J
Jackson, Andrew
"Andrew Jackson is a barbarian who can hardly spell his own name."– JOHN QUINCY ADAMS (I disagree. If I’d been around in those days, I’m pretty sure I would’ve supported “Ol’ Hickory”)
Jamaica
“Jamaican history is characteristic of the beastliness of the true Englishman.” – KARL MARX (pity he didn’t limit his being wrong to Jamaican history….)
“January 6th”
"Calling a 3-hour riot in which nobody was killed except protesters an 'armed insurrection' will, by design, massively empower the US security state in ways you may think or hope will only target your enemies but will end up, as it always does, crushing the liberties of everyone." -- GLENN GREENWALD (the Leftist, poofter journalist -- on 22 Jan 2021)
"Let’s be clear - 1/6 was nothing, except for the murder of Ashli Babbitt. Nothing. Zilch. On a scale of 1 to 10, it was not on the scale. President Ron DeSantis must pardon all the political prisoners, fire their prosecutors and direct the murder prosecution of the shooter." -- KURT SCHLICHTER
"What the left is saying when they compare the minor fracas of January 6 2021 with Pearl Harbor and 9/11 is that America should declare war on you, the patriots.
Pearl Harbor was an active war and followed by a war that defeated our enemy. 9/11 was an active war which our current ruling class botched.
They want the minor fracas of January 6, 2021 to be an excuse to imprison or kill you for dissenting from their garbage ideology. What else could it mean? I if you compare it to two other causes of wars, how can you claim it does not justify a third war? The message is clear.
Everything they do supports that notion.
First, what they say on social media and elsewhere.
Second, the weaponization of federal law enforcement against patriots.
Third, the attempt to disarm you.
Fourth, the attempt to disenfranchise you by arresting your candidates.
Resist. Defeat leftist candidates, by which I mean Democrats. Not only ignore but actively seek to ruin the regime media. Demand Republican politicians understand what time it is. Buy guns and ammo to lawfully defend your life & liberty & frustrate disarmament schemes.
We can only be disenfranchised, enslaved or murdered if we allow ourselves to be. If we refuse to submit, they cannot compel us. Stand fast in defense of your rights. This is your country, not theirs. Take it back." -- KURT SCHLICHTER (on 11 September, 2022)
"January 6th was a terrible day because it's the day Big Tech and the media kicked President Trump off Twitter" – RIC GRENELL (the ex-Director of National Intel and, incidentally, a poofter. He said this on 6 Jan 2022, and if he ever runs for President I’ll happily vote for him – making him the 2nd poof I’ll have voted for, after the late Ed Koch)
"How many January 6th protesters were actually working for the federal government? In October, I asked AG Garland while he was under oath and he refused to answer. He looked very nervous and worried..." – REP. THOMAS MASSIE (Republican from Kentucky, in early January 2022)
"Jan 6th was the American people exercising it's right to protest tyranny!" -- NICHOLAS CLAMORGAN
"The J6 Inquisition is an obvious Soviet-style show trial." -- MOLLIE HEMINGWAY (On 10 June 2022)
"The J6 Committee is the most nakedly partisan force in the Whole-of-Ruling Class War on Wrongthink." -- BENJAMIN WEINGARTEN
"Tucker Carlson aired some of the January 6th security tapes he got. I have seen more violence at Walmart entrances on Black Friday." -- RON HART
“Chansley ("Shaman-horns guy") got 4 years in prison for a non-violent, police-escorted tour!?” -- ELON MUSK
"Capitol Police admitted under oath that they invited people into the Capitol then claimed they trespassed.
That's entrapment. In a nation with functional criminal justice system all charges would be dismissed with prejudice and the Capitol cops involved would be fired and prosecuted." -- JOHN CARDILLO ("conservative pundit" -- ex-NYPD)
Japan
“A nation of workaholics living in rabbit hutches.” – ROY DENMAN (Brit politician, in 2001.)
“Consider also the parable of Japan in the 1980s. Japan kept giving America radios, TVs, stereos, and cars and we kept giving Japan money. The Japanese didn't want anything America produced except Bo Derek, and we didn't even produce the valuable part – the silicon part – of that. So the Japanese decided, instead of buying anything Americans made, they'd buy America itself. They bought office complexes, hotels, resorts. They bought Pebble Beach. They bought Rockefeller Center. The Japanese bid up the price of American real estate. There was a bubble. The bubble did what bubbles do. And by the 1990s America had all the radios, TVs, stereos, and cars, and America had Pebble Beach and Rockefeller Center, and America had all the money too. The Japanese had stuck their economy in a place where the rising sun never shines.” – P. J. O'ROURKE
"A ship without a sail, a shirt without a tail, a Jap without a camera." -- W.C. FIELDS
“The eccentricity of Japan is all-enveloping and inescapable. Like those ‘magic eye’ pictures where you have to go into a Zen-like trance and wait for an image to emerge from a pointillist mélange of dots, Japanese customs and behavior often do make sense – but only after you perform a sort of mental squint and wait for a kind of logic to manifest itself.” – PHILIP PATRICK (all I know about this guy is that he’s ‘a lecturer at a Tokyo university and contributing writer at the Japan Times’.)
