herr Pöhl that, as painful as getting the toothpaste back in might be, his admiral American contemporary Paul Volcker, managed to do it.... by raising interest rates higher than the rate of inflation)

"The inflation crisis will help us to reshape the future." -- LIZ SHULER (AFL-CIO President in a conference call with Biden in August 2022)

“You know your retirement money? Well, they’re burning it – by the roots.” – CHRIS PLANTE                        (on the radio, 12 Jan. ‘21, as the Biden regime hit inflation not seen for 40 years)

Influence

"Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life. " -- GEORGE SEFERIS     (writer, diplomat, Nobel laureate,1900-1971)

Information                                                                                                                     

“One story is an anecdote; two stories are data.” – AARON WILDAVSKY       (the late American political scientist and budgeting “wonk”)

“Thanks to technology, the need to know has been replaced by the ability to find out.” – LARA PRENDERGAST (an English journalist, in the SPECTATOR in August 2016)

“Files rarely lied in terms of content; their lies were usually by omission, nearly always on security grounds.” – ALAN JUDD (Brit ex-spook and outstanding spy novelist)

“Information threatens to overwhelm wisdom.” – HENRY KISSINGER                                                    (in July 2018)

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

Infrastructure                                                                                                                       

“Codswallop is infrastructure.” – FREDDIE GRAY                                                              (the editor of Spectator USA and deputy editor of The UK Spectator – commenting on the China Joe Administration’s grotesquely expansive view of the subject, in April 2021.)           

Inheritance

"It always amazed me that widows and children, who were entirely clueless about what to get the old boy for Christmas or Father's Day, knew exactly what the late great Pop would want after he popped off." -- NELSON DEMILLE

Innovation

“The left treats each act of innovation as an occasion to go looking for its victims.” – JIM PETHOKOUKIS

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

"The costs of trying something new are always more salient than the opportunity costs of doing something familiar." -- RORY SUTHERLAND  

"Innovations are more likely to first arise from the bottom up, not top down." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

"People say you should never ascribe to Leftist ideological intent what is in fact due to incompetence, and I call that bullshit. That's ideological Leftist-talk. The fact is you should never ascribe to incompetence what is in fact to to Leftist ideological intent." -- JACK JOLIS

"Where do you put the bayonet on the damn thing?" – LT. GEN LEWIS “CHESTY” PULLER (USMC. On being shown his first flame-thrower, in WWII)

"Throwing away the old playbook isn’t synonymous with coming up with a better one." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“When you’re one step ahead of the crowd you’re a genius. When you’re two steps ahead, you’re a crackpot.” – SHLOMO RISKIN (the Orthodox Rabbi of the Noo Yawk’s Lincoln Square Synagogue)

“Break fresh ground and they’ll bury you in it.” – PETER DEVRIES

Insanity/Sanity

“You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.” ― FLANNERY O'CONNOR

"One advantage to being crazy is that one is given leave to be rude." -- WALKER PERCY

“Insanity is to keep trying the same thing over and over with the expectation of a different result.” – ALBERT EINSTEIN (This is actually a very familiar quotation, but I include it anyway – I guess because in addition to a good definition of insanity, it’s a good definition of Socialism….)

“It is sometimes said that insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result. But doing the same thing under different circumstances while expecting similar results is not less a form of derangement. The first behaviour is a characteristic of alcoholics; the second is a hallmark of bureaucrats, ideologues, management consultants. It is prevalent among the most educated.” – RORY SUTHERLAND (an interesting addition to Einstein, above.)

“Poets do not go mad – but chess-players do.” – G. K. CHESTERTON

“Madmen are always serious – they go mad from lack of humour.” – G. K. CHESTERTON

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

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” ― FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

“Every trouble in life is a joke compared to madness.” -- WALTER BAGEHOT                                                   (19 century English conservative)

"There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad." -- SALVADOR DALI

“I do not care for these patients, they annoy me, and I find them alien to me and to everything human.” -- SIGMUND FREUD (on his crazy patients)

“That was the essence of madness: not knowing how mad you were.” – JAMES LILEKS

“Mental health is all the rage – everybody is talking about how nobody is talking about it.” – FREDDY GRAY (the amusing young wise-ass Deputy Editor – and daughter Annie's pal – at THE SPECTATOR, in May 2017.)

“If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me.” – SAUL BELLOW (actually spoken by his eponymous protagonist Moses E. Herzog, in his 1964 novel, “Herzog”)

“No, she’s not mad. She’s a bit eccentric. Interesting. People who are really mad are just boring.” – MARTYN HARRIS (in his novel “The Mother-In-Law Joke”)

“It’s no big deal being sane.” – MARTYN HARRIS

“The less humane, the more ruthless, the more violent a system, the easier it is to cast someone who opposes it as off his rocker.” – CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL

“But the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.” – F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

“There’s no comfort in knowing everybody’s as mad as you are.” – SALLY VINCENT (and English journalist who specialized in interviewing famous people.)

“Insanity is relative. It depends who has who locked in what cage." – RAY BRADBURY

"The line between sainthood and psycho-pathology is a fuzzy one." -- LUCASTA MILLER     (English writer and critic, referring to Simone Weil, in Sept. '24) 

“Being sane and being well aren’t the same thing.” – JOHN UPDIKE

"It makes you marvel that most people hold it together as well as they do: what a massive feat of neuron coordination just getting through the dullest day involves." -- JOHN UPDIKE

"That's what's good about being nuts, you mind less what anybody says. In fact, you cease minding at all." -- J. P. DONLEAVY 

“Mental illness has become the great new aspirational app. We have become obsessed with it and determined to devoted the entire GDP to ‘counseling’ people who, in turth, merely feel a little down in the dumps. A bit peeved. Schools devote half of their time to ensuring the kids are not going doolally – and so more and more children identify as having ‘mental issues’, because these days those are the things to have if you’re cool.” – ROD LIDDLE (In March 2021)

“I’m not mad, I’ve just read different books.” – KEN CAMPBELL (The late English comic actor. {He’s the guy in “Fawlty Towers” who keeps shouting “Syb ill!” in the episode in which Basil’s trying to pass off Polly as his sick wife.})

“To the mad, other people are... a closed book.” — KINGSLEY AMIS

"Madness tells us nothing about what the mad do in the rest of their lives, gives no insight into the human condition and has no lessons for sane people except how sane they are. Mad people may make some very odd remarks but that's because they're mad." – SIR KINGSLEY AMIS

“Am I going crazy? And when I do, will all this get easier?” – NIGEL WILLIAMS

“Insanity, of course, is very proud of its rules; it doesn’t want just anyone to join its club.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS   (!!!)

Inspiration

“Inspiration is a guest that does not willingly visit the lazy.” -- PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY

"All the inspiration I ever needed was a phone call from a Producer." -- COLE PORTER

Instinct

“The job of human intuition is to be vaguely right, rather than precisely wrong.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

"A porpoise understands wave theory better than a physicist." -- MARK HELPRIN

Institutions

“Institutions matter until Donald Trump wins an election, and then the entire system needs junking and is probably being run by the Russians anyway.” – CHARLES C. W. COOKE

Insults

“A simple rule of thumb: if someone is describing you with a noun than ends in -o, chances are, they are not paying you a compliment.” – AMMON SHEA

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

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

“If I convert to Islam could I then announce a ban on people saying insulting things about me?” – DINESH D'SOUZA

“If you aren't pissing someone off, you are wasting the First Amendment.” – KURT SHCLICHTER

“Being black doesn't give you a license to call people racist any more than being Jewish gives you a license to call people anti-Semitic.” – ALAN DERSHOWITZ

"A caliphate of sniveling morons" -- WILLIAM VOEGELI

"He is every woman's husband and every man's wife." -- CURIO (GAIUS SCRIBONIUS CURIO) (This delightfully named Roman consul, 84-49 BC, was describing his contemporary Julius Caesar with these words)
 

“One of the rules of the put-down is that it’s not the content of the thing that matters, so much as the speed.” – MARTYN HARRIS

“A wind storm of assertion indiscernible in its parts and knowable mainly through the damage it leaves behind.” – SARAH RUDIN

“Come again when you can’t stop quite so long!” – WALTER SICKERT (British artist, 1860-1942, to an annoying guest.)

“I won't insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said.” – WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.

“It would be too colorful to say that the man looked as ignorant as a Galway pig, yet it would be a grievous understatement to say he was only as silly as a hatful of assholes.” – TEN MANN (Canadian-born TV writer and producer, and an early star of the old NATIONAL LAMPOON, where these words appeared.)

"His nose looked like a cockroach's double-garage." -- A. A. GILL 

"What is amazing is that anyone with feet puts up with you." -- ARISTOTLE

"If there's one thing worse than being insulted on purpose, it is being insulted by sheer inattention." -- MATTHEW PARRIS 

“One must allow people to be right – it consoles them for not being anything else.” – ANDRE GIDE

"He had delusions of adequacy." - WALTER KERR (the long-time Noo Yawk theater critic)

"I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here." --STEPHEN BISHOP (the American pop song-writer)

"He is a self-made man and worships his creator." -- JOHN BRIGHT (Victorian politician)

"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up." -- PAUL KEATING (the leftist Aussie PM who once said, of Australia's strenuous participation in the Vietnam War, "We wouldn't be in the shit, if we weren't in the shit in the first place".)

"I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial." -- IRVIN S. COBB (early 20th century American humorist)

"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?" -- MARK TWAIN

"Will nothing I say persuade you that your aspirations are no concern of mine?" -- EVELYN WAUGH

"He has Van Gogh's ear for music." --BILLY WILDER

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." --WINSTON CHURCHILL

“By ‘gook’ I mean precisely an uncivilized Asiatic Communist. I see no reason for anyone who doesn’t fit this definition to object to the way I use it.” -- ADMIRAL DANIEL V. GALLERY (1901-1977 – notable for having captured a German U-boat intact during WWII – the first time that an enemy ship was captured intact by the US Navy since 1815)

“If a doorman calls you an asshole, you’re an asshole. If an intellectual calls you an asshole, you may be a saint.” – NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB (According to Wiki, this chap is a “Lebanese-American essayist, mathematical statistician, former option trader, risk analyst, and aphorist”.)

 "Ahhh, kiss my petunia!" -- BILLY MARTIN (New York Yankee supreme.) 

"Never insult anyone by accident" -- ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

Insurance

“I have found that insurance loss adjusters have the deepest insight into human nature this side of Shakespeare.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

“These life insurance agents are a curious bunch. The world is full of them. I have met them in country-houses, at seaside hotels, on ships, everywhere: and it has always amazed me that they should find the game worth the candle. The trouble they take is colossal. Nobody loves them and they must see it; yet they persevere.” – P. G. WODEHOUSE

"It's the same business, after all, the chance business. Insurance, gambling." -- GRAHAM SWIFT 

Integrity

“Integrity, my friend, is the shield to greed and vanity.” – RYAN FARLEY (the screenwriter of episode 8 of Season 1 of  the TV series“Ozark”, spoken cynically by the main Mexican drug-lord bad guy)

Intellect

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” – F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

“Strange as it may seem to academics, not everybody thinks intelligence matters all that much.” – MATT RIDLEY

Intellectuals                                                                                                                           

“An intellectual is someone who thinks ideas matter more than people.” – PAUL JOHNSON (This is really not the slur it sounds like. It’s actually true.)

“There are some things than only an intellectual can be stupid enough to believe.” – GEORGE ORWELL

"The intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on 'our' side."– GEORGE ORWELL

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

“It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice.” – GEORGE ORWELL (in his preface to ANIMAL FARM)

“An intellectual is a person knowledgeable in one field who speaks out only in others.” – TOM WOLFE

"The new hero, the intellectual, didn't need to burden himself with the irksome toil of reporting or research. For that matter, he needed no particular education, no scholarly training, no philosophical grounding, no conceptual framework, no knowledge of academic or scientific developments other than the sort of stuff you might might pick up in Section 9 of the Sunday newspaper. Indignation about the powers that be and the bourgeois fools who did their bedding -- that was all you needed. Bango! you were an intellectual!" -- TOM WOLFE 

"An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself." - ALBERT CAMUS

“Most of the crimes of our (twentieth) century were perpetrated by people – Communists and Nazis – who regarded themselves as thoroughly emancipated from the superstitions of the past. They sacrificed human beings by the millions in the service of pseudo-scientific doctrines devised by aggressive and over-confident intellectuals.” – CONOR CRUISE O’BRIEN

“To an English ear, the very word “intellectual” has an obnoxiously continental sound to it, cliques of self-absorbed Bohemian mischief-makers arguing about nothing important in smoky Left Bank cafes” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

“Capitalism is the only system that produces the seeds of its own destruction by nurturing intellectuals”. – JOSEPH SCHUMPETER

"Intellectuals don't actually enjoy anything." -- LLOYD EVANS (the esteemed theatre critic of the UK Spectator, in June 2022) 

“It was only after the Soviet regime became unmistakably totalitarian that English intellectuals, in large numbers, began to show an interest in it. This interest betrayed a secret wish to usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip.” – GEORGE ORWELL

“The intellectual left, most conspicuously in its Ivy League, Manhattan and Hollywood variants, still clings to its dream of the whip handle, just as the educated right dreams of the day when the intelligentsia will be the first to feel the stinging cord.” – SAM TANNENHAUS (commenting on the Orwell comment above, but it stands pretty well on its own.)

“I had supposed that intellectuals frequently loved truth, but I found here again that not ten percent of them prefer truth to popularity.” – BERTRAND RUSSELL

“One cannot escape the impression that the intellectual's most fundamental incompatibility is with the masses.” – ERIC HOFFER

“Intellectuals are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputations.” – ERIC HOFFER

“The enemy of the Intellectual is not the Capitalist, but the individual, which is to say the Worker.” – DAVID MAMET

“The ideologies which produced all the mischiefs and catastrophes of our century are not an achievement of the mob. They are the feat of pseudo-scholars and pseudo-intellectuals.” – LUDWIG VON MISES

"The more I study the history of intellectuals, the more they seem like a wrecking crew, dismantling civilization bit by bit -- replacing what works with what sounds good." -- THOMAS SOWELL

"Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God." -- THOMAS SOWELL

“The charge is often made against the intelligentsia and other members of the anointed that their theories and the policies based on them lack common sense. But the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else?" – THOMAS SOWELL

“The intellectual knows with every fiber of his being that all men are not equal, and there are few things that he cares for less than a classless society.” – ERIC HOFFER

“A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual's sense of worth as an automated economy is a threat to the worker's sense of worth.” – ERIC HOFFER

“Any social order which can function well with a minimum of leadership will be an anathema to the intellectual.” – ERIC OHOFFER

"It is the duty of the intellectuals to commit suicide as a class." – ERNESTO “CHE” GUEVARA

“An intellectual is someone who takes more words than are necessary to tell more than he knows.” – DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER

“Enlightened intellectuals are not a harmless curiosity. They are dangerous maniacs” – ERIC VOEGELIN

“Never forget that intellectuals and educated people are far more prone to feats of self-delusion than ordinary people.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

“I also believe in the United States. I think this is the greatest nation that ever existed, still is. It’s really the only really democratic country in the world. Find me one country, just one country in the entire world that would let a foreign people -- different culture, different language, and in many cases different color than the majority of the native stock -- take over politically an entire metropolitan area in less than one generation. I’m talking about the Cubans in Miami. I really love this country. I just marvel at how good it is, and obviously it’s the simple principle of freedom. . . . Intellectually this is the system where people tend to experiment more and their experiments are indulged. Whatever we’re doing I think we’re done it extremely, extremely, extremely well.... These are terrible things to be saying if you want to have any standing in the intellectual world.” – TOM WOLFE

"Illusion springs eternal, especially among intellectuals." -- THEODORE DALRYMPLE

"Real economics are more complicated than anything that intellectuals can make sense of." -- P. J. O'ROURKE

“ ‘Intellectuals’ is a Marxist term that sprang up in the Middle European countries to distinguish a class, which doesn’t exist here (in England) between the worker and the bourgeoisie. I don’t like the word.” – EVELYN WAUGH

“Thus was it ever in the Puritan tradition with intellectuals. Having rubbished white history, they are no rubbishing red and black history, and deceiving the minorities with the absurd notion that absolution for their manifold sins can come from dishonesty.” – PROF. JOHN GREENWAY (the late, great Gonzo-Anthropologist from the U. of Colorado)

“If a doorman calls you an asshole, you’re an asshole. If an intellectual calls you an asshole, you may be a saint.” – NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB (According to Wiki, this chap is a “Lebanese-American essayist, mathematical statistician, former option trader, risk analyst, and aphorist”.)