“The Japanese are self-absorbed but not necessarily fully self-aware.” – PHILIP PATRICK
"There's no word for 'cliché' in Japanese." -- PHILIP PATRICK (is a freelance journalist and a lecturer at Tokyo University)
“A Japanese person understands Japaneseness in the same way a fish understands water.” – DONALD RICHIE (a ‘writer on Japanese aesthetics”)
"A group of Japanese were discussing in low reverential whispers, something I find the Japanese do exceptionally well. Nobody gets more out of a few low grunts and a couple of rounded vowel sounds stretched out and spoken as if in surprise or consternation. They can carry on the most complex conversations, covering the full range of human emotions -- surprise, enthusiasm, hearty endorsement, bitter disagreement-- in a tone that sounds awfully like someone trying to have an orgasm quietly." -- BILL BRYSON
"Japan is a living, breathing successful refutation of 'multi-culti' Marxist claptrap. Oh, it's got problems of its own, of course (not least a worryingly negative birthrate), but at least it's not being rotted from within by swallowing any 'diversity is our strength' bullshit." -- JACK JOLIS
"Girls are like the Japanese -- they fear loss of face." -- KEITH WATERHOUSE
Jargon
“‘Multitasker’ is a word made for a certain kind of person, rain-makers, paradigm-shakers, out-of-the-box thinkers – serious jerks, in other words – and I wish them joy of it.” – JOSEPH EPSTEIN
"Jargon is both gnosis and shibboleth all at once." -- JONAH GOLDBERG (as my 2-year old daughter used to say, "Ish you say so, Claude")
"I learned long ago never to question the jargon of an organization; somewhere in the jargon is a clue to the mind-sets of the people who work there." -- NELSON DEMILLE (seems self-evident, but it's the great DeMille, so I'll include it.)
"Any profession which communicates largely in jargon is make-believe." -- GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
"I like jargon, prefer to have the wool pulled over my eyes, don't think I'm getting my money's worth unless being bamboozled by abstraction." -- WILLIAM DONALDSON (the English gossip-columnist and playboy)
"There's a general sort of cargo cult mentality outside hard sciences that conflates incomprehensible jargon with intellectual rigor. I refer to this as Physics Envy." -- DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE
Jazz
“This music (jazz) that the savage bushmen created to satisfy their primitive desires, and their desire for noise on the one hand, and the abundance of animal noises on the other.” – SAYYID QUTB (the ‘architect’ of the Muslim Brotherhood, writing in “The America I Have Seen’” in the 1940s. And words very similar to these are spoken by one of the main terrorists in P. N. Gwynne’s great 2018 thriller THE BRONX BOMBING)
“Outside the Pump room, a man with no obvious disability is playing a saxophone. He is either incompetent or playing jazz.” – JOE BENNETT (New Zealand author and columnist)
"If it has more than three chords, it's jazz." -- LOU REED
"Jazz is not dead.... it just smells funny." -- FRANK ZAPPA
“Noodly Jazz is fun to play, dreadful to listen to.” – HELEN RITTELMEYER (of NR and C-Span)
"The history of jazz is one of overblown pronouncements, overeager judgments, and passing artistic fads. Jazz was once the pop music of the day, but that day didn't last long." -- C. W. MAHONEY (A writer and musician from northern VA., in the AMSPEC)
“We were listening to this brilliant jazz band – at least I think they were brilliant – it’s always hard to tell with jazz, isn’t it....” – MARCUS BRIGSTOCKE (the Brit comedian, who I regularly hear on the BBC; Pretty funny, though, of course, left-wing.)
"Jazz: A kind o music played by blacks and listened to by whites." -- MILES KINGTON (English author, journalist and humorist)
"Once is a mistake. Twice is an idea. Three times is a style." -- MILES DAVIS
“Jazz died in 1959.” – NICHOLAS PAYTON (New Orleans trumpeteer)
Jealousy
“It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.” – LAURENCE DURRELL
"We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?" -- JEAN COCTEAU (author and painter 1889-1963)
“Jealousy never comes to the party dressed as jealousy. It comes dressed as high standards, or something else.” – MARTIN AMIS
Jefferson, Thomas
”I’m sick of hearing about Jefferson and (Sally) Hemmings. Who cares if he had slaves? Why, if I could, I'd dig him up and give him six more slaves. That man invented freedom! You'd better not print that. I catch enough hell as it is.” -- ALBERT MURRAY (The noted black American novelist, essayist, and jazz critic, speaking to Richard Snow, the Editor of AMERICAN HERITAGE)
Jerusalem
“Desolate wide open spaces full of biting things and stinging things always seem tp push people toward thee reflexive and unforgiving political right; cities, by contrast, tilt towards the left. Except Jerusalem, obviously.” – ROD LIDDLE
"Jerusalem, a city built from scripts and mortar." -- FRANK LAWTON (young English journalist, in July 2019)
"The forces of the past and future were so strong that the city (Jerusalem) almost failed to have a present." -- T.E. LAWRENCE (Lawrence of Arabia, here in 1917 -- and he couldn't have been more wrong)
Jesus Christ
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish things that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be god’. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic or else the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon, or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and god. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” – C.S. LEWIS
“If Christ came back tomorrow, He’d have to change planes in Frankfurt.” – P. J. O’ROURKE
“One of the reasons we can be pretty sure Jesus actually existed is that if He had not, the Church would never have invented Him. He stands so passionately, resolutely and inconveniently against everything an established church stands for. Continuity? Tradition? Christ had nothing to do with stability. He came to break up families, to smash routines, to cast aside the human superstructures, to teach abandonment of earthly concerns and a throwing of ourselves upon God's mercy.” – MATTHEW PARRIS (The atheist, poofter, ex- British Conservative MP – and here he was griping about the Church of England, and not the Catholic Church, particularly)
“Jesus is coming – look busy.” – JONAH GOLDBERG (actually, he was summarizing the basic “millenarian” position)
“Christ’s much nicer than God, he hasn’t got that capricious, arbitrary, prohibitive side, he’s more human, what? You start feeling it’s worth making an effort to do what he wants you to do, even in cases where the size of the effort called for may appear to be... excessive.” – SIR KINGSLEY AMIS (in 1994, the year before he died.)
"In his time, of course, there was no such thing as a Christian. Jesus was attempting to perfect Judaism, not found a new religion, and until the eminently practical apostle Paul pointed out that the movement would attract few converts if gentiles were required to observe the bewildering requirements of Hebraic religious law, all followers of Jesus were intensely observant Jews." -- CHARLES McCARRY
"Jesus Christ, the single most important man who ever lived, like it or not." -- JOE QUEENAN
"I am a Jew but I am enthralled by the Nazarene. Jesus is too colossal for the pen of phrasemongers, however artful. No man can read the gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life. Theseus and other heroes of his type lack the authentic vitality of Jesus." -- ALBERT EINSTEIN
Jews (Judaism)
“American Jews live like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans” – MILTON HIMMELFARB (Irving Kristol’s brother-in-law, the comedian…)
“Judaism is a tribal cult of a single fiercely unpleasant God, morbidly obsessed with sexual restrictions, with the smell of charred flesh, with his own superiority over rival gods, and with the exclusiveness of his chosen desert tribe.” – RICHARD DAWKINS
“Jews, amazingly, excel so readily in all intellectual fields that they outperform all rivals even in the arena of anti-Semitism.” – GEORGE GILDER (a gentile, but a “philo-semite”)
“Jews say they are different, and the world agrees – unfortunately, with malevolent intent.” – HILLEL FRADKIN (a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, in 2009)
“Any people who’ve been persecuted for 2,000 years must be doing something wrong.” – HENRY KISSINGER (nasty, Henry.)
“A Jew is one who other men consider to be a Jew.” – JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
"The Jews are our elder brothers in the Faith." -- POPE (SAINT) JOHN PAUL II
“We decide who is Jewish.” - HERMANN GOERING
"Who said we could get along without the Jews? Watch the Jews, their mysterious comings and goings and stayings! The Jews are a sign! When the Jews pull out, the Gentiles begin to act like the crazy Jutes and Celts and Angles and redneck Saxons they are. They go back to the woods." -- WALKER PERCY (the words of the slightly deranged protagonist in his 1980 novel "The Second Coming")
“Atheism and Judaism are not contradictory.” – MAXIM SHROGIN (a prominent California Jew, in Sept. ’11)
“Personally, I think the Jews have estimable qualities; they're so kind to their poor – and to our rich.” -- SAKI
“The 'Jewish vote' is a concept beloved of people who cannot count.” -- CHARLES MOORE
"If you're old enough to kill a Jew, you're old enough to be killed by a Jew." -- ALAN DERSHOWITZ (in Nov. 2023)
“Judaism is not an organisation exactly, but it is a big family, riven into dozens of clans, many of which can't stand each other, yet all of which seem to be aware of each other, from atheist anti-Zionists to bearded rebbes, and word gets around. Media, entertainment, sports, law, Wall Street, gaylandia – the options wink off into the distance, like stops on the A train.” -- RICHARD BROOKHISER
"Reform Judaism: 'the Democratic Party with holidays'."-- RICHARD BROOKHISER
"If the Jews are God's chosen people -- that's all one needs to know about God." -- PATRICIA HIGHSMITH (the celebrated American novelist and, incidentally, raving anti-Semite)
“Some people like Jews and some do not; but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world.” -- WINSTON CHURCHILL
“Everybody loves Jews as victims. In other roles, not so much.” -- MARK STEYN
“Never trust a skinny Jew.” – JOHN PODHORETZ
"Since the Exodus, freedom has always spoken with a Hebrew accent" – HEINRICH HEINE
“Judaism doesn't give a toss about faith. It's all about observance.” -- HUGH RIFKIND (A Scottish Jew; Brit columnist, son of wet Tory Cabinet Minister. And the way I like to put it is “Jews don't believe in anything, actually – their whole thing is all about ritual and custom.”)