Intelligence

“If you want them to collect intelligence, you’re going to have to let them collect intelligence.” --  OLIVER “BUCK” REVELL (ex-head of counterintelligence at the FBI from 1980-91.  Telling it like it is.)

“It is costly and painful to be misunderstood. But it is more costly and painful to misunderstand the world in which we have to operate.” – WILLIAM J. CASEY

"Almost all leakers are lawyers. That's the bottom line." – HOWELL RAINES (the “disgraced” ex-NY TIMES editor)

“Intelligence is gimlet eyes in a world of rose-colored glasses”. – ANDREW C. McCARTHY

“Intelligence is about assuming and preparing for the worst in an era that sees ‘bad’ as an outmoded adjective for ‘different’, another dash of enlivening spice in a rich social stew. – ANDREW C.   McCARTHY

“Intelligence-gathering is something of a square peg in the round hole of contemporary political morality. It is about unearthing that which is willfully concealed, an enterprise that necessarily calls for invading privacy and inducing betrayal – discomfiting acts in an age that exalts the individual and his liberties above community and country.” – ANDREW C. McCARTHY

“Dots, after all, must be collected before they can be connected.” – ANDREW J. McCARTHY (agreeing with Charles Krauthammer, see below – or vice versa.)

"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)

“Intelligence work is like flying – 95 percent routine, 5 percent sheer turbulence.” -- PAUL EARNEST (Ex-Agency spook and director of D.C.’s International Spy Museum)

"We were to be gangsters, but with the behaviour, if possible, of gentlemen." -- RODERICK BAILEY (quoting a Brit recruit to SOE -- the Brit OSS -- in his book "FORGOTTEN VOICES OF THE SECRET WAR: AN INSIDE HISTORY OF SPECIAL OPERATIONS DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR")

"Obtaining secret information is a delicate business involving some unpleasantness; it must be entrusted to the hands and tongues and pens of men who are completely above suspicion and without self-interest, for the weal or woe of the country depends on them." -- NIZAM AL-MULK (An 11th century Persian "vizier", who died, ironically, by assassination in 1092)

"What it is about the Intelligence world that prompts people to write with such certainty about what they know they do not know?" -- ALAN JUDD (good question, and, by the way, Alan Judd is one guy who does know…..)

“He was an intelligent man who in any other area of life would be skeptical to the point of cynicism, but was also one of those for whom the supposed activities of intelligence activities prompted an immediate suspension of disbelief, a naïve credulity that countenanced anything discreditable while denying anything good.” – ALAN JUDD

"Spying on friends is politically more dangerous than spying on enemies." -- ALAN JUDD

“Intelligence failures are often failures of assessment rather than collection. This is especially so when the intelligence is unwelcome or unfashionable.” – ALAN JUDD

“Intelligence is the life of everything in war.” – NATHANIEL GREENE (Washington’s most effective general in the Revolutionary War; 1742-1786)

"An intelligence service is like a frigid woman. It waits such a long time between orgasms that it thinks of nothing else." -- CHARLES McCARRY (the greatest American spy novelist.)

"Learn to see things as they are and to keep quiet." -- CHARLES McCARRY (advice on how to be a good intelligence officer. Reminds me of the great boss of the CIA Bill Casey's mournful verdict "Everybody talks too goddamn much.")

“People think intelligence work is complicated, and it is. But what it's not is complex.” – MICHAEL WALSH (the ex-Marine, NSA-maven author of “Hostile Intent” and “Early Warning”)

“The truth will make men free is the motto of American intelligence, but the reality is that it only makes them angry.” – CHARLES McCARRY      (one of my favorite quotes – not just about intelligence, but about anything....)                                                                                       

“The triangle – the worst geometry for both love and intelligence work.” – MICHAEL WALSH

"Everyday life is a cover identity for operational types.  Inside the golfer, the backyard chef, the fond grandfather, the cutthroat remembers what is hidden and listens for the phone to ring at midnight and the muffled voice he knew so well to say, 'You're needed in Berlin.'" – CHARLES McCARRY

“Captured spies are usually questioned by counterspies who are unlikely to believe them even when they are telling the truth.” – CHARLES McCARRY

"It is the business of an intelligence service to stay in with the outs no matter how odious the outs might be." -- CHARLES McCARRY

"The back door to an intelligence service is always open." -- CHARLES McCARRY

"An intelligence service is authorized under the unspoken law to carry out its responsibilities by any means necessary. The fact is, intelligence services exist to commit crimes on foreign soil for the benefit of a government. That is their charter, their reason for being. Espionage is a criminal activity, and in any country but their own, spies are felons and worse than felons." -- CHARLES McCARRY

“The cliché about intelligence work is that doing intelligence is like working on a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle but not having the box top to tell you what the finished product should look like. If only it were that easy. In fact, it is more like working on a million-piece puzzle, with no box top, and having millions more random pieces that look like they might fit, but actually are from different puzzles altogether.” – JOSE A. RODRIGUEZ, JR.

“The job of intelligence is finding out whatever could not be found by other means.” – CHARLES MOORE

“If you don’t collect the dots, you can’t connect the dots.” – CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

“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

“You can’t defend against what our enemies might do without studying what they believe.” – ANDREW J. McCARTHY

“When you engage in espionage, you engage in activity that is completely illegal. You are engaged in a conspiracy to commit a crime.” -- TOM POLGAR (The last Agency COS in Saigon. A good guy, and a recipient of the Distinguished Intelligence Medal. Or whatever the damn thing is called – never actually seen one, myself... not many people have.)

“Sometimes in the spy business you don’t have a choice with whom you deal; unfortunately, it is often the unsavory individuals who have the critical information.” – DUANE “DEWEY” CLARRIDGE (the top CIA officer-executive)

“The CIA is lambasted for dealing with ‘scumbags’ to acquire secret intelligence to protect American lives and property, whereas no such condemnation is leveled at the FBI, the DEA  and local law enforcement which deal routinely with criminals (called paid informers rather than agents).” – DUANE “DEWEY” CLARRIDGE

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

“Intelligence reports are like reading spy novels with the last chapter missing, because you never know what actually has happened in the end.” -- PAUL JOHNSON

“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.)

“Customers sometimes use intelligence as a drunk uses a lamp post: for support, not illumination.” -- BRIAN STEWART (a long-time British intelligence officer)

“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                (the son of a bitch. I liked him at the very beginning, but after he turned leftist and viciously anti-American with the publication, in 1983, of “The Little Drummer Girl”, and I’ve reviled him ever since.)

“Intelligence is what defuses bombs, intercepts arms caches, and apprhends suspects. Its acquisition can involve unimaginable personal risks, in circumstances of nerve-shredding tension. We should all be grateful, but most of us never get to know what to say thank you for, or to whom. An agent's success manifest itself in nothing happening. Its continued value depends on secrecy.-- JENNY McCARTNEY (a pretty English investigative reporter for the UK SPECTATOR and DAILY TELEGRAPH)

“Understanding that intelligence operations in democracies are conducted in secret isn't a left/right issue. It's an adult/child issue.” – JOHN SCHINDLER               (ex-NSA officer, Nat Sec correspondent for the US Observer)

“Smart politicians don't pick needless fights with the Intelligence Community.” -- JOHN SCHINDLER

“It is crucial to demonstrate to foreign governments that we can keep secrets if we want them to tell us secrets.” – ANDREW C. McCARTHY

“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)

“This is Psy Ops. We're talking about unbalancing the enemy's judgment.” – DENIS JOHNSON

"What might be admirable for a court-system is unconscionable for an intelligence agency." -- MICHAEL HAYDEN

“Intelligence is most often clear – it is stupidity and wishful thinking of politicians which result in surprise or failure.” – LTC TONY SHAFFER

“The job of human intuition is to be vaguely right, rather than precisely wrong.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

“It's a paradox of intelligence collection that a human source is safe only if his identity stays a secret, but useful only if the intelligence gathered from him is shared, endangering his secrecy.” – CLAIRE BERLINSKI                                                                                                                                                                       (author of “Menace In Europe”)

“Intelligence services from different nations do not cooperate because they enjoy it. They do so because, like divorced parents of small children, they sometimes find it necessary to work together for the greater good.” – DANIEL SILVA                                                                               (in his excellent thriller, “The Black Widow”)

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

"Intelligence is necessary to the public good, and, by being necessary, becomes honorable." -- RICHARD HELMS

"The gathering of intelligence is a strange business. Rarely does one single coup provide all the answers, let alone solve all the problems. The search for the single, wonderful solution is a particularly American trait. Mostly the picture appears as if a jigsaw puzzle is being carefully assembled, piece by piece. Usually the last dozen pieces never appear at all; a good intelligence analyst will discern the picture from a collation of fragments." -- FREDERICK FORSYTH (this is all rather banal and obvious, but Freddy is a fellow member of my Special Forces Club in London, and a good guy... so it goes in.)

“Information doesn't exist until it has been safely transmitted.” – TERRY HUGHES

"More wars are fought because of bad intelligence than good intelligence." -- H. KEITH MELTON (of the National Spy Museum)

"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)

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

"He had what it took to do the work we did -- the ability to mistake the absurd for the significant -- which is why I was trying to recruit him." -- CHARLES McCARRY 

“The most egregious of the innumerable failings of intelligence officers is their universal yearning to be known as legendary.” – MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE (Not me.)

“There’s always more.” – WILLIAM HOOD (The American spy novelist)

“It was better carefully to recombine odd parts of pronouncements, so as to give them the tang of original, freshly considered perceptions. This is what is commonly called intelligence.” – JAMES ROGERS (in his 1987 novel “Dog’s Life”)

"Us? We're in the dark -- that's the way most intelligence operations are run." -- JOHN McAFEE (in his 1993 Vietnam War novel "Slow Walk In A Sad Rain")

Intelligence (Knowledge/Smartness)

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." -- F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

"An intelligent man can memorise the tube map. A wise one knows when to take a cab." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

“The only sure-fire way to discuss intelligence in the public square without jeopardising (sic) your career is not to be an academic, given how cowardly most university administrators are.” – TOBY YOUNG

"Intelligence is a function of Curiosity while Creativity is a function of Imagination." -- JACK JOLIS

"Smart people believe what they read only up to the age of 50 or so." -- NEAL B. FREEMAN

"The trouble with intelligence is that it is not naturally humane. It tends to be very bored by the slowness of others and rather self-admiring." -- CHARLES MOORE

“Clever people all make one mistake. They all think everyone else is stupid.” – ROBERT HARRIS (in his 1998 novel “Archangel”)

"It's not getting a lot smarter out there."-- FRANK ZAPPA

Intelligence (“Oversight”)

“As a nation we have a propensity for shooting ourselves in the foot. One of these self-inflicted wounds, close to my heart, leaves us the only country in the world which gives foreign intelligence agencies and anyone else a legal license to poke into our files.” – WILLIAM J. CASEY

“One day you are serving your country by taking action; the next day you are criminally liable for having taken exactly that action. This is no way to run an intelligence service.” – TOD LINDBERG (in the wake of left-wing calls for legal actions against Bush Administration intelligence officials)

“Incidentally, when I asked if there was anything more ridiculous than outrage over spies spying, the answer is 'yes'. It is those people who complain after any 'successful' terrorist attack: 'Why did our intelligence services not know?' The striking thing is that it's often the same people who complain in both cases.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY

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

"Most intelligence professionals are well acquainted with the broad cultural cultural rhythm connection American espionage practitioners and American political elites: The latter group gets to criticize the former for not doing enough when it feels in danger, while reserving the right to criticize it for doing too much as soon as it has been made to feel safe again." -- MICHAEL HAYDEN (the head of both the NSA and the CIA)

"What might be admirable for a court-system is unconscionable for an intelligence agency." -- MICHAEL HAYDEN

"You don't have to say everything." -- GEN. JACK KEANE

“Intelligent Design”

“Eighty percent of everything is stupid”. – MICHAEL BYWATER (a terribly funny, if somewhat left-wing, English writer, and author of “Big Babies”)

Intent

"You are what you do, not what you say you will do." ~ CARL JUNG

"if you don't understand the purpose of something, look at the results." -- CARL JUNG

Intensity (+ Intensity of Feeling)

“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, THIRD LORD FALKLAND (1610-1643. Speaking of some law he'd proposed and which sank like a stone. Incidentally, this was the same f ella 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....)

Interest

"Interest is the key to learning, and as anyone who has ever been in love knows, few things are more interesting than looking into another mind and discovering a simulacrum of oneself." -- CHARLES McCARRY

"Just because something is true, it doesn't mean that it is interesting." -- TOM STOPPARD (the justly-celebrated Czech-born English playwright) 

“International Opinion”

“'Not being recognized’ by The International Community meant that apart from The International Community walking straight past you without nodding, they didn’t bother to invite you to the Eurovision Song Contest, or allow you to have a national football team which could compete on the international stage.” – TONY HAWKS (referring to Moldova, the ex-USSR country against whose soccer team this Brit loonie   played tennis, for Christ’s sake. Don’t ask. But if you’re interested further, it’s all in his book, PLAYING THE MOLDOVANS AT TENNIS. Strewth….)

“Contrary to all of the treacle we hear about the ‘international community’, the international realm isn’t a community. It’s a contested sphere of power where individual actors and coalitions of actors exert their will.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

Internet, The

“The Internet is a vanity press for the demented.” – LARS-ERIK NELSON (the liberal NY Daily News columnist)

“The Internet is the idiot’s sorting office.” – DOT WORDSWORTH (English lady entymologist.)