“I stand with God's People. Seems prudent.” – KURT SCHLICHTER
“What starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews.” – SIMON WIESENTHAL
"Jewish Americans who advocate a two-state solution are far worse than those who policed their fellow Jews in Nazi concentration camps." -- DAVID FRIEDMAN (Trump's Ambassador to Israel)
“The Jews are like other people, only more so.” – DOMINIC GREEN (I'm pretty sure someone more famous than he said this before, but I read it by Mr. Green, a member of the Royal Historical Society, who teaches politics at Boston College, writing in NR in Dec. 2016)
“Yiddish isn't a language, it's an infection.” – BILLY CRYSTAL
“For leftists born into a Jewish family, anti-Semitism is not about people who hate Jews. It’s about people that the Jewish leftists hate.” – ARNOLD STEINBERG (In THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR, Feb. '17)
"The gentile makes gods of stone and we of theories." - ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER
“Leftism has filled the void that secularism has produced. That is, all of the Leftist religions, Marxism, Humanism, Communism, socialism, Environmentalism, Feminism, they are all Left-wing religions. They have filled the void, and that’s why Jews are so attracted. Jews are the most religious people in the world, but unfortunately, for most of them, Judaism isn’t their religion. Jews stayed religious, and they think that feminism, environmentalism, and socialism – all those “isms” I mentioned – they are secular messianic moments.” – DENNIS PRAGER
“That is the story of the many Jewish leftists to this day: Jewish leftists make revolutions, and all the Jews (among millions of others) pay the price.” – DENNIS PRAGER
“Jews, being good modern philosophers, want to change the world, which makes them political, but, being Jews, want even more to understand it, which makes them intellectual.” – RICHARD BROOKHISER
“A WORSE HABIT THAN SMOKING> Jews voting Democratic.” – ROGER L. SIMON
“Jewish virtue, the oldest lost cause still active in the Western world.” – JOHN UPDIKE
“The Jews have inherited the middle class – nobody else wants it.” – JOHN UPDIKE
"The Evangelicals are the best (and prior to the Trump administration the sole remaining) friends in the West of the Jews." -- DAVID MAMET (in 2022)
"The only thing more foolish than one Jew is two Jews." -- DAVID MAMET (in fairness, he was referring to New York and Hollywood liberal Jews....)
"It's said that German humor is about excretion and French humor is about sex. Jewish humor is about ambiguity." -- DAVID MAMET
"Jews are just like everyone else, only more so." -- CHAIM WEIZMAN (The First President of Israel, who I believe said this first, see Dominic Green, above.)
“A summary of the main Jewish festivals in three sentences: ‘They tried to destroy us. We survived. Let’s eat.’ ” – RABBI JONATHAN SACKS (The ex-Chief Rabbi of the UK, then a professor at NYU.)
“There is nothing worse than a Jew sitting and listening to a conversation. They not their heads with a fraudulent air of rabbinical wisdom that makes you want to set about them with staves.” – STEPHEN FRY (whose mother was Jewish; in his 1994 novel, “The Hippopotamus”)
"RBG (Ruth Bader Ginsburg) is up in heaven rolling in her grave.” -- SEN. CHARLES "Schmuckie" SCHUMER (wrong on about 6 counts....)
"The great Jewish vice is glibness, fluency, -- also possibly just bullshit, as in Marx, Freud, Marcuse. Pity L. Ron Hubbard not." -- KINGSLEY AMIS
"The real religion of Leftist Jews is Leftism. And their 'Judaism' is something they retain as a sort of residual cultural accessory -- to be deployed when it serves their Leftist political purposes." — JACK JOLIS
"Self-hatred is not a fundamental part of Judaism (to put it mildly), so a self-hating Jew must perforce embrace Leftism as his or her real religion." -- JACK JOLIS
"People only really like Jews if they're suffering." -- SARAH SILVERMAN (a surprising and unusual bit of insight from this leftist comedienne)
"There is only one race greater than the Jews, and that's the Derby." -- SIR VICTOR SASSOON (one of the "Baghdad" branch of the international family of Jewish industrialists and philanthropists)
“When you say ‘I am a Jew,’ they think you are weak. But of course we are as strong as anyone else, and because of that we often give them big surprises. Afterwards they hate us because they think we have tricked them. But usually it is they who have tricked themselves. Their eyes have done the tricking.” – MARK HELPRIN
"Every white Jewish guy wishes he was black." -- BEN STILLER (No, Benji, maybe every LEFTIST white Jewish guy wishes he was black….)