“The Internet – that dunce’s playground”. – DOT WORDSWORTH (riffing on a familiar theme…)

“The vast bran-tub of masturbatory imagery and random, often incorrect information that is the internet.” – DANIEL WOLF

“Importantly, you do not search the Internet, you ‘surf’, a word recalling freedom, hedonism and total fatuity.” – PHILIP DELVES BROUGHTON

“Just a quick glance, if such a thing were possible, reveals the Internet to be an interminably boring system of communication inhabited by the sort who telephone chatlines. E-mail is a perfect means for unnecessary communication without any of the terrifying immediacy of the telephone. Trivia can be swapped at a leisurely pace. The slacker who claims to be working is, in all probability, trading quips with his Internet friend, Yoshi in Chicago, about the latest Jim Jarmusch film or the post-modern ironies of Oprah Winfrey.” – PHILIP  DELVES BROUGHTON

“Like all credulous technophobes, my mother attributes supernatural powers to the ‘internet’: powers to pervert, mainly; but also powers to enrich an individual far beyond anything that can be achieved under the temporal laws of economics.” – JEREMY CLARKE (the hilarious author of the “Low Life” columne in the UK SPECTATOR, in April 2007)

“To me, bloggery is much like modern poetry: more people want to write it than read it. Most blogs are read by fewer than 10 people a day. Only 10% have more than 100 hits a day. You’d reach a wider audience if you photocopied a few sheets of paper and left them on the Underground (subway)”” – CHRISTOPHER HOWSE (Brit journalist in June 2007)

“The Web is an engine of constant complaint, not idea formation.” – DANIEL HENNINGER (of the Wall Street Journal Editorial page)

“Virtually everything the Internet is selling, our children already have too much of and are choking on.” – DAVID GELERNTER

“You’re never alone out there; some idiot will always back you. The online world doesn’t dissolve tribes. It gives them global reach.” – ROGER COHEN (my “pal” and epistolary sparring partner from the NY TIMES)

“Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.” – T.S. ELIOT

“What might be delicate or unseemly in normal life is daily meat for the butt-wiggling exhibitionism of the internet.” – ANDY FERGUSON

“The person who said 'there are no stupid questions' never was on twitter.” – JAKE TAPPER

“They’ve always said that if you took a million monkeys and strapped them to a million typewriters eventually they’d produce the entire works of Shakespeare, but now we’ve got the Internet we know that’s not true.” – DAVID WILENSKY                                                                             (the American blogger and editor, quoted by Stephen Fry on the Beeb)

“In the new technological world of the Internet – of surfing, blogging, tweeting, texting, linking, and Facebooking – civil society is increasingly tenuous. People are not so much speaking to each other as speaking across each other, befriending each other in such quantities as to belie the very idea of friendship, violating the confidences of acquaintances and any presumption of privacy, using language that makes a mockery of what used to be called civic discourse. In this sense, people are bowling alone, so to speak, more than ever. A friendly commentator might look kindly upon this as liberalism at its best, giving free rein to the individual as against a conformist and oppressive society. A harsh critic would find it uncomfortably reminiscent of the 'state of nature' that civil society was meant to supplant.” – GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB (the author and redoubtable wife of Irving Kristol and mama of Bill.)

“Thanks to the internet, we can no longer kid ourselves that any experience is unique.” – ALEXANDER CHANCELLOR (in 2013, and at that time one of the many surviving ex-editors of the UK SPECTATOR)

“ 'I've started a blog' is news to make the heart sink.” – SUSAN HILL (The English lady novelist)

“Philosophers don't discuss trees falling over in empty forests any more; instead they ask whether, if an event happens and no one uploads it to YouTube, the even really happened at all?” – MARK MASON (And English blogger, in June 2013)

“I've tweeted several times now, and I still don't have a crowd of ladies at my door. I'm beginning to doubt the power of the internet.” – JOHN UILDRIKS

“The Internet is an electric Gulag, a network of lonely children indulging in communities of self-surveillance.” -- JASPER GIBSON (the English author of the comic novel “A Bright Moon For Fools”)

“If you're not paying, you're the product.” -- JAMIE BARTLETT (The British journalist on how internet companies buy and sell your identity online...)

"If something on the internet is free, it means you are the profit." -- ANDREW LANGER (the American talk radio chap, who must have heard what Squire Bartlett said, see above....) 

“Using the internet for any prupose other than to amuse oneself strikes me as misguided. But for the most part Tim Berners-Lee's invention is a fugue of almost unrelieved idiocy, malice, spite, misinformation, banalities, lunacies, non-sequiturs and tedious vapidities. In other words, yes, it is the voice of humanity as heard after several stiffeners down the pub on a Saturday night.” -- ROD LIDDLE

“Dear internet: stop asking me to join things. I belong to Costco and the Moose Lodge, and that's where I draw the line.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

“We want Google to be the third half of your brain.” -- SERGEY BRIN (the rather totalitarian-sounding founder of Google, here channeling Yogi Berra)

“I have learned much less in my life than I expected to learn, but I do know you shouldn't write emails to anyone at three o'clock in the morning.” -- JOHN BURNSIDE (the English poet, novelist and author of a memoir entitled “I Put A Spell On You”)

“I scroll around, but when I look at the internet, I feel the same as when I’m walking through Coney Island. It’s like carnival barkers, and they all sit out there and go, ‘Come on in here and see a three-legged man!’ So you walk in and it’s a guy with a crutch.”– JON STEWART (I'm not crazy about quoting this asshole, but this, at least, is not bad....)

“If the Internet is a global village, then comment sections are the town square. And if you've never visited, believe me, it's a place where you don't want to roll down your window at night.” -- MOLLIE HEMINGWAY (Senior Editor at THE FEDERALIST)

“The reason the Internet has so demolished the idea of charity is simple: When everyone's your neighbor, then nobody's your neighbor.” -- MOLLIE HEMINGWAY

“If Ernest Hemingway had known about internet comment sections, he would've killed himself sooner.” – ISAAC MORRISON (A graduate of Hillsdale College, from Orlando, FL)

"The world had shrunk, shrink-wrapped in an electronic membrane. No person on earth was more than six mouse clicks away from any other." -- TOM WOLFE

 “The word ‘delete’ is misleading: it really means ‘hide, until such times as this may incriminate’. We’re living not just in the age of instant communications, but of the digital downfall. So there is a gap in the market for a tool ensuring safe, effective communications. What about the pen?”-- IAN OSBORNE (A regular contributor to the UK SPECTATOR, in 2015)

“If there is hope, it lies in the 'Comments' threads.” -- JOHN DERBYSHIRE

“The internet is not a shop, or a mail-order advert in the back of Viz. It is everything, always, at our fingertips, for ever. It is bottomless. And thus ripe for exploitation by people who are not.” – HUGO RIFKIND (the Jewish-Scottish wise-ass at THE SPECCIE)

“The internet dream was that the web would create a more open society. It wouldn't really matter what you said because everyone would feel more liberated. The opposite has happened increasingly, people are nervous about what they say online for fear of future rebuke. Far from making everyone feel free to speak their minds, the internet has made many of us terrified of self-expression.” – LARA PRENDERGRAST (in THE SPECCIE, January 2018)

“If online dating turns more men into commitment-phobes. I don't see why anyone should be surprised. It's women for the most part who feel the urge to nest and breed – as we all once quite freely acknowledged before gender became a choice. Most men don't feel the same need to play house. It took the threat of public shame, fear of God and the censorious tutting of mutual friends to chivy a man towards family life. Online, dating strangers, who's to see or care?” -- MARY WAKEFIELD

“The internet is quite left-wing.” – PETER HITCHENS

"I am not a member of the WhatsApp group as I don't have a mobile phone. I have to be contacted separately when a drink is in the offing. Indeed, if I'm going to be hones, I'm not sure I know what a WhatsApp group actually is." -- MARCUS BERKMANN
 

“Information threatens to overwhelm wisdom.” – HENRY KISSINGER                                                                (in July 2018)

“The Internet is the light shining out the devil's butthole.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

“The smartphone version of Scrabble is the best argument yet against the internet existing at all.” -- JEREMY VINE (English TV’s version of Jerry Springer)

“If anything, the internet has made us stupider.” -- LIONEL SHRIVER                                                                 (in January 2021)

"Any online exchange must be designed to be proof against the world's most dishonest people. this imposes a huge burden on the majority of honest customers." -- RORY SUTHERLAND  

“The internet is morally neutral, like the sea.” -- TANYA GOLD

"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)

“The more various cures for an ailment you can find on the internet, the likelier it is that the aillment is incurable.” -- MATTHEW PARRIS               

Interrogation

“The U.S. (no longer) has strong options for interrogating and holding prisoners itself. If it could find another terror mastermind, or even a successor to Bin Laden, we might simply be forced to eliminate him with a Hellfire missile rather than running the risks of attempting to capture him. When terrorists are taken out by blunt force, our ability to exploit their phones, computers, and minds dies with them. The U.S. has chosen to unilaterally disarm itself in the war on terror.” – JOSE A. RODRIGUEZ, JR. (The Puerto-Rican born ex-head of the CIA's Counter-Intelligence Center and the guiding hand   behind the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, and then the ex-chief of the CIA's Clandestine Service; in his excellent book “Hard Measures”)

“Capturing and interrogating terrorists is on the 'too hard' list these days. With no black sites still open and no reasonable place to take detainees who might be captured, the administration has stumbled into a 'take no prisoners' approach. It has limited itself to using blunt instruments in the war on terror. An administration that thinks it was 'torture' to interfere with the sleep cycle of a handful of the worst terrorists on the planet has no problem with authorizing the firing of Hellfire missiles into a group of thirty or forty suspects gathered around a campfire. Needless to say, there is no opportunity to interrogate or learn anything from a suspect who is vaporized by a missile launched by a keystroke executed thousands of miles away.” – JOSE A. RODRIGUEZ, JR. (in his 2012 book “Hard Measures”)

“Nobody believes in torturing terrorists... unless we really need to, in which case everyone does. Nothing has ever brought forth more inanity from the chattering class than the question of how to deal with ‘high value’ terrorist detainees.” – PETER MULHERN                                                  (An excellent commenter on NR0)      

“Well, if I were in charge... they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists.” – SARAH PALIN

"It's amazing how touching the enemy soften the heart." -- CHARLES McCARRY (Gotta say, this was never my experience -- but I'm happy to defer to others'...) 

“The first eight hours belong to them. Then they are mine.” – GREG McDONALD (Sergeant and Chief Interrogations Officer at the Prince George's County, Maryland, Police Department)

“There is something about the detention and interrogation program that brings out the worst in people. Not the people running it but the people reporting on it.” – JAMES E. MITCHELL (the chief architect of and advisor to the CIA's Enhanced Interrogations Program from 2002-2004, in his terrific book, “Enhanced Interrogation”)

“CIA interrogators were deployed as warfighters, not law enforcement officers, a fact that often gets lost in the press coverage.” – JAMES E. MITCHELL

“There was a distinction between how the FBI and the CIA approached captured terrorists. The CIA was never interested in prosecuting — the CIA was not going to let another catastrophic attack go off. They were going to walk up to the line of what was legal, put their toes on it, and lean forward.” – JAMES E. MITCHELL

“Sometimes a live terrorist is better than a dead one. A live terrorist can tell you things, such as where and when the next attack will occur.” -- DANIEL SILVA

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

“Vanity, the interrogator’s best friend.” – WILLIAM HOOD (the former American counterintelligence officer, and also spy writer)

"If you let somebody talk enough, everything comes out, underside first." -- JOHN UPDIKE                                            (No, I don't either.)

“And I look straight into their eyes. Always do that. See into their souls. I’ll tell you a funny thing: nobody wants their souls seeing into.” – MICHAEL FRAYN (from his 1996 novel “Know You Know”)

“Intersectionality”

“The thing is, though, once you start to unpick the thread of just one of these intersectional arguments, the whole thing starts to fall apart like a mohair jumper knitted by a blind amputee. It is an edifice built upon wishful thinking and unicorn tears, the whole lot of it. The gender pay gap, colonialism being responsible for Africa’s ineptitude, children doing just as well when they are brought up by single parents or gay parents – all of these are fashionable political positions based on demonstrable untruths. Once the transgender stuff has fallen, the rest will fall too. Peak wank, I’m telling you.” – ROD LIDDLE

"A lot of leftists are finding out that Intersectionality means that they’re going to get run over from two different directions because they’re standing in the intersection." -- KURT SCHLICHTER (after the outburst of anti-semitism on the left in October 2023) 

Intimidation

“Just pure intimidation. Which was, he had come through sixty years to realize, the aim of eighty-five percent of all human behavior.” – JOHN UPDIKE

Intuition

"Intuition is the way your brain warns you when you're wrong about something." -- CHARLES McCARRY

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

Invention

"Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction.  They may be summed up by the phrases: One, it's completely impossible. Two, it's possible, but it's not worth doing. Three, I said it was a good idea all along." -- ARTHUR C. CLARKE

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” – ALAN KAY (The pioneering American computer scientist.)

“A scientist has figured out a way to turn coffee grounds into alcohol. He is not so much a scientist as he is an alcoholic.” --” – CONAN O’BRIEN

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." --THOMAS A. EDISON

“The guy who invented the wheel was an idiot. It's the guy who invented the next three who was the genius.” – SID CAESAR

“Perhaps patents need an arrangement that could turn it from the current winner-takes-all system to one where everyone wins. The investor pays the inventor only in the case of success. In turn, inventors would be much better off with ten chances to make £1 million than one with one slim chance to make £10 million.

Inventors might not want £10 million anyway. With £10 million your spouse will probably run off with the tennis coach, your children will become crackheads and, worst of all, you could end up living in the Cayman Islands. What’s more, you might not bother to invent anything else.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

“How important is the spatula anyway? ‘Very!’ says Professor Iona Chevy of Southwestern All-Night university in a new paper. The prof claims that prior to the spatula, primitive man was unable to make full use of his hands, because at least one of them was always badly burned from flipping food on the fire. ‘Pancakes were a particular problem,’she points out. It was professor Chevy, you might recall, who stirred the stew last year with her contention that it was an anonymous Swiss monk who made Alpine travel possible, with his invention of the hairpin curve.” – JOHN BENDEL (for many years, the “True Facts” editor of the old NATIONAL LAMPOON, of the early 70s)

 "I would prefer to have invented a machine that people could use and that would help farmers with their work, for example a lawnmower." -- MIKHAIL KALASHNIKOV (typical commie – stealing others’ ideas: The first lawn-mower was invented in 1839 and the first motorized mower in 1922. Kalashnikov lived from 1919 to 2013)

Investment

“Markets are impish, ignorant and slaves to emotion. In short, markets are children. And only an idiot gives money to his kids.” – MARTIN BAKER (author of “A Fool And His Money”)

“Picking shares is like a beauty contest, where it’s important to choose not who you think is the prettiest girl, but who the judges will think is the prettiest girl.” – JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

“October. This is one of the particularly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.” – MARK TWAIN

“Every estate lawyer will tell you the first thing they advise their clients: For heaven's sake, keep this money out of the economy. You'll never see it again.” – JAMES LILEKS

“The great skill of investment is to know when the right time is to get out. Getting in’s easy.” -- NIGEL FARAGE

“People who make unwise investments ought to pay the cost of them, and certainly they ought not to pass that cost to others who are innocent of fault.” – ROGER SCRUTON

“It is not illegal to be bad at investing.” – DAVID BAHNSEN (author of “Crisis of Reponsibility”)

"Put your money in things that God ain't makin' any more of." -- WILL ROGERS

"Don't gamble; take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don't go up, don't buy it." -- WILL ROGERS

"The question is not when to buy (now). It’s when to sell (after a double, in my opinion)." -- SAMUEL M'CHEYNE GLASSER

"Declines in U.S. stock prices have correctly predicted nine of the last five American recessions." -- PAUL SAMUELSON

Iowa

“Baja Minnesota” – FRED GRANDY (An ex-Republican congressman from Iowa, and later a quite funny morning radio talk-show host on WMAL in D.C.)