"A shared aspect of that Jewish upbringing was a purely cultural Yiddishkeit that emphasized Yiddish literature and theater, the folk writing of Sholom Aleichem, the parables of freedom that abounded throughout Jewish culture, and more important, a complete rejection of anything to do with religion." -- RON RADOSH (the ex-radical communist agitator, in his excellent 2001 memoir "Commies")
Jihad (see also “Islamic Jihad”)
“We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.” – HUSSEIN MASSAWI (the head of Hezbollah, in July 2006)
“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.)
“Praise be to God, the jihad war is ongoing, and on several fronts. The Mujahadin work and may God give them strength to endure on the jihad path will continue to target the guardian of universal apostates, America, until it becomes weak. Once America is weak, we can build our Muslim State.” – OSAMA BIN LADEN (In a document captured at Abbotabad)
Jobs
"The primary purpose of every jobs program is to create jobs for the people who run the program. No Bureaucrat Left Behind!" -- JOHN DERBYSHIRE
“The Chinese economic development cost American workers their jobs? Sure. That's the price of progress. The invention of fire cost Cro-Magnon workers their jobs – all those people you paid to sit on you to keep you warm.” – P. J. O'ROURKE
"Jobs are desired but job-creators are reviled."—GEORGE GILDER
“The Government can make work, in the main, only by appropriating those jobs already created by private enterprise, and doling them out less efficiently. A perfect example is the Civilian Conservation Corps of the New Deal, which, as Thomas Sowell has pointed out, was merely giving twenty thousand shovels out to do the work which could be accomplished by fifty bulldozers. Why not then, as he suggested, enlarge the paradigm, and replace the shovels with three million teaspoons.” – DAVID MAMET.
"(T)he supporters of tariffs treat it as self-evident that the creation of jobs is a desirable end, in and of itself, regardless of what the persons employed do. That is clearly wrong. If all we want are jobs, we can create any number -- for example, have people dig holes and then fill them up again, or perform other useless tasks. Work is sometimes its own reward. Mostly, however, it is the price we pay to get the things we want. Our real objective is not just jobs but productive jobs -- jobs that will mean more goods and services to consume." -- MILTON FRIEDMAN
"'Jobs bills' are to jobs what Buffalo Bill was to buffaloes." -- DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE
"If hiring cops, firefighters & teachers help the economy, then theft, arson & stupidity are stimulus programs." -- DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE
“Don’t let anybody tell you it’s corporations and businesses create jobs.” – HILLARY CLINTON (noooo, nevah – nothing like that....)
"Any profession which communicates largely in jargon is make-believe." -- GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
"You cannot set deadlines for plumbers, any more than for poets." -- ALAN COREN
Johnson, Boris
“People find it harder to believe Boris than other politicians because of his jokey, ironic style. It's not that he's insincere; he's just not good at appearing sincere.” – TOBY YOUNG
“The unwillingness to make any effort to understand Boris or his election-winning appeal may be his greatest asset. Again and again, his political enemies have sought to portray him as a far-right rabble-rouser but haven’t been able to make it stick. He simply doesn’t look like a demagogue from central casting – less Benito Mussolini than Bertie Wooster. Boris may seem befuddled, but his greatest skill as a politician has been to befuddle his opponents, transforming them into furious scolds and leaving them at a loss as to how to defeat him. Long may it continue.” – TOBY YOUNG (in June 2019)
“Boris looks like an eight-year old but speaks like he is 80.” – FREDERIK ERIXON (Swedish economist and author of “The Innovation Illusion”, writing in March 2019)
"I think the secret of Boris' success is that he hasn't bothered with authenticity. He realised, long before his contemporaries, that the era in which politicians had to fake ordinariness is now behind us. The public simply don't buy the idea that their leaders are down-to-earth, normal people any more. So instead Boris has decided to be openly insincere. He's mastered the art of seeming like he gives a fuck, but not really." -- TOBY YOUNG
"Boris is no good at any job except the top one." -- CHARLES MOORE
“You always knew precisely where you stood with Boris because he always let you down.” – CHARLES MOORE
"The prime Minister is a writer, campaigner and entertainer -- but not really a fighter. He dislikes making enemies, He loves to be liked. Critics say that he's a bit too keen to agree with the last person he spoke to." -- FRASER NELSON
“Boris is a fox disguised as a teddy bear.” – CONRAD BLACK (Who was the owner of THE SPECTATOR when Boris was its editor)
"The Prime Minister is one of Life's Charles II's." -- TOM HOLLAND (Tom Holland is an English author of both fiction and non-fiction, specializing in Islam and the Middle East; and Charles II was the "Restoration King, following Cromwell's Puritans, and he rather notoriously had 7 mistresses.)
“Boris, like Disraeli, has charisma. He articulates ancient themes. He almost embodies them.” – TIM STANLEY
“When Boris was confronted by businessmen angry with Brexit, his response, capturing the popular mood, was ‘Fuck business’.” – TIM STANLEY
"The attraction of Boris Johnson to the electorate was that he seemed 'refreshing' for a politician, a kind of village idiot waving around a pig's bladder on a stick but somehow conversant in Latin." -- ROD LIDDLE
"Boris Johnson’s bumbling Bertie Wooster act helped him transcend political drudgery and become a bona fide comedy celebrity." -- KYLE SMITH
"Boris did one of the least conservative things imaginable: He turned citizens into prisoners." -- KYLE SMITH (the day Boris resigned, 7 July 2022)
"He's (Boris) a fox disguised as a teddy bear." -- CONRAD BLACK
"I would sum up the Boris Johnson era thus: what Carrie wants Carrie gets." -- MELISSA KITE (And quite rightly so. Poor old BoJo was utterly undone by his "green" maniac of a wife, Carrie.)
Johnson, Lyndon B.
"LBJ feeling sorry for himself was a like a billion Chinese crying." – JOHN ROCHE (Govt. Prof at Tufts and counselor to JFK and LBJ)
“A man of his most recent word.” – WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.
“I want people around me who would kiss my ass on a hot summer’s day and say it smells like roses.” – LYNDON B. JOHNSON (In 1962 JFK sent his VP LBJ to attend a meeting of the OAS in Uruguay, and when he came back a reporter asked him how it went, and LBJ answered “Son, between you ‘n me, th’ OAS couldn’t pour shit outta a boot if th’ instructions was written on the heel.”)
"I seldom think of politics more than 18 hours a day." -- LYNDON B. JOHNSON
"Johnson would screw anything that would crawl, basically. But he had a totally loyal White House staff -- because they were afraid of him." -- WILLIAM F. CUFF (the Executive Assistant to the Director of the White House Military Office, during LBJ's presidency. And we knew about Kennedy and Clinton, but LBJ's randiness while president is less well-known -- perhaps because it undoubtedly was so gross)
Joining
“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
Jollity
"Excessive jollity is just about bearable up to a point -- and that point is usually breakfast." -- BEN SCHOTT (the English author of eponymous "Miscellany" and "Almanac" and homage to P.G. Wodehouse, "Jeeves And The King Of Clubs")
Jordan
"The truth is that Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan." -- KING HUSSEIN BIN TALAL (of Jordan, 26 November 1981)
Journalism (-ists)
“When legend and reality conflict, print the legend.” – HORACE GREELEY (he of the legendary “Go West, young man.” He was the editor of the New York HERALD before and during the Civil War, and a thorough treasonous anti-war scoundrel – to such an extent that Lincoln had him tossed in the clink for the duration – in fact, it was his case that was at the heart of the famous “suspension of Habeas Corpus” by Lincoln during the Civil War… Oh, and yes, he was the original author of this line, made famous in John Ford’s 1962 “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”.)
“The Basic Law of journalism states ‘First, simplify, then exaggerate’.” – JOHN HUMPHRYS (clever, if markedly left-wing, Brit BBC interviewer and author)
“’Journalist’ is a term of contempt employed by writers who are not read to refer to writers who are.” – ERNEST NEWMAN (of the TIMES of London)
“Liberals get elected not because they understand Americans but because they understand American journalists.” – R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR.
“Most people say, ‘Where there's smoke, there's fire.’ I say, ‘Where there's smoke around a conservative, there are journalists furiously rubbing two sticks together.’ “ – ANN COULTER
“Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is dead' to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.” -- G.K. CHESTERTON
"In American journalism, to be right – or, at any rate, to argue for the position that the right people consider to be reasonable at the time – is much more important than to be brilliant or entertaining." -- YASCHA MOUNK (A German-American prof at Johns Hopkins, and I guess the two great exceptions to this were Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson... and more recently, Matt Taibbi.)