“Iowa is an enigma, breaded in a riddle, deep fried and smothered in mystery cheese.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

IQ

“I suspect the notion that IQ is mainly biological rankles because smart people want to think of themselves as virtuous rather than lucky.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"Privately -- not many care to speak out -- the vast majority of neuroscientists believe the genetic component of an individual's intelligence is remarkably high." -- TOM WOLFE 

“There are a lot of myths floating around about intelligence, such as the belief that IQ isn’t real.” – TOBY YOUNG

Iran

“All nations must bow down to the dignity and to the nobility of our people. And if you don't do that, our people, the nation of Iran, will make you do that." – MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD (in August 2006)

“Everything this (the Obama) administration has done seems to indicate that it sees a potential strike on Iran as more of a threat to the world than the Iranian bomb itself." – JONATHAN TOBIN                       (in Contentions magazine)

“Every Iranian male is born with a chip in his brain that periodically broadcasts, 'I am the leader of the Iranian people'.” – GEORGE CAVE         (the alias of OSWALD LEWINTER, a CIA officer and the Deputy Chief of Station in Tehran during the days of the Shah)

“Right now Iran's population is around 80 million. Their supreme leader wants to get it up to 150 million. If he wants more pregnancies, he should start by legalizing alcohol over there.” – JIMMY KIMMEL

“We've reached the point where Obama admin is bragging that it protected the Iranian nuclear program from an Israeli airstrike.” – NOAH POLLAK

“Clearing the way for Iran to get nuclear bombs may – and probably will – be the most catastrophic decision in human history.” – THOMAS SOWELL

“Based on 30 years of experience with the Iranians, they will give you 100 words. Trust only one of the 100.” – HAMAD BIN KHALIFA AL THANI (The Emir of Qatar, in Sept. 2015)

"An Iranian moderate is one who has run out of ammunition." -- HENRY KISSINGER

“Saying 'Death To America' is easy. We need to express 'Death To America' with action.” – HASSAN ROUHANI (“President” of Iran, in 2013)

“Like the Soviet Union of the 1970s, the Islamic Republic (of Iran) is a relic that can neither reform itself nor accommodate the aspirations of its restive constituents.” – RAY TAKEYH (In Nov. 2017)

“The messianic mullahs who would bring the Shah’s throne toppling down had never read an economics textbook and had no wish to read one.” – SHIVA NAIPAUL

“Engaging with Iran is like having sex with someone who hates you.”-- the late CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

"The Iranian way: If they think 1 in 10 might be a leaker, they kill all 10 to ensure they get the right one. If the leaker turns out to be somewhere else, they kill 10 more, 10 more, 10 more until they find the right one. Eventually, they stop leaks, but they foment disloyalty." -- CYRIL WYCHE (an old guy on the Twoot who seems to know what he's talking about)

“Al-Qaeda has a new home base: it is the Islamic Republic of Iran.” – MIKE POMPEO (the US SecState, just before he left office, in Jan. 2021)

"The most imbecilic foreign policy decision of our time: the Obama administration's nuclear deal with Iran. For Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Ben Rhodes, John Brennan and all the rest, the nuclear deal in 2015 was the entrée into a true friendship with the ayatollahs. They believed that their appeasement would reshape the region, as they anticipated working in unison with a regime that enjoys nothing more than shedding blood in the name of the Islamic Revolution." -- MIKE POMPEO

“They (Iran’s governing mullahs) think the world could end tomorrow. It gives them freedom.” – ALEX BERENSON (in his 2008 novel “The Ghost War”)

"Tehran has pursued policies largeely in line with Russia's interests, whether in Syria, the Caucasus, central Asia, or Afghanistan, but especially when it comes to Israel." -- JONATHAN SPYER (in October 2023, and this fellow is the British-Israeli editor of The Middle Eastern Quarterly Review) 

"The Islamic Republic of Iran had declared a secret war against the United States, and the United States had chosen to ignore it." -- ROBERT BAER (in 2002)

"The ayatollahs have been in power for 45 years, and I still feel that Westerners have not yet understood that the DNA of this regime is terrorism." -- CHRISTIAN MALARD      (a "diplomatic correspondent" for i24news in France... and a pal of my pal Debbie Aldrich)

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

“Iran has never won a war but never lost a negotiation" -- PRES. DONALD TRUMP

"Iran is our main artery for funds, personnel, and communications." -- OSAMA BIN LADEN

“Iran-Contra Affair”

“The worst interpretation of the Iran-Contra affair was that senior figures in the Reagan administration, conspiring in secrecy, negotiated the sale of arms to the Iranians in order to secure the release of Americans being held hostage by Hezbollah, using the profits from that exchange to aid those fighting against the murderous Soviet proxy in El Salvador. Sneaky and illegal but intended to secure real American national-security interests ― surely, somewhere in the penumbras of the federal government, there is a black-budget agency chief who has approximately that as a job description. The Democrats howled about the sale of those anti-tank missiles to Tehran, of course, and one of the loudest howlers was John Kerry ― who has just signed off on a deal delivering Tehran a nuclear weapon in a blue Tiffany box. Exactly what vital national-security interest that secures remains a mystery.” –KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"When was the last time we  impeached a President for trying to bring American boys home?" -- RICHARD NEUSTADT  (the Harvard "presidential scholar" and a Democrat)

Iraq

“My people are unimaginable masses of human beings, devoid of any patriotic idea, imbued with religious traditions and absurdities, connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil; prone to anarchy and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatever.” – FAISAL, KING (King of Iraq, shortly before his death in 1933. He was a Hashemite who’d been installed by the mandate power, Great Britain)

“Like all Arabs, Iraqis live in what anthropologists call a shame society, and this generates common values that all can share, to that extent acting as a social glue” – DAVID PRYCE-JONES (what a shame….)

“(Iraq is) an ungrateful volcano.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL (in 1922, writing to Lloyd George, who’d sent him there to “sort out Iraq.”)

"Iraq is a true laboratory of democracy in the Arab world today. It is there that the future of democracy in the region will play itself out. Iraq could potentially become a political model for its neighbors. And, whether one likes it or not, all this has come about thanks to the American intervention of 2003." -- BORIS BOILLON                 (the French ambassador to Iraq, and he made this statement to LE FIGARO, the day before the Post-American-in-Chief B. Hussein Corpseman made his shameful un-speech on Iraq and, in the words of ex-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, "If, of all people, an ambassador of France can make such an admission, the U.S. president should be able to likewise.”)

“We have learned many lessons about human nature from Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, but the universal hunger for liberty hasn't been foremost among them.” – RICH LOWRY (in October 2007)

"Mesopotamia is a land of mud deprived of mud's only possible advantage, vegetable fertility. It is a mud plain. From this plain rise villages of mud and cities of mud. The rivers flow with liquid mud. The air is composed of mud refined into a gas. The people are mud-colored, they wear mud-colored clothes, and their national hat is nothing more than a formalized mud-pie. Baghdad lurks in a mud fog, when the temperature drops below 110, the residents complain of the chill and get out their furs. For only one thing is it now justly famous: a kind of boil which takes nine months to heal, and leaves a scar.

But it is a paradise compared to Tehran." -- ROBERT BYRON (the English explorer and travel-writer, in his famous 1937 "The Road To Oxiana") 

Iraq War, The

"More than half of the battle is taking place on the battlefield of the media. We are in a media race for hearts and minds. The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam--and how they ran and left their agents--is noteworthy." – AYMAN AL ZAWAHIRI (Al Qaeda’s N° 2 guy, in a letter to the now-room temperature Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in late ’05)

“It was famously said that The Vietnam War was lost on television. In this instance, The Iraq War’s being lost only on television. In Iraq it’s a tremendous victory. Indeed, it has the potential to be one of the most consequential, transformative victories of the modern age; but even if it doesn’t ever fulfill that potential, it’s still a huge success.” – MARK STEYN (in Dec. 2005)

“The offensive strategy and tactics belonged to U.S. forces. Then again, long-term strategic planning is something of a problem when the soldiers headed into battle hope to die” – HUSAIN HAQQANI (of Boston University and the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, here “setting up” the (Second) Battle For Fallujah, from the Jihadis’ point of view.)

“It is not a privilege for the United States to act against Iraq, a favour and an indulgence America seeks from other countries, and a treat for the American armed forces and taxpayers. It is an enforcement of international law, an act of retribution for past provocations by Saddam, and the removal of the greatest political tumour that afflicts the Middle east. It is a service to the civilized world.” – CONRAD BLACK (Lord Black. Ex-Canadian owner of the (UK) Telegraph Group. A damn good man, despite his financial embroglios… He was “disgraced”, convicted, and since has been almost entirely exonerated.)

“One of the more bitterly enjoyable tropes of the anti-Iraq War crowd has been their childish – and classically American – insistence that a lack of ‘planning’ contributed to the difficulty of securing a peaceful Iraq, as if ‘planning’ could somehow soothe the toxic brew of Shiite, Sunni, and Kurd. Some things are just disastrous messes, which doesn’t mean they’re not worth doing.” – ROB LONG

“Victory’s adversaries now include many in whose behalf victory is being sought.” – JOSIAH BUNTING (in Jan. 2007, and boy, he was putting the situation mildly…)

"By any reasonable historical standard, the conduct of this war in Iraq has been a triumph, not a disaster." – NORMAN PODHORETZ

“Fighting a war in a Muslim country is like playing a football match with an inferior team that is allowed to carry concealed weapons.” – TOM BETHELL

“No nation ever fought a more restrained and honorable war” – BING WEST (In his book “The Strongest Tribe”)

“Iraq marked a sea change in the American way of war. ‘Force protection’ mean minimizing casualties – so that over three years, there were fewer fatalities than in that one awful day of 9/11. Mess halls morphed into ‘dining facilities’ offering salad bars, pizza bars, fast-food counters, Middle East cuisine, or good old-fashioned steak and lobster, followed by ice cream, at a cost of about $34 a meal. Soldiers lept in air-conditioned rooms, chatted on the internet, and played video games. We chose to fight a war that a veteran of Vietnam would not recognize. (Thrown into the cauldron of Fallujah, though, U.S. soldiers and Marines displayed courage and aggressiveness equal to those of any American generation.) – BING WEST (in Sept. 2006)

“We have nobody to ask for help, except God and the American Army.” -- HAMED IDO HAMMO (a village elder in Qahtaniya, Nineveh Province, Iraq, in October 2008)

“It is true that Saddam is a thief and an apostate, but there is no harm in such circumstances if the Muslims’ interests coincide with those of the socialists in fighting the Crusaders, despite our firm conviction that they are infidels. There is nothing wrong with a convergence of interests here.” – OSAMA BIN LADEN          (In an audiotape of 11 February 2003, one month before we moved against Saddam. And this is the MONEY QUOTE when it comes to the reasons for the Iraq war.)

“Iraq and Afghanistan have become known as ‘the captains’ wars’ because officers of lower and lower rank have been put in the position of making decisions of higher and higher degrees of consequence and complexity.” – ROBERT GATES (speaking at West Point in Feb 2011, in his final address before quitting as SecDef)

“It’s time to acknowledge the truth: The Iraq War is over. America won.» -- MATTHEW CONTINETTI (5 April ’11)

"Increasingly the liberal press reads like the press of what during the Cold War was called 'a non-aligned nation'. Increasingly it appears that the American press 'is not taking sides' in this war, this Republican war." -- R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR. (In 2006. And it could have been worse -- during Vietnam, the American press actually supported the enemy)

“Obama brought the Iraq war to a close in a fashion that did about as much as humanly possible to annul its existence in the first place. Uncharacteristically, for such a large-scale intervention, the United States has no remaining military presence in Iraq. Supposedly, the reason is that we were unable to conclude a status-of-forces agreement with the Iraqi government. If Obama is the least bit sorry about that, he has given no sign. Hence the annulment f a war he regarded as wrong an illegitimate.” – TOD LINDBERG (of the Hoover Institute, in September 2013)

“It's ridiculous to say Iraq was ‘unwinnable’. Most any war is winnable. You just need to win it.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

"We won the war in Iraq. What we needed is leadership in DC to maintain the peace."– GOV. RICK PERRY (of Texas, and he could have been talking of Vietnam, too)

“The real question isn't why we went into Iraq. The justifications for it were, and remain, abundant. The question is how we went from a decisive victory in 21 days to a seven-year occupation in which some 4,000 Americans perished.” – BRET STEPHENS

“Before, it was about hearts and minds. Now it’s about two in the heart, and one in the mind.” – PFC CHRIS FERGUSON (A US Marine, member of the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, at the First Battle for Fallujah, Iraq, 2004)

“The War in Iraq is increasingly becoming a war against all, with no rules.” – TOBY DODGE (author of “Inventing Iraq”, 2008.)

"At Dhahran International Hotel. Hell, how do they expect to have a war without a bar? This is a virtually intoxicant-free conflict, no weird concoctions circulating in these parts other than those brewed by a few enterprising GIs, or by Saddam's mad scientists. Maybe that's why in these first few days it's been a ticktock war, everything going off like clockwork, no one driving backward over the latrine or dropping ordnance on a hallucination." -- DENIS JOHNSON

"If you're not confused, then you don't know how confusing the situation is." -- JAMES MATTIS      (then a Major General in the USMC, prior to the second & victorious Battle for Fallujah, 2004)

Ireland ( + the Irish)

“The IRA men and women I have met were not psychopaths; some of them are highly intelligent people. But they are all disordered. Some central navigational instrument is at fault. Because they don’t like the way the plane is flying, the IRA seem to think that smashing it into the mountainside will improve its performance. They have not succeeded. Not yet, anyway. Most of the passengers sat in the back chewing their fingernails. Many were killed. Others joined in the mayhem in the cockpit. But the plane is still flying.” – KEVIN MYERS (An Irish journalist writing in the British press, in April 1995)

“An Irish temper makes you appreciate Lutherans.” – JOHN UPDIKE

“If the Irish were so wonderful, why was Ireland such a sad and empty country?” – JOHN UPDIKE

“Eire, a land whose history was muffled in legend and ignominy. Just its shape on the map, next to Great Britain’s spiky upstanding silhouette, suggested the huddled roundness of a docile spouse.” – JOHN UPDIKE

“An Irishman can always see both sides of an argument, provided it will lead to a fight.” – J. P. DONLEAVY

“All their (the Irish) wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.” – G. K. CHESTERTON

“Ireland's second religion is hate.” – RUDYARD KIPLING

“I personally will go so far as to suggest the reason Irishmen spend half their time in pubs and the other half throwing bombs into pubs: Irishwomen. Celts were always regarded by their unfortunate neighbors as a witch-ridden people.” – PROF. JOHN GREENWAY

“Irish Alzheimer's is a condition in which one forgets everything but one's grudges.” – PAT DICKEY (all I know about this person is that he is a friend of the writer Joseph Epstein)

“The only war Ireland ever won was a civil war, and then only by default.” – KURT SCHLICHTER (An ex-US Army Colonel, veteran of Bosnia and Gulf War I, a lawyer in California, and a prolific conservative Twitterer)

“Ireland has a surfeit of idealists who in their desire to make things better made everything very much worse.” – ROD LIDDLE

"We put the food in boiling water. Then we take it out." -- WILLIAM BULGER (Long-time Democrat State Senator of Massachusetts, and an ex-President of the University of Massachusetts -- on Irish cooking, as told to Richard Brookhiser) 

"Ireland is the country for ruins, from the Phoenicians down to the present day." -- JOHANN GEORG KOHL                                                           (German writer and geographer, in 1842)

"Put all the Dutch people in Ireland, and Ireland would be the garden of Europe. Put all the Irish people in the Netherlands, and it would sink." -- OTTO VON BISMARK 

“But Sinn Fein’s success is a reminder also of one of the great mysteries of Ireland, both North and South: how a people famous for remembering everything can have forgotten so much.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY (In Feb. 2020, after Sinn Fein won the most votes in the recent Irish general election)

“Forget Irish history, for the simple reason that Irish history does not really exist. People who cannot tell you accurately what happened next door last week have no history: they make do instead with legend and myth which are both more amusing and more advantageous. The Phoenicians conquered Ireland by weaving their magic spells.” – HONOR TRACY (A British novelist and travel writer, 1913-1989)

"I wouldn't want you to breathe a word of this to anyone, especially to those IRA zealots who think they're to be the new commissars when Marxism comes, but between me and you, fuck communism." -- BRENDAN BEHAN (in 1952, spoken to his pal, confidante and drinking mate, J. P. Donleavy) 

"I may be Irish, but I'm not stupid." -- JOE BIDEN (on 17 March 2022, and he's not and he is.)