“Journalists who can write outnumber those who can read.” – FERENC MOLNAR (The Hungarian playwright)
“Journalism is a favorite occupation for strangely gifted people with a limited set of skills.” – CHARLES SAATCHI
“Reporting is like hunting. Writing is like cleaning the thing you killed.” – P. J. O’ROURKE
“All journalism careers end badly. It's just a matter of how.” – DAMON DARLIN (A real name, believe it or not – he is – or at least was when he wrote this -- the “International Business Editor” of the NY Times)
“Being a newspaper columnist is like being married to a nymphomaniac; it's great for the first two weeks.” – LEWIS GRIZZARD
“Journalists are the only people on the planet more sensitive to criticism than the politicians themselves.” – TEVI TROY (in his book “What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted”)
“Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE
“When a man is too lazy to work and too cowardly to steal, he becomes an editor and manufactures public opinion.” – GEN. WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN
"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations." – GEORGE ORWELL (Which sounds true enough – which is why the press and the intelligence services are natural, and implacable, enemies.)
“Newshounds bathe in self-importance, which partially makes up for all the times we don't bathe in water. Proximity to important stuff, we figure, makes us important. We think we're lions but we're really the guys who clean the cages.” -- KYLE SMITH
“Every story is a media story.” -- ANDREW BREITBART
“Regarding to 'ethics of journalism'. The rules were created by the left to be applied exclusively as a weapon against the right." -- ANDREW BREITBART
“Journalism, including opinion journalism, is a bit like pornography. It’s a specialty but not a science. The constitutional right to commit journalism isn’t a special right for a select few (despite what some in the guild might tell you), it’s a right we all have, just as the right to bear arms isn’t reserved solely for police.” – JONAH GOLDBERG
“Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” – JANET MALCOLM (American writer and long-time journalist at THE NEW YORKER)
“Modern journalism is all about deciding which facts the public shouldn’t know because they might reflect badly on Democrats.” – JIM TREACHER (real name SEAN MEDLOCK – he’s a blogger and columnist at PJMEDIA)
"The essence of American journalism is vulgarity divested of truth." -- WINSTON CHURCHILL (in 1895, in a letter to his brother, from America, during Churchill's first trip there.)
"Journalism is all writing on water." -- MARY KENNY (Irish broadcaster, journalist and playwright – a “feminist”)
“The few journalists I’ve spoken to in my life all seemed to have this in common: an attitude of perpetual exhaustion, brought on by dealing with people who just aren’t quite as fantastic as they are.” – HUGH LAURIE
“If a headline ends in a question mark, the answer is always ‘no’.” – CHRIS PLANTE (the conservative and amusing radio chap, on 5 May 2021)
“Journalists have power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.” – RUDYARD KIPLING (Many people know the first part of this quote – but very few know the second.)
"In Washington, 'very rich' means just above the level a top-notch journalist." -- MEGAN MCARDLE (the non-Leftist American journalist)
“All I want from a journalist is the ability to string sentences together with subject-verb agreement and a certain base, rat-like nosiness.” – SETH LIPSKY (as quoted by my pal Sohrab Ahmari)
“More newspapermen have been ruined by self-importance than by liquor.” – FRANK I. COBB (Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, 1869-1923)
"This country (America) was built on journalistic laziness." -- ANNE BERG JOLIS (my ex-journalist daughter in conversation with me, 29 May 2022)
"Journalists are fond of saying that 'There are two sides to every story. In fact, there are at least three. Along with both sides of the story, there is also the possibility that it isn't really a story at all, or is a distraction from something else." -- RORY SUTHERLAND
"When Donald Trump rails about 'fake news’ and insults journalists interviews, I suspect this resonates with voters much more than most journalists realize." -- RORY SUTHERLAND
Journalism School
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that professors of journalism are among the most genuinely worthless specimens walking God’s green earth and that any halfway self-respecting society would exile them to the moon, and I am not at all sure that an advanced degree in journalism is more of a qualification than a disqualification when it comes to instructing students. And journalism degrees are some of the purest lab-grade bunkum ever produced.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
Judges
“At any rate, it seems to me that a fear of offending judges is unbecoming in a free people. So screw that.” – MARK STEYN
"A judge’s concern is not justice or fairness or progress but the law, and that people who want to change the law should run for office." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
"Don't tell me what the Law is, tell me who the Judge is." -- ROY COHN (so true, in post-Obama America...)
Judging/Judgment (“Judgmentalism”)
“Ever since we decided that it is nasty to ‘be judgmental’, we have tended to forget that it is also each citizen’s most important duty.” – DAVID GELERNTER
“Why is it so evolved not to judge? This notion that we’ve evolved into a species that’s incapable of judging other groups and what they are doing, especially when it’s beheading people or setting people on fire or throwing acid in the face of schoolgirls… I like that kind of judging. That’s evolved! This is a unique age. We don’t want to be judgmental. Every other age that’s come before us has believed exactly the opposite.” – JOHN RHYS-DAVIES (Dwarf actor in the Lord of the Rings, etc.)
"The right to judge is what keeps much of civilization afloat." -- JONAH GOLDBERG (actually, it's the ACT of judging that does that....)