"All of the good elements in Ireland long ago de-assed the area for ideologically more convivial climes around the world, leaving behind a rump of embittered farniente socialist layabouts, cranks, grumps, incompetents and inadequates.” – JACK JOLIS

Irony

“Irony is only a term for a cowardly mocking of someone else’s true conviction.” – MARK HELPRIN

 
"Irony is the song of a bird that's come to love its cage." -- ALDOUS HUXLEY

"Trying to explain irony is hard, because it is a figure of speech in which words used to mean the opposite of what they say. But it's not that hard." -- IAIN MACWHIRTER (of the Scottish "Herald")

 "Irony is a preemptive emotion, a handy baffling device to prevent the white noise coming in from Rwanda, Serbia, Cabrini Green or parents invading one's space." -- JOE QUEENAN (in 2000)

"Irony may be to life what gravity is to the universe, the invisible force that holds everything together and keeps everything apart." -- CHARLES McCARRY (I don't pretend to understand any of this, but it sounds elegant -- and McCarry's my guy, in any case...)

I.R.S., (The)

"The IRS doesn't give a shit about restoring the 'public's trust', only the public's fear." -- DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE

"This is the only country I have lived in in the civilized world where the citizens fear their revenue agency." -- MARK STEYN

"The IRS Employee Union donates 99% of its money to Democrats. Does anyone believe that an agency that gives almost every dollar from its PAC to one party is an unbiased referee of our tax system?" -- STEPHEN MOORE

“ISIS”

“My father-in-law used to say ‘There’s only one thing worse than being a nxxxxr.  Being a nxxxxr’s dog.’ I may have found an even lower form of life - being the wife of a member of ISIS.” – SAMUEL M’CHEYNE GLASSER

Islam

“The singular most revealing fact about the present ‘clash of civilisations’, namely that Muslims are migrating in their millions to the West, while nobody is migrating in the opposite direction.” – ROGER SCRUTON (the late British philosopher. And the same – extremely salient – point was made by John Updike about Vietnam and populations faced with the communist/non-communist alternatives.)

“Islamist economics reads like Utopian socialism in theory, and in practice is akin to Soviet economics without the vodka.” – JAMES S. ROBBINS (American national security analyst, in 2002)

“Islam is politics or it is nothing.” -- (AYATOLLAH) RUHOLLAH KHOMEINI (The old "There is no fun in Islam" bastard really was the Gift That Keeps On Giving)

“There is no real dialogue, since Muslims never reciprocate the goodwill gestures made by the Christians. The result is we sit down together, and the Christians say what a wonderful religion Islam is, and the Muslims say what a wonderful religion Islam is.” -- IBN WARRAQ         (This is the pseudonym of a "secular" Pakistani who is the author of, among other things. "Why I Am Not A Muslim")

“Whatever a western liberal tells you about the world of Islam, you can be assured that it is utterly wrong on every count. Demonstrably wrong every time on every issue, without fail.” – ROD LIDDLE

“ 'Nothing do do with Islam'. Just 'madness'. As if these two states of mind were mutually exclusive.” – ROD LIDDLE

“Islam is a territorial religion. Any space once gained is considered sacred and should belong to the umma for ever. Any lost space must be regained – even by force if necessary. Migrant Muslim communities in the West are constantly engaged in sacralising (sic) new areas – first the inner private spaces of their homes and mosques, and latterly whole neighborhoods.” – PATRICK SOOKHDEO                                                  (a British Islamic commentator, in Nov. 2005).

“There is a great deal of pleasure, after all, to be had from indignant outrage, especially when there isn’t much else in your life. The politics of Islamic countries tend to ensure that this is true of a large proportion of the population.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE (English author and Doctor. Real name Anthony Daniels)

“The fundamental problem of the Muslim world is that it wants the material fruits or benefits of the Enlightenment without the Enlightenment itself.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

“Technologically, scientifically, artistically, philosophically, economically they are nullities: but they know how to be vicious, and that makes up for every other defect. If the world will not listen to their tedious religious lucubrations, it will at least pay heed to their bloodcurdling threats. Each expression of pseudo-understanding is music to their ears.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

“To any non-Muslim reader of the Koran, Islamophobia – fear of Islam -- seems a natural reaction, and, indeed, exactly what that text is intended to provoke. Judged purely on its scripture – to say nothing of what is preached in the mosques – it is the most viciously sectarian of all religions in its heartlessness towards unbelievers.” – BORIS JOHNSON (The British Prime Minister was the one-time Editor of The (UK) SPECTATOR. A Good man.)

“To the godless, all things may seem possible without God, but Western Civilization will not be possible: We'll get a different God, and Mohammed is his prophet.” – TOM BETHELL

“The Koran is considered the final authority on all matters it touches upon – and that means just about all matters that impinge on the lives of ordinary mortals. Its style is exhortatory, and its mood imperative. It resounds with threats and imprecations and, for all its many passages of lyrical beauty, it is the biggest joke-free zone in literature.” – ROGER SCRUTON (for example, there are no cartoons in it…)

“A world wracked by acts of terror. Embattled civic forces victimized by violent political gangs. Endless wars resulting in the deaths of millions. Megalomaniacal leaders who seek to expand power through invasion and subversion. Militarized societies characterize ed by torture, intimidation, and repression. Genocide and mass murder of civilian populations. Millenarian ideologies that claim to provide answers to all of humankind’s vexing problems, and offer the snake-oil promise of rapid solutions to poverty and underdevelopments. Virulent anti-Semitism and scorn for the values of democracy, minority rights, and tolerance. These phenomena are part of the recent history of wide swaths of the Islamic and Arabic worlds.” – ADRIAN KARATNYCKY (President of Freedom House, in Dec. 2002)

“It is presumptuous and insulting to suggest that a whole region of the world, or the one-fifth of humanity that is Muslim, is somehow untouched by the most basic aspirations of life.” – GEORGE W. BUSH (I’m one of the few humans who actually managed to wade through his 1990 cinderblock of a memoir “Decision Points”, and I can confirm – I double checked – that not once do the words “Islam”, “Islamic” or “Muslim” appear in any of its 512 pages.)

“You hear the name of its deity called out, and you think you are about to die.” – CHARLES MOORE

“When politicians say that ‘Islam is a peaceful religion’ they are not exactly wrong – all the great religions speak of peace as their ultimate attainment – but one can’t help wondering if they would say it quite so often if they were absolutely sure it was true.” – CHARLES MOORE

“ ‘Not for nothing’ wrote Edward Said ‘did Islam come to symbolize terror, devastation, the demonic hordes of hated barbarians. For Europe, Islam was a lasting trauma…’. Some would say, it still is.” – PIERS PAUL READ

“Muslim bellicosity and violence are late-twentieth-century facts which neither Muslims nor non-Muslims can deny.” – SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON (He said this is 1996, and things ain’t noticeably improved since then, to put it mildly….)

“No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism (as Islam was then known as) is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step, and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science…the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL (in…. 1899!)

"How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property—either as a child, a wife, or a concubine—must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen: all know how to die. But the influence of the religion paralyzes the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science—the science against which it had vainly struggled—the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome." -- WINSTON CHURCHILL (In "The River War", which he wrote... in 1899! And this is one of the things he wrote that’s gotten him in so much bogus “trouble” from the usual commie sources....)

“Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

"Islam is as dangerous in a man as rabies is in a dog." -- WINSTON CHURCHILL

"When Muslims are in the minority they are very concerned with minority rights; when they are in the majority there are no minority rights." -- WINSTON CHURCHILL

“Anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence.” – TASMIN ASLAM (a spokeswoman for Pakistani President Musharraf, in 2006. And, if you think about it for a moment, what she says is hilariously, embarrassingly… exactly correct.)

“Those who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world. Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to paradise, which can be opened only for holy warriors!” – RUHOLLAH KHOMEINI (The granddaddy Ayatollah of them all. He said this in 1942 -- ! – and we should have listened to him then.)

“There is no ‘fun’ in Islam.” RUHOLLAH KHOMEINI (heh. Quoted by Reuel Marc Gerecht in The Weekly Standard in Jan 2006, saying this was a “famous” quotation…)

"Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious." -- AYATOLLAH RUHOLLAH KHOMEINI (from the horse's mouth – the “long version”)

"Female prisoners who are virgins must be raped before execution, to prevent them from entering heaven." -- AYATOLLAH RUHOLLAH KHOMEINI

“There are moderate Muslims, but no moderate Islam.”-- MARK STEYN (in his brilliant, book, "America Alone")

"As it happens, the biggest 'safe space' on the planet is the Muslim world. For a millennium, Islamic scholars have insisted, as firmly as a climate scientist or an American sophomore, that there's nothing to debate. And what happened? As the United Nations Human Development Programme's famous 2002 report blandly noted, more books are translated in Spain in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the last thousand years." -- MARK STEYN

"The devotees of multiculti tolerance and the Allahu Akbar crowd are united by their reliance on the shut-up card." – MARK STEYN

“By their behavior the Muslim extremists are in danger of making scurrility and disrespect towards Islam a positive duty of free men and women.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

“Osama bin Laden, in the light of the Koranic canon, is as good a Muslim as any and better than most.” – DAVID SELBOURNE (the American author of “The Losing Battle With Islam”, and he’s right.)

“Islam’s destructive spirit speaks only by the sword.” – MONTESQUIEU

"Let all show penitence before God, and abandon all bad and forbidden habits, such as the degrading acts of the flesh, the use of wine and tobacco, lying, bearing false witness, disobedience to parents, brigandage, the non-restitution of goods to others, the clapping of hands, dancing, improper signs with the eyes, tears and lamentations at the bed of the dead, slanderous language, calumny, and the company  of strange women. Clothe your women in a decent way, and let them be careful not to speak to unknown persons. All those who do not pay attention to these principles disobey God and His Prophet shall be punished in accordance with the law." -- "THE MAHDI" (real name: MOHAMMED AHMED IBN EL-SAYYID ABDULLAH) (Gordon's nemesis. Laurence Olivier in the movie. And damn well avoid the improper signs with the eyes... not to mention strange women....) 

 “The Koran is a wretched book in which I have not been able to discover one single idea of value.” – ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER (in 1819)

“Islam is deadly and to be feared. It is a form of decadence.” – ALEXIS DE TOQUEVILLE (even HE got into the act….)

“Islam is the only religion that acts like the mafia, that will fucking kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture or write the wrong book.” – BILL MAHER

"I like the Mussulman, he is not ashamed of his God. His life is a fairly pure one. Certainly he gives himself a good margin in the wife line, but at any time he never poaches on others'. Can our Christian people say the same?" -- GENERAL CHARLES "CHINESE" GORDON (of Khartoum, in an 1880 letter -- and he would, of course, be famously killed by those same Mussulmans 5 years later) 

“The world worries about highly-enriched uranium, but the real danger is highly-enriched Islam”. – MAMOUN FANDY (Director of the Middle East program at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.)

“My primary interest in Islam lies in understanding why it is used to rationalize barbaric behavior.  I don’t much care about it otherwise.” – ANDREW C. McCARTHY (of NRO and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies)

“The main cause of Islamic radicalism is Islamic doctrine, not lack of democracy. The doctrine at issue does not make all or even most Muslims into radicals; but as long as it is not reformed, it will always make some percentage of them radicals (in many places, a larger percentage than we like to acknowledge)”. – ANDREW C. McCARTHY

“Mohammed was a pedophiIe. Islam is evil, violent, hateful, barbaric and incompatible with freedom.” -- GEERT  WILDERS

“A man’s honor rests between the legs of his daughters and sisters. This is culture?” – AYAAN HIRSI ALI (the brave Somali lady who was chased out of Holland to come to rest in the good ol’ USA)

“Islam is not a religion of peace, it's a political theory of conquest that seeks domination by any means it can.” – AYAAN HIRSI ALI

"If Islam is the same as every other religion, why do I have to walk around with armed bodyguards?" -- AYAAN HIRSI ALI

“Islam appears to me less as a religion than as a system of world domination, dividing, as it does, the Dar al-Harb and the Dar al-Islam. And unlike that other, now relatively defunct, system of world domination, communism, it offers its adherents an afterlife. That makes Islam potentially more alluring and less destructible, ultimately more dangerous. Marx’s promised ‘withering away of the state’ isn’t much compared to an eternity of virgins.” – ROGER SIMON

“The status of women is only one piece of the puzzle. What Islam really finds intolerable is that the West exists as an autonomous power. And that is precisely why the West, if it is to continue to thrive, must find Islam in its current configuration intolerable” – ROGER KIMBALL

“We’re told to ‘understand’ Islam. I think the primary task is not to understand but to change it.”-- ROGER KIMBALL

“Islam is totalitarianism with Allah pasted onto the top of it.” — JACK JOLIS

"Islam is a totalitarian, political death-cult, armed with a supernatural cover story." -- JACK JOLIS

"Islam isn't, strictly speaking, a 'religion' -- Rather, Islam is a totalitarian political way of 'life', that is in fact, a death cult... a grim and inhuman package that hides behind a divine veneer." -- JACK JOLIS

“The only good Muslim is a bad Muslim.” – JACK JOLIS (thank you, thank you.....)

“Our civilization is superior to theirs (Islam); just look at the way they treat women.” -- SILVIO BERLUSCONI

“Islam constitutes a distinct civilization. It is not merely an exotic splash on the gorgeious global mosaic with a few embarrassing cultural eccentricities; it is an entirely different way of looking at the world.” -- ANDREW C. McCARTHY

“The underlying problem for the West is not islamic fundamentalism, it is Islam – a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture.” -- SAMUEL HUNTINGTON (the American author and political scientist, most famous for his “The clash of Civilizations”)

“Men should grow beards. One of the two body parts that separate men from women is the beard, For example, if you see a man with long hair from afar you may think he is a woman if he does not have a beard. Because nowadays women and men dress similarly. God forbid! You could be possessed by indecent thoughts!" -- MURAT BAYARAL     (A Turkish Islamic cleric, in April 2024 -- and I already hate shaving, so I'll think of this genius each morning when I do so.)  

“We must be open and tolerant towards Islam and Muslims because when we become a minority, they will be so towards us.” – JENS ORBACH (I promise this is a real quote, and not some poor right-wing attempt at satire. Mr. Orbach is something that purports to be Sweden’s Minister for Democracy. So. THAT’s alright, then….)

“There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it” – RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN (Prime Minister of Turkey, and the head of the Islamist AKP Party, in 2007 And, hey, he ought to know….)

“The Moslem religion ever makes numbness and death in some part of the human understanding.” – CHARLES MONTAGU DOUGHTY (In his “Travels in Arabia Deserta”, 1888)

“I don’t want to live in a society where I get stoned for committing adultery. I want to live in a society where I get stoned. And then commit adultery.” – IBN WARRAQ (The pseudonym of a prudent Muslim writer living in England, in Sept. 2007)

“Speaking is a means to achieve objectives. If a praiseworthy aim is attainable through both telling the truth and lying, it is unlawful to accomplish it through lying because there is no need for it. When it is possible to achieve such an aim by lying but not by telling the truth, it is permissible to lie if attaining the goal is permissible, and the speaker is obligated to lie if the goal is obligatory.” -- AHMAD IBN NAQIB AL-MISRI (in his 1368 manual of sacred Islamic law: “The Reliance Of The Traveler”. Italics added. So I guess it’s a Religion of Truth as well as a Religion of Peace. Good to know….)

“It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims; We cannot clear our names unless we own up to the shameful fact that terrorism has become an Islamic enterprise; an almost exclusive monopoly, implemented by Muslim men and women.” – ABDEL RAHMAN AL-RASHED (General manager of the “al-Arabiya” news channel, in 2004)

"We respect Muhammad, we do not respect Mohamed Atta." – MARTIN AMIS

"I have a weird theory. Maybe one of the reasons -- aside from the illiteracy, shame culture, anti-Semitism, authoritarianism, etc. -- that Arabs are both so conspiratorial and so complex in their political machinations is the lack of alcohol in their cultures. Maybe there's so much intrigue and duplicity in the Middle East because that's exactly the sort of thing you'd expect in a society where men sit around all night consuming stimulants like nicotine and caffeine. In, say, Russia -- another hotbed of paranoia -- people stay up late into the night, but they get drunker and more simplistic the later it gets. In hookah bars, you stay up later and later, totally sober and increasingly wired, like a college sophomore on a sleep-deprivation vision quest who, at 3:00 in the morning, suddenly realizes he should write his term paper on how Kierkegaard predicted Jersey Shore." -- JONAH GOLDBERG (Jonah's explanation of the world's Muslim Problem -- no booze. Well, like Supreme Court Justette Elena Kagan, who regularly has to "recuse" herself from cases before the Court because she's been too closely involved in cases as a "party of the first part" -- or whatever -- I feel I must  recuse myself from this particular debate. However, I would just say that, well, it doesseem to hold water..... heh.)

“The problem with Islam is not a lack of self-esteem but too damned much.” – BRUCE THORNTON (a professor of classics at Cal State, Fresno, in 2006)

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

“When I, a thoughtful and unblessed Presbyterian, examine the Koran, I know that beyond any question every Mohammedan is insane, not in all things, but in religious matters. I cannot prove to him that he is insane, because you never can prove anything to a lunatic — for that is a part of his insanity and the evidence of it.” -- MARK TWAIN

"It seems to me that there is no single aspect of Mohammedan art, history, scholarship, or social, religious or political organization, to which we, as Christians, cannot look with unshaken pride of race." -- EVELYN WAUGH

"The absence of an Islamic theater may have something to do with the Islamists' grim humorlessness, which reflects an inability to see themselves from outside, as we see actors in a drama." – BRIAN C. ANDERSON                                                                                                                   (Editor of City Journal and author of "South Park Conservatives")

"Killing is the same as mercy. To kill and be killed are the supreme duties of Muslims; war is a divine blessing." -- AYATOLLAH RUHOLLAH KHOMEINI

"Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious." -- AYATOLLAH RUHOLLAH KHOMEINI

"I'm getting tired of treating Islam like Fabergé eggs." -- DENNIS MILLER

“Contrary to popular misconception, Islam does not mean peace but rather means submission to the commands of Allah alone"-- ANJEM CHOUDARY (The firebrand London-based “cleric” who said this on Hannity right after the Charlie Hebdo killings in Jan 2015)

“Muslim scholars spend all their time arguing about how long they will have erections in Islamic Paradise and discussing pederasty in Islamic Paradise.” – FARAG FODA (an Egyptian writer who, for his pains, was murdered by, er, followers of “The Religion of Peace”)

“Listen to what the Islamists say, and believe that they mean what they say…. These are people who inhabit a spiritual world of ultimate goods, of a relationship with their God, of  responsibilities and obligations. When we disparage that and say that it’s a distortion… we completely fail to understand the people who want to destroy us.” – BRUCE THORNTON                                                                                              (prof of classics at Cal State Univ., Fresno)

“The majority of young Muslims are by no means religious; they see in Islam but a pretext for the domination of women.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

"We Muslims know the Ground Zero mosque is meant to be a deliberate provocation" – RAHEEL RAZA and TAREK FATAH                          (both members of something called the Muslim Canadian Congress)

"Islam is a parody upon Christianity by the evil spirit. It tells its followers to commit criminal violence in this life and promises a reward, the enjoyment of vicious indulgence in the life to come. I will not be sorry one day to see the Turk kicked out of Europe and compelled to go and sit cross-legged, smoke his pipe, chew his opium and cut off heads on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus." -- LORD PALMERSTON (Real name Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, 1784-1865. British Foreign Minister from 1830 to 1855 and Prime Minister from 1855 until his death.)

“There are gradations of spite, violence, persecution and insecurity within Islam: but what there always is, beyond all doubt, is spite, violence, persecution and insecurity.” – ROD LIDDLE

“To the godless, all things may seem possible without God, but Western Civilization will not be possible. We'll get a different God, and Mohammed is his prophet.” – TOM BETHELL

“'Seventy-two virgins' is a mis-translation. What the martyr really gets is a 72-year-old virgin.” – JEFF MIRZA (the London-born Pakistani comic)

“There is no fun or humour in Islam and nothing funny about Islam but it is without question the world’s biggest joke.” – TERRY GAIN (A commenter to PajamasMedia and, judging from his spelling, a Brit.)

“A society that becomes more Muslim eventually becomes less everything else.” – MARK STEYN

“The price of welcoming and incubating and growing Islam in the west is, ultimately, the loss of everything else.” – MARK STEYN

“I have plenty of problems with the ideology of Islam, but none at all with its requirement for self-effacement and self-denial.” -- ROD LIDDLE

“Every time the mass of people in Muslim countries exert their popular will, it is to create a regime which is considerably more unpleasant, punitive, illiberal and hostile to the West than the undoubtedly ghastly regime which was peremptorily overthrown.” – ROD LIDDLE

“Islam, as it is practiced today, is in general neither peaceable nor tolerant and it seems to me absurd to pretend that it is.” – ROD LIDDLE (in April 2019)

“It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated; to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.” -- HASSAN AL-BANNA (the Egyptian founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Obama's and the Democrats' friends....)

“Jesus died to start Christianity. Muhammad killed to start Islam.” – RANDALL TERRY (The anti-abortion activist.)

“The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” – BARACK OBAMA (Can you fucking believe it? The fucking President of the United Fucking States.....)

"The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture." -- SAMUEL HUNTINGTON

“The problem isn't fundamentalist Islam, it's the fundamentals OF Islam.” – SAM HARRIS                           (The American philosopher, neuroscientist and author of «The End Of Faith»)

“The hatred of women is an endemic barbarism of Islam, no ifs or buts about it.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

“A proselytizing Muslim preacher cannot teach why one must obey Allah since any claim to understand him is a sacrilege. He can only demand blind obedience.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

“Islamism is so stupid, so preposterous and intellectually nugatory, and so appallingly catastrophic in its actual effects, that it makes one almost nostalgic for the days of Marxism.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

“Religion is more difficult to talk about. I don’t think we could do ‘Life of Brian’ any more. A parody of Islam would be even harder. Weallsaw what happened to Salman Rushdie." -- MICHAEL PALIN (The famous Python, at the end of 2013, and while he may have devolved into a politically correct wuss of the first order, at least he’s honest.)

“We must make a decision whether to follow man-made civil law, or whether to follow the fatwas issued by Islamic jurisprudents. We must no embellish things and say that Islam is a religion of compassion, peace and rose water, and that everything is fine. Brother, your Islamic history is full of wars, raids – from Tunisia alone, one million boys were taken as slaves to Damascus.” – AYAD JAMAL AL-DIN (a Shiite cleric, Iraqi intellectual, and former member of the Iraqi parliament, on 17 October 2014)

“If we are practicing Muslims, we are above the law of the land.” – MUSTAFA CARROLL (Director of CAIR, Texas, in Jan. 2015)

"Many women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes." -- HOJATOLESLAM KAZEM SEDIGHI (This genius -- whose scientific aptitude would seem to make him a good candidate for honorable membership in the Congressional Black Caucus -- was personally appointed to be "Official Leader of Friday Prayers" throughout Tehran, by Iranian "Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Khamenei. Me, I think it's fine -- at least he doesn't blame any earthquakes on fracking.…)

“Muslims live in fear of one another more than in fear of others, at least in the modern world.” -- THEODORE DALRYMPLE

“If I convert to Islam could I then announce a ban on people saying insulting things about me?” – DINESH D'SOUZA

“It legal to yell 'Allahu Akbar' in a crowded theater? – WILL ANTONIN

“Islam equals communism plus Allah.” – SIR MUHAMMAD IQBAL                                                                   (Pakistan’s “Founding Poet”. And this is a hell of a quote.)

“There’s this notion Islam and Muslims are this protected species. That if we talk about them at all or criticize at all, it’s somehow hurting or humiliating Muslims. It’s a ridiculous idea. They mistreat women, make them wear the burqa and all the rest. But that’s ‘their culture’ and you have to accept it. It’s the one exception. Liberal about everything but this one exception, ‘it’s their culture’. Well, to hell with their culture.” -- RICHARD DAWKINS (The famous English atheist, speaking to Bill Maher -- another one who may be a lefty but who     has cojones when it comes to telling the truth about "the religion of peace".)

“The trouble is a lack of forgiveness in Islam. I have looked through the Quran trying to find forgiveness... there isn't any. If you find it, tell me.” – CANON ANDREW WHITE (the liberal Church of England Canon of Baghdad)

“Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Qur'an should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.” – OMAR AHMED (Chairman of CAIR)

"Let’s be clear: Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism." – HILLARY CLINTON (Nov 15, 2015)

"Islam, this absurd theology of an immoral Bedouin, is a rotting corpse which poisons our lives." -- MUSTAFA KEMAL ATATURK (The secular founder of modern Turkey.)

“The only Religion I Respect is Islam The only Prophet I Admire is Muhammad.” – ADOLF HITLER

"It’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. The Mohammedan religion would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?" – ADOLF HITLER

"Staying alive seemed to be pretty low on the average Muslim's list of priorities." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS (in 1993)

"You cry like a woman, for what you didn't defend as a man" -- AIXA (The mother of the last Muslim king of Spain, Muhammad XII of Granada, known to the Spanish as "Boabdil", to her son after his final defeat at the Battle of Granada, in 1492 -- his surrender to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, by the way, was attended by, amongst many others, Christopher Columbus)

“The (Islamic) enemy is obsessed with holy sites, and is as convinced as the old Communist archenemies had been that capitalism has a headquarters, a head that may be cut off, leaving flocks of the faithful to be gratefully herded into an ascetic and dogmatic tyranny. The (Islamic) enemy cannot believe that democracy and consumerism are fevers in the blood of Everyman, an outgrowth of each individual’s instinctive optimism and desire for freedom.” – JOHN UPDIKE (in his 2006 novel “Terrorist”)

"Virgins of paradise will have no menstruation, saliva, mucus, or excrement; each man will be given the sexual strength of 100 men." -- AHMAD KHADOURA (this brilliant chap, speaking in October 2023, is described as a "Gaza Islamic Scholar”)

"Like National Socialism, Islam is a cult of masculinity, and also like National Socialism, it is a kind of idolatry of masculinity, confusing genuine masculine strength with brutality, bloodlust, domination, and the exaltation of violence and brute force. This is why both National Socialism and Islam attract weak men who are overcompensating for their lack of real masculinity, and who often also wish to deny and suppress their homosexual inclinations.

Converts to Islam in the West (generally as opposed to men who grow up in Islamic cultures) and sons of immigrant Muslims who become deeply committed to their faith over here generally tend to be losers who are attracted to the spurious sense of superiority and strength that Islam offers them, and insecure half-men who can't get a woman other than through making a deal with her father, etc." -- ROBERT SPENCER (American author and expert on Jihad)

Islam (doctrine)

"If they had gotten rid of the apostasy punishment, Islam wouldn't exist today. Opposing apostasy is what kept Islam alive to this day." -- YUSUF AL-QARADAWI (The head of the Muslim Brotherhood, in Arabic, speaking on Egyptian TV)

“Mohammed, they say, came back one day from talking with Allah in the desert with word that it was OK to have as many wives as you wanted. But the prophet’s advisors, those grave and powerful men, though without a direct line to God, decided he had heard wrong. Surely Mohammed was mistaken; surely Allah said no more than four? Otherwise, wouldn’t family life collapse? The prophet’s remembrance under pressure, collapsed. OK, OK, only four, that’s what Allah said, have it your own way. And so it goes, to this day. Only four.” – FAY WELDON

"Female prisoners who are virgins must be raped before execution, to prevent them from entering heaven." -- AYATOLLAH RUHOLLAH KHOMEINI

"Men can have sex with sheep, camels and so on. However, he should kill the animal after he has had his orgasm. He should not sell the meat to the people of his own village. But selling the meat to a neighboring village is reasonable." -- AYATOLLAH RUHOLLAH KHOMEINI

"Men have authority over women because Allah has made the one superior to the other, and because men spend their wealth to maintain women. good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because Allah has guarded them. As for those women from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart, and beat them. Then, if they obey you, do nothing further against them." -- THE KORAN -- SURAH 4 VERSE 34 

"Islamic Holy Law, or sharia, stressed that the community or state and the religion were inseparable from each other. The religion conferred legitimacy on the community, while the community protected the religion." -- BING WEST       (In his excellent book about the Battle for Fallujah, "No True Glory" -- and it's called Totalitarianism, people....)  

Islam (“Halal”)

"For a true halal slaughter, the animal's throat is cut while the butcher recites some religious rhyme from the early Middle Ages. I do not want that to happen to the meat I eat. I want the creature to be conveyed to lamb or calf heaven painlessly, perhaps with the butcher whistling 'All Da Niggas and Da Bitches' by Snoop Dogg." -- ROD LIDDLE (The "house Labourite" columnist at the {UK} SPECTATOR, on the news that all of the UK's supermarkets had agreed to sell "halal" meat, without telling the public.)

Islam In America

“I am an Iranian by birth and of my Islamic faith. I am also an American citizen and I seek to change America to be a more Islamic country. My faith guides me and I feel that it is going well in the transition of using freedom of religion in America against itself.” – VALERIE JARRETT (Barack Obama's chief string-puller and the effective chief executive of the US from 2008 to 2016, here speaking at her alma mater, Stanford, in 1977. And I don’t believe a word she says – she’s no Muslim, she’s a communist.)

"There is very little phobia (irrational dislike or fear) about Islam in America. We are Islam-aware, e.g we understand that horrible threat to humanity." -- JIM HORN (my old CIA pal from the Central African Republic)
 

"Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim Book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth." -- OMAR AHMAD (Founder of CAIR)

Islam (“moderate”)

“But if our time is to be limited, it would be nice to see less of it wasted on pleas for Muslim grown-ups – or anybody else – to get inside the heads of their militant mutineers with a view to gentle persuasion. The only understanding likely to be productive is of the kind needed for sufficient intelligence to catch them and thwack them.” – CAROL SARLER (writing in the UK SPECTATOR in August 2007)

“The answer to this problem is, he says, to bolster moderate Muslims. It often is: never have so few been invoked by so many.” -- JAMES FORSYTH (the REAL problem is: a “moderate” Muslim is a bad Muslim. Sorry.)

“Moderation happens to Islam, not in Islam.” – ANDREW C. McCARTHY

"Radical Islam is not very radical ― it is Islamic doctrine strictly applied.” – ANDREW C. MCCARTHY

“Moderate” Muslims resemble the innocent and unwitting carriers of a deadly virus. They have not deliberately caused the epidemic of Jihaditis from which millions of their fellows suffer, but they allow it to spread unchecked if they do not recognize the affliction and seek appropriate treatment. For Islam itself is the pretext and warrant for both overt violence against and covert subversion of Western cultural and institutional life, and there is no Islam without the sustaining habitat provided by the moderates.” – DAVID SOLWAY  (The Canadian poet, in PJMedia, June 2013)

"Muslims are the first victims of Islam. To liberate the Muslim from his religion is the best service that one can render him" – ERNEST RENAN (the 19 thcentury French historian and Middle East expert – a philosopher and “Orientalist”)

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

«Radical Nazism. Ridiculous? As ridiculous as Radical Islam.» – BOSCH FAWSTIN                                                          (the ex-Muslim Albanian-American cartoonist, who drew the winning cartoon of Mohammed in that Pam Geller contest down in Texas at which the two Jihadists got shot down by the Texas cop. A good guy.)

“I'm not a critic of "radical Islam", I'm a radical critic of Islam.” – BOSCH FAWSTIN

"It's not that extremists are corrupting Islam. It's that moderates are sanitizing it." -- RAIF BADAWI (Muslim-born atheist Pakistani-Canadian author)

"Creators should have nothing to do with Islamic fashion. Designers are there to make women more beautiful, to give them their freedom, not to collaborate with this dictatorship which imposes this abominable thing by which we hide women and make them live a hidden life."--PIERRE BERGE (the business partner and boy-friend of Yves St. Laurent)

“There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it” – RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN (Prime Minister of Turkey, and the head of the Islamist AKP Party, in 2007 And, hey, he ought to know….)

"Let’s be clear: Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism." – HILLARY CLINTON (Nov 15, 2015)

“For those who argue political Islam and democracy are incompatible, Erdogan in Exhibit A.” – JUSTIN MAROZZI (in May 2019. He is the author of the book “Islamic Empires”.)

Islam (Sharia & Sharia supremacy)

“We are not here to adopt Western values; we are here to colonize the U.S. And Canada, and to spread Islamic Sharia Law. Canada has one of the easiest legal systems to penetrate and advance Sharia from within. But if that doesn't work, we won't hesitate to use violent Jihad.” – TARIQ RAMADAN (Professor for Islamic Studies, Oxford)

Islam (Sunni)

“A straight line of Sunni tyranny leads from the weak and unscrupulous Faisal to the mass graves of Saddam Hussein and his Baathists” – DAVID PRYCE-JONES (British author—THE CLOSED CIRCLE, amongst others -- and journalist, who knows as much about our friends The Be-toweled as anyone on earth.)

Islam (Wahabbi)

“Oil isn't the principal Saudi export, ideology is; petroleum merely bankrolls it.” – MARK STEYN (in June 2006)

“The Wahhabists have successfully radicalized hitherto moderate Muslim communities from Albania to Indonesia; they’ve planted their most radical clerics as in-house padres throughout U.S. prisons and even the armed forces.” – MARK STEYN (like the U.S. Army chaplain in P. N. Gwynne’s THE BRONX BOMBING)

Islamic ecumenism

“In Islam, Sunni or Shia do not count for they are all brothers and equal.” – AYATOLLAH RUHOLLAH KHOMEINI

“We Will Gather Together Kurds And Arabs, And All Of The Muslim World, And Invade Jerusalem, And Create A One World Islamic Empire.” – RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN (On 27 May 2015)

“The left uses Islam as a means to achieve its ends. In Europe you’re seeing what those ends look like.” – NICK SHORT (On the Twoot – 30 March 2016)

"Islam is the common cold and Leftism is Aids. It's easy to fight off a cold unless you have Aids" -- MILO YIANNOPOULOS

“Only a coalition of Marxists and Islamists can destroy the United States.” – ILICH RAMIREZ SANCHEZ (“Carlos The Jackal” – a guy who ought to know about all this....)

“A lot of the reason left-wing men seem to have so much time for Islamism is to do with suppressed feelings of resentment towards the march of feminism, which they could never in a million years admit to.” – JULIE BURCHILL

“It is true that Saddam is a thief and an apostate, but there is no harm in such circumstances if the Muslims’ interests coincide with those of the socialists in fighting the Crusaders, despite our firm conviction that they are infidels. There is nothing wrong with a convergence of interests here.” – OSAMA BIN LADEN                     (In an audiotape of 11 February 2003, one month before we moved against Saddam. And this is the MONEY QUOTE when it comes to the reasons for the Iraq war.)

"Iran is our main artery for funds, personnel, and communications." -- OSAMA BIN LADEN

“Sunni and Shia jihadists of a feather flock together.” – BENJAMIN WEINGARTEN (of THE FEDERALIST and THE CLAREMONT INSTITUTE, on the Israelis killing Al Qaeda’s #2 criminal in Iran, in Nov. 2020)

"In our time, the Shia Iranian regime has even made common cause with Sunni al-Qaeda. Forget what you thought about a Sunni-Shia rivalry preventing cooperation." -- MIKE POMPEO

"I'll remind the world again the killers of three thousand Americans are no longer conducting the bulk of their external plotting against America from Afghan soil. They are in Iran." -- MIKE POMPEO

Islamic “Jihad”

“We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.” – HUSSEIN MASSAWI (this charming fella is the guy who brought you the 1984 USMC barracks bombing in Beirut – 241 US KIA. I know these ragheads are congenital liars, but in this case – why don’t we take him at his word?....)

“We don’t make a distinction between civilians and non-civilians, only between Muslims and unbelievers. And the life of the unbeliever has no value.” – OMAR BAKRI MOHAMMED (described in Lisbon’s ‘Publica” magazine, here as a “Sheik” – could he be, with vibrator up his arse, the original “Sheik Mohammed”?)

"To kill Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim". -- OSAMA BIN LADEN (in 1998; midway through the 2ndClinton Administration, and 3 years before 9/11, and 5 years before the American overthrow of Saddam Hussein.)

"Jihadism is racist, homophobic, totalitarian, genocidal, inquisitorial and imperialistic. Surely there should be no difficulty in announcing one's hostility to that, but there is." – MARTIN AMIS

"Jihad won't go away. There would be no Muslim world without it." – ANDREW C. McCARTHY

"There are no lone wolves. There is a global Islamic supremacist pack." – ANDREW C. McCARTHY

“Some people just become jihadists for a variety of reasons, mainly having to do with the dysfunctional cultures that nourish it.” – ANN MARLOWE (an American expert on Afghanistan and counterinsurgency theory. In August 2009.)

"Jihad is not trying to convert you; it is seeking the imposition of Allah's law." -- ANDREW C. McCARTHY

“It is true that Saddam is a thief and an apostate, but there is no harm in such circumstances if the Muslims’ interests coincide with those of the socialists in fighting the Crusaders, despite our firm conviction that they are infidels. There is nothing wrong with a convergence of interests here.” – OSAMA BIN LADEN          (In an audiotape of 11 February 2003, one month before we moved against Saddam. And this is the MONEY QUOTE when it comes to the reasons for the Iraq war.)

“When a Christian says ‘Praise God’, people nod politely or in agreement. When a Muslim shouts ‘Allahu Akbar’, everybody ducks.” – MONA CHAREN

“What I am doing is part of the ongoing war between Islam and disbelief.” -- RICHARD REID (the “shoe bomber”, in an e-mail to his mother 2 days before his attempted attack)

“Muslims who take Islam seriously are at war with us and Muslims who don’t aren’t. But, that doesn’t mean we should consider these reluctant Muslims allies against Jihad…they give the enemy cover..indifferent about the evil being committed in the name of their religion…proving in their silence and inaction against jihad that they are not on our side either.” – BOSCH FAWSTIN                                   (The “recovered” Muslim, writing in Front Page magazine in 2013)

“More than half of this war is taking place on the battlefield of the media.” – AYMAN AL-ZAWAHIRI        (The then-boss of Al Qaeda, in 2005)          

“The war of narratives has become even more important than the war of navies, napalms, and knives.” – OMAR AL-HAMMAMI (Of Somalia’s Al Shabbab, 2013)

“Jihad is Islam, nothing more nothing less.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

“Jihad existed before modern Israel. Jihad existed before America. Jihad existed before even Great Britain. So, no, it is not rooted in our supposed national sins, the Sykes-Picot agreement. That's not nihilism. It’s fanaticism. And these fanatics don’t care one bit about the race or ideology of our president. But they do care about our strength or weakness. And now, Americans should once again see that weakness means death.” – DAVID FRENCH

"The West must awaken to the fact that it is facing nothing less than the resurgence of the greatest war machine in world history: an ideology that holds the killing of others, the plundering of their wealth, the conquering of their lands, the enslavement of their people, and the destruction of their institutions to be among the highest virtues and the stepping stones to salvation. Islam, while it continues to lack a centralized political structure, is nonetheless reacquiring the means of war it has used to such deadly effect in the past. Yet it seems that the secular West today is determined not to hear the bad news. It is hoping against hope that things are not as bad as they seem. It is hoping that the myriad acts of violence around the world done in the name of Allah are somehow not indicative of 'real' Islam. It is hoping that Muslims throughout the world calling for the destruction of America and Europe are just blowing hot air. It is hoping that Islam -- a religion founded by one of history's great warlords; a religion that waged wars of aggression and conquest for a thousand years, that slaughtered and enslaved untold millions and invented modern genocide, and that today is the only force in the world that produces terrorism, suicide bombings, hostage-taking, organized rape, and massacres on a global scale -- that this strange, seething, violent mass is somehow 'a religion of peace.' Rejecting this fiction and standing up to be counted will determine whether or not we survive the twenty-first century." -- GREGORY DAVIS (In his excellent 2006 book “Religion of Peace: Islam’s War Against the World”)

"The burka is just another weapon in the jihadist arsenal of misogyny." - Dr. TAJ HARGEY (The Imam of the Oxford Islamic Conference, UK)

“Muslims, whether they live in Pakistan or India, Nigeria or Syria, whether they are poor or rich, illiterate or educated, their only goal is to destroy the whole nation by terrorism, bomb blasts, population explosion, riots and Jihad in the name of Islam.” – SALMAN RUSHDIE

“You cannot win a war against radical Islamic terrorists with an Administration unwilling to utter the words radical Islamic terrorists.” – TED CRUZ

"If the President and the other Democrats don't believe these radicals are really Muslims, why do they bend over backwards to treat them as Muslims when they're captured – and then release them into Muslim countries?” – DENNIS PRAGER

“Muslims must kill non-believers wherever they are, unless they convert to Islam.” – DR. ALI GOMAA        (The «Grand Mufti» of Egypt, in 2008)

"Those who study Islamic Holy War will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world."-- AYATOLLAH RUHOLLAH KHOMEINI                                                                                                                          (he was not a coy fellow)

“We Will Gather Together Kurds And Arabs, And All Of The Muslim World, And Invade Jerusalem, And Create A One World Islamic Empire.” – RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN (On 27 May 2015)

“O Muslims, Islam was never for a day the religion of peace. Islam is the religion of war. Your Prophet (peace be upon him) was dispatched with the sword as a mercy to the creation. He was ordered with war until Allah is worshiped alone. He (peace be upon him) said to the polytheists of his people, ‘I came to you with slaughter.’ … He never for a day grew tired of war.” – ABU BAKR AL BAGDADI (The Generalissimo of “The Islamic State”, “ISIS”.)

"Islam is a conquest ideology -- not even a religion." -- RUSH LIMBAUGH

“Non-jihadist Muslims become jihadists- Not because they've been "radicalized" by others- but because They decided to take Islam Seriously.” – BOSCH FAWSTIN

“Radical Islam understands that the more pre-modern it becomes, the more postmodern is the likely Western response.” – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

“Radical Islam finally has grasped that the way to destroy Western societies is to employ Western political correctness against them, leading eventually to their paralysis.” – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

" The mosques are our barracks, the drones our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers."– RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN

“It is not a clash of civilizations, but a clash between civilization and barbarism.” – GEERT WILDERS

"Islam has bloody borders." -- SAMUEL HUNTINGTON

"America did not create the threat of Jihadist Islam, and American retreat will not eliminate the threat." -- DAVID FRENCH

"Violent expansionism has been a central fact of Islamic existence, and the Ottoman Empire's fall after World War I did not result in a change in Islamic theology so much as a call among Islamists for Islam to return to its Jihadist roots." -- DAVID FRENCH

“We will win because Americans don’t realize . . . we do not need to defeat you militarily; we only need to fight long enough for you to defeat yourself by quitting.” -- KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED (The mastermind of 9/11 -- and, incidentally, the be-header of Wall Street Journalist and fraternity brother of mine, Daniel Pearl -- as quoted in James Mitchell's riveting book "Enhanced Interrogation".)

"Eventually America will expose her neck to us for slaughter." – KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED

"Islamic terrorists perceive ours as a candle-and-teddy-bear society -- 'We kill, you light candles.' -- The teddy bears are more reassuring for the terrorists than for those who buy them to place on the site of the latest outrage." -- THEODORE DALRYMPLE

“The jihadis distrust music for the same reason they distrust women and art: because at some not very deep level they fear, correctly, that they are perverts.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY

“We have 50 million Muslims in Europe, There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe – without swords, without guns, without conquests. The 50 million Muslims of Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.” - MOAMMAR GADDAFI

"If you are weak your land will become Muslim." -- ASHIN WIRATHU (the Burmese Buddhist monk who's the leader of the anti-Muslim (Rohingya) people there. And stone me if he's not wrong.)

"Terrorism will only end when scripture is not taken literally." -- ED HUSAIN

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

“Islamic State”, The (“ISIS)

"The way you deal with the Islamic State, these bloodthirsty, blood-drunken terrorists, is to kill them, keep on killing them until you've killed the last one, and then you kill his pet goat." -- LTC RALPH PETERS

“O Muslims, Islam was never for a day the religion of peace. Islam is the religion of war. Your Prophet (peace be upon him) was dispatched with the sword as a mercy to the creation. He was ordered with war until Allah is worshipped alone. He (peace be upon him) said to the polytheists of his people, ‘I came to you with slaughter.’  … He never for a day grew tired of war.” – ABU BAKR  AL BAGDADI (The Generalissimo of “The Islamic State”.)

Islamism

«Islamism is so stupid, so preposterous and intellectually nugatory, and so appallingly catastrophic in its actual effects, that it makes one almost nostalgic for the days of Marxism.» –THEODORE DALRYMPLE

«Islamism in the modern world being the continuation of crime by other means.» – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

«Islamism is a Middle Eastern form of fascism.» – PAUL BERMAN                                                                      (in his book «The Flight Of The Intellectuals»)

“The creed is Islamism, a modern-day political agenda masquerading as religion. Its artefacts take the form of permanent war with secularism and an obsession with purity.” – QANTA AHMED (a lady author of “In The Land Of Invisible Women”, and member of the UK Council On Foreign Relations)

"Saying that Islamism has nothing to do with Islam is like saying that a particular part of beef has nothing to do with a cow. They are inexorably linked; one grows inside the other. There are plenty of ways to practice Islam -- and plenty of choices in cuts of steak -- but they all come from the same place." -- GLENN BECK 

"The only thing Islamists  know is violence." -- JOHN ROSSOMANDO      (Very pithy. Full of pith.)

Islamofascism

“Islamic fascism is a cult watered by frustration and cultivated by political actors, mostly Saudi and Iranian, with access to immense wealth. None of these factors will change easily.” – RICHARD BROOKHISER

“Our new enemies are not simply bent on our destruction: they are pleased to compass their own destruction as a collateral benefit. This is one of those things that makes Islamofascism a particularly toxic form of totalitarianism. At least most Communists had some rudimentary attachment to the principle of self-preservation. In the face of such death-embracing fanaticism our only option is unremitting combat.” – ROGER KIMBALL

“No other major religion – with the possible exception of Persian Zoroastrianism – has been so ravaged by Islam as has Hinduism.” – SHIVA NAIPAUL

“Islamophobia”

"You can call that Islamophobia, if you’re suffering from factophobia." – ANDREW C. MCCARTHY

« 'Islamophobia' is a word created by fascists and used by cowards to manipulate morons.» – ANDREW CUMMINS (an elusive fellow of whom nothing much is known other than he used to appear on Twitter under the name of @vodkaninja . Anyway, it's a pity he's incongnito, as this quote has become famous world-wide, and is often mis-attributed to the late Christopher Hitchens)

"Islamophobia is a code word for mainstream European elites’ fear of their own populations"– BRENDAN O'NEILL (the editor of the London-based online magazine “Spiked”)

“ 'Islamophobic' is a favorite phrase of trouble-makers.” – BEN STEIN

“We have a Saudi crown prince who is being more frank about Wahhabi-inspired terrorism than the British.” – JOHN R. BRADLEY (on then-Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in THE SPECTATOR, in 10 March 2018)

“I don’t believe that Islamophobia exists at all: it is instead a rational response to a singularly belligerent ideology.” – ROD LIDDLE

“Being nasty about Muslims simply because they are Muslims is unpleasant, but it should not be given the title Islamophobia. My problem is with the ideology, not the followers.” – ROD LIDDLE

"Islamophobia is just a big lie invented by Islamists in the west to intimidate and silence people who speak the truth about the Sharia law!" -- AMINA LONE (a Muslim lady herself, and a British member of the Labour Party  – a “Councillor” – and the Director of "The Social Action and Research Foundation".  In 2019.)

“This loathsome term ("Islamophobia") is nothing more than a thought-terminating cliche conceived in the bowels of Muslim think tanks for the purpose of beating down critics. 'Islamophobia' is a term designed as a weapon to advance a totalitarian cause by stigmatizing critics and silencing them. This plan was an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood’s deceptive ‘General Strategic Goal for North America'.’” -- ABDUL RAHMAN MUHAMMA

"There is very little phobia (irrational dislike or fear) about Islam in America. We are Islam-aware, e.g we understand that horrible threat to humanity." -- JIM HORN (my old CIA pal from the Central African Republic)

Isolationism

“A day of reckoning is approaching. It is my hope that the price in blood, treasure and humiliation America will eventually be forced to pay for the hubris, arrogance and folly of our reigning foreign-policy elites is not, God forbid, war, defeat and the diminution of this Republic – the fate of every other great nation or empire that set out on this same course.” – PATRICK J. BUCHANAN (Buchanan said this in 1999. Meanwhle, I love Pat — but this is bullshit.)

“The majority of Americans don’t care that much about the self-inflicted stupidities of the rest of the world – if you want to live under some sort of Islamo-fascist totalitarianism, go right ahead.” – W. PICOU (some fine American from Weatherford Texas, in June 2002, replying to the English left-wing journalist Paul Gottfried).

“The world does not go away when America retreats.” – HENRY R. NAU                                                             (Poli-sci prof at Geroge Washington Univ. and author of “Conservative Internationalism; in Sept. 2013))

“The World does not go away when America retreats. Each time America has come home, after the First World War, the Second World War, Vietnam, and the Cold War, new conflicts yanked it back into world affairs, always under less favorable circumstances and with higher casualties than if it had acted earlier.” – HENRY R. NAU

“Isolationists on the left reject American engagement in the world because the world is too good for us, while isolationists on the right think the U.S. is too good for the world.” – MONA CHAREN                              (In NATIONA REVIEW, December 2014)

“When you don't have a hammer, no problem ever looks like a nail.” – BRET STEPHENS

"The world becomes more dangerous, not less dangerous when America gets less involved."– CHUCK HAGEL (The Corpseman's first SecDef sort of isolationist/dovish Republican senator from Nebraska who had to be one of the most naive pols alive when he accepted the gig, but he showed quite a bit of integrity after he left office.)

"'America First' does not mean 'America Alone'." -- SEBASTIAN GORKA (Trump's British-Hungarian-born Special Adviser, 6 July 2017)

Israel

“Surrounded by rivals who hate them and want to steal their land and cattle, the Nuyangatom (tribe in southern Ethiopia) have a lot in common with Israel: if they don’t play hardball, they die.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE (Brit author and columnist, in July 2006)

“It’s true that I am a new prime minister, relatively speaking. Though in Israel, every day is like a year in other places.” – EHUD OLMERT

“To defend Israel is to defend the values of the West.” – GIANNI ALEMANNO (The right-wing Mayor of Rome, the “Italian Giuliani”, in July 2008)

“Israel is the heart of Europe separate from the body.” – MILAN KUNDERA

"Israel is part of Europe, and Greece is part of the Middle East" -- JACK JOLIS

“I really resent the presumption that I'm going to Israel to play to right-wing Nazi Jews. If Elvis-Fucking-Costello wants to pull out of a gig in Israel because he's suddenly got his compassion for Palestinians, then good on him. But until I see an Arab country, a Muslim country, with a democracy, I won't understand how anyone can have a problem with how they're treated.” – JOHNNY ROTTEN (the former head of the Sex Pistols, in 2010)

“Israel is an American value.” – WALTER RUSSELL MEAD (the great American historian)

“There exists a visceral John Wayne kinship between Israelis and Texans,” – KINKY FRIEDMAN

"Americans and Israelis are natural partners, facing the same enemies." -- CLARE LOPEZ (American author and Mid-East expert, in March 2023)

“If you stand with freedom, if you stand for Western values, you stand with Israel. Defending Israel, we are defending the West. We are defending our way of life, our values. Simply put, we must to defend Israel if we want to preserve the West as we know it.” – JOSE-MARIA AZNAR                     (of course, the great ex-conservative Prime Minister of Spain)

“The lesson many in the West took from the Holocaust is that nationalism is bad; the message Jews took from it is that nationalism is necessary.” -- RICHARD PATER (An English “political analyst” living in Israel)

“I stand with God's People. Seems prudent.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

“It’s only the conservatives in America who have ever helped us; it’s not their liberals.” -- YITZHAK RABIN (The assassinated Labor Party Israeli Prime Minister, 1974-1977 & 1992-1995. This quote was repeated by ex-NY Mayor Ed Koch in a 2011 interview with NR’s Jay Nordlinger.)

"Israel has faced Jihad from the first moments of its founding, and it has had to confront the bloody reality that there are no permanent answers; there is, however, permanent self-defense." -- DAVID FRENCH

"All the current troubles of the world are because of that shitty little country Israel." -- DANIEL BERNARD (The French Ambassador to Great Britain, in 2001. And after this shitty comment, he did not remain so long.)

“In Israel, in order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles.” -- DAVID BEN-GURION

"The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup." -- BOB HOPE

“Israel has three things in abundance: beautiful women, M-16 rifles, and beautiful women carrying M-16 rifles.” -- JIM GERAGHTY

"Tel Aviv -- a fine city, but too many Jews." -- ARTHUR RUBINSTEIN (as told by Anthony Burgess)

“Israel is a villa in the jungle.” – EHUD BARAK (Prime Minister of Israel, 1999-2001)

“Tel Aviv where air was obsolete and the entire city heated like potters kilns.” – MARK HELPRIN

"Israel is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago." --CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

"Israel is the only country in the world which is expected to accept with equanimity the mutilation of its citizenry." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY (14 October 2023)

"People always say that Israel has a right to defend itself, and when they do, they object to it." -- BILL MAHER     (to paraphrase my daughter when she was 2 1/2: When Maher's wight, he's wight.)

"Israel is America's first line of defense." -- SIGGY FLICKER    (The very fetching Israeli-American wahine on WABC radio on 11 Dec. 2024.)

Italy

“Italy is a white Nigeria.” – DANIEL PETRIE (a Scottish professor, believe it or not, at the University of Verona, in 2003)

“We Italians  think it’s an insult to our intelligence to comply with a regulation. Obedience is boring. We want to think about it. We want to decide whether a particular law applies to our specific case. In that place, at that time.” – BEPPE SEVERGNINI (Author of “La Bella Figura: A Field Guide To The Italian Mind”. This reminds of me of the great quote from Giovannia Agnelli, the great and legendary boss of FIAT when, upon the accession of a “new” Socialist government, headed by Bettino Craxi, was asked how his company would fare under the new dispensation. He replied, “Ah, well-a – I theenk-a that-a thee-a Gavamen’  she a-gonna do watta thee-a Gavaman’  a-wanna do; an’ we a-gonna do a watta we a-wanna do!”)

“I long for the Italian solution; governments so unstable and lacking in legislative majorities that for long periods we don’t have one. Think of it: no new legislation! No frenetic activity masquerading as progress! Then, truly, we could throw down our crutches and walk.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

“In an Italian accent any old bollocks goes down a treat.” – A.A. GILL

“The place (Italy) is full of fairies.” – F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

“Capri out of season is not only quiet but moribund; there is nowhere to go, no one to see, nowhere to eat except in two crummy restaurants. In fact, the whole thing is a bugger.” – NOEL COWARD

“Venice is the only city I have been to where there is no place or anywhere that I could find in which to simply hang about, hang out, just drink or loaf about. Al fresco museums are not for me.” – JEFFREY BERNARD (He’s right; in the various times I’ve been to the ferkakta place, I never was able to find an even half-assed place to have a drink in or at…)

“In Italy, the whole country is a theater and the worst actors are on the stage.” – GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

“Ah Italia! Such a great place to get your head round: great art and great women but what a crappy little country.” – NICHOLAS FARRELL (A Brit who lives in and writes about Italia)

“The point of Italy's judicial system is not to destroy people by means of jail but to destroy them without the need for jail.” – NICHOLAS FARRELL

“Governing the Italians is not impossible, it is merely useless.” – BENITO MUSSOLINI

"To reduce it to one sentence. Italians are very proud of being Italian but are not proud as such of the country of Italy." -- ROY CAMERON (who lived there for 11 years)

“Linguistically, as in so much else, Italy is based upon aesthetics rather than ethics. The judgment words most used are not good and bad, but rather beautiful (bello) or ugly (bruto). Bello is an adjective trotted out with such regularity that it entirely obscures a concept like ‘good’. Thus immorality is less frowned upon than inelegance.” – TOBIAS JONES (in his book “The Dark Heart of Italy”)

“In Italy everything is on the surface.” – NANCY DELL'OLIO                                                                                (the Italian-American bimbo lawyerette who became famous when she became the mistress of then England soccer coach Sven-Goran Ericsson – who himself is Swedish)

“Italian think-tanks tend to do all their ‘thinking’ over seven-course meals and crates of wine... though fair to say they are all  ‘in the tank'." – ANNE JOLIS

“We like the Italians. But that is no reason for behaving like the Italians.” – CHRISTOPH BLOCHER (A Swiss conservative former MP and “elder statesman”)

“I cannot fathom how one city (Genoa) can be home to so many ugly priests.” – CHARLES DICKENS

“All we had to do was leave Italy and Abyssinia alone and nobody would have got hurt, because I can't imagine anything safer than being in an Italo-Abyssinian war. As far as I can make out, neither side has yet come within fifteen miles of the other.” – P. G. WODEHOUSE (in 1935, commenting on the then Mussolini vs. Haile Selassie shadow-war – and the whole thing is redolent of Evelyn Waugh's brilliant “Black Mischief”)

“Italy’s a tough country. Even the natives can’t figure it out.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 
“Italy is such a delightful place to live in if you happen to be a man.” — E.M. FORSTER

“Italy is a country in a state of chronic political paralysis, of which the inhabitants contrive acceptable lives.” – MAX HASTINGS

"The Italians, after two thousand years of bad government, had no respect for la legge. La legge got back at them with an oppressive bureaucracy." -- ANTHONY BURGESS

"The true art of Italy was urbification. They knew how to build towns." -- ANTHONY BURGESS (who lived there for long periods of time) 

“I suppose one has to regard Italy as civilized.” – GRAHAM GREENE (actually, it wasn’t him – it was his aunt. In 1957. But he didn’t contradict her, so he gets this one.)

"If Virgil were to sail one day into the Bay of Naples, he would recognize it." -- SHIRLEY HAZZARD (the famous Australian-American novelist) 

“In Naples and the south, I was solemnly informed that the red light was not an order to anybody but more in the way of a bit of friendly advice.” – ALAN BRIEN (an English journalist and author of the novel “Lenin”, said this in 1985)

“Never shake hands with natives, however well educated they think themselves. Arabs are quite different, many of them very like gentlemen… no worse than a great many Italians, really.” — EVELYN WAUGH (in 1935) 

“Say what you like for your snooty frogs, the wops are top nation for simple fun and prettiness.” – EVELYN WAUGH             (in 1950)

“Italians like to make you ask for things. I think it’s probably one of their main entertainments.” – FIONA PITT-KETHLEY (The supposed “enfant terrible of British letters”, in 1988)

“There is no law or government at all, and it is wonderful how well things go on without them.” – LORD BYRON (George Gordon Byron, writing from Ravenna in 1821, which was then part of the “Papal States” – Italy didn’t exist yet as an independent and separate state.)

“I’ve never been sure what Italians think.” – WILLIAM HOOD (the American spy writer)

“Rome is like that – if you peel away the glossy exterior, something is always hidden underneath. There is a tremendous difference between being a tourist in Rome and living there. In many ways, Rome is far more like Cairo than London.” – DUANE “DEWEY” CLARRIDGE (the one-time CIA station-chief in Rome. Being uncharacteristically diplomatic, here....)

"For millennia the Italians have substituted culture for politics, and it has been a success." -- MARK HELPRIN

"Italy: 1. A wife who’s yelling at you; 2. A side lover who’s yelling at you; 3. A mother who’s yelling at you; 4. An uncle you’re scared to death of." -- DAIN EHRING (a self-described "Entrepreneur, CEO, Astrophysicist, Patented Systems Designer, Author, Yoga Instructor")