"Good Judgment comes from experience , and a lot of that comes from bad Judgment" -- WILL ROGERS
“When you live in a totalitarian country, you learn not to be judgmental. You learn to be very cautious in your judgments because you know that people sometimes find themselves in hopeless situations.” – VLADIMIR BUKOVSKY
“Without judging others -- and acting on that judgment -- we're all helpless pawns fit only to be manipulated by those that do.” — JACK JOLIS
"I judge people by the flags they raise. (That's why they raise them.)" -- JACK JOLIS
"Success is achieved by applying judgment; but your passions will rule you, if you let them, and your judgment will go out of the window." -- JULIUS CAESAR (100-44 BC)
“Those who love you will love you and those who hate you will hate you. In judgment there is peace.” – TANYA GOLD
"Success is the result of good judgment, good judgment is the result of experience, and experience is often the result of bad judgment!" -- TONY ROBBINS (where he pulls his floater is at the end -- experience is not necessarily the result of bad judgment -- but it's a snappy aphorism, anyway...)
Judgment Day
"Perhaps Judgment Day would be something like this: There would be no trumpet blasts to raise the dead. Telephone calls instead. You'd either get a call or you wouldn't." -- STEVE TESICH
Jungle, the
"Vaguely at the back of his mind he had always believed that the jungle was a place full of food; that there was danger of snakes and savages and wild beasts, but not of starvation. But now he observed that this was far from being the case. The jungle consisted solely of immense tree trunks, embedded in a tangle of thorn and vine rope, all far from nutritious." -- EVELYN WAUGH (in "The Man Who Liked Dickens", in 1933)
“There was a sense, in this dizzying forest, that every living thing longed for the death of its nearest neighbor.” – TIM CAHILL (one of those travel-writers who refuses to call a jungle a jungle. They’re always “forests” or, if it’s a really deadly jungle, a “rain forest”. He was in Honduras when he wrote this, as shitty a jungle as you’ll find anywhere.)
“It was my first time in a jungle and I was awed by the rank stench and the hubbub of screeches, purrs, twanglings and yelps – like a dog run over by a motor car.” – RICHARD WEST (in South Vietnam, 1966)
"Africa was big. The bush muffled the sound of murder, and the muddy rivers washed the blood away." -- V. S. NAIPAUL
"You can't find God in a triple-canopy jungle. You can't find a goddamned thing in a triple-canopy jungle unless you're a bird, monkey, lizard or insect. But you're not that lucky, you're a soldier. And that means you've got the bottom. The lucky things that twitter and woof and skitter and howl are on the second and third level of trees that are growing above you." -- JOHN P. McAFEE
Juries
“If these were my peers, I’d rather be tried by being thrown in a pond to see whether I floated or sank; the chances of a true verdict would be considerably greater. What a collection!” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE
“It’s not legal illiteracy, it’s just plain illiteracy.” – THOMAS GHEOHEGAN (an amusing if left-wing American – what other kind is there? -- tort lawyer, and author of “See You In Court”)
“(On the other hand), what makes and keeps us free is a committee – the jury. Governments have the legal monopoly on deadly force, and, in a free country; the thing that prevents the government from forcing us into prison or onto the lethal injection gurney any time it likes is the need for a jury verdict. Our government cannot inflict any punishment or penalty upon us unless what we have done is so obviously wrong and outrageously bad that even a feebleminded, asinine, obtuse, muddled, stubborn, qnd silly committee, which never agrees on anything, agrees.” – P.J. O'ROURKE
“All we see about us, Kings, Lords, and Commons, the whole machinery of the State, all the apparatus of the system, and its varied workings, end in simply bringing twelve good men into a box.” – HENRY BROUGHAM (Lord Brougham and Vaux, to give him his precise title, 1778-1868, British Lord Chancellor, and, amongst other things, the “founder” of Cannes, the lovely city in southern France....)
“A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.” – ROBERT FROST
“How comforting is it to know that as a defendant in our criminal justice system, your fate is being decided by 12 people who were not smart enough to get out of jury duty.” – DENNIS MILLER
Justice (& Injustice)
“Although rain falls on the just and unjust, it chiefly falls on the just because the unjust steal their umbrellas.” – ALAN MILLARD (an otherwise anonymous English wiseass, in June 2002)
"You can't serve papers on a rat; you've got to kill him or let him be." – CHARLES PORTIS (Marshall Rooster Cogburn, in “True Grit”)
“The driving virtue in Republics is justice, in Monarchies it is clemency.” -- MONTESQUIEU
“It is not the job of the State to be compassionate, but to be just.” -- DAVID MAMET
“Common parlance tends to confuse justice with benevolence.” -- ANGELO CODEVILLA
“Terror is naught but prompt, severe, inflexible justice. It is therefore an emanation of virtue.” -- MAXIMILIEN DE ROBESPIERRE
"He who is only just is cruel. Who on earth could live were all judged justly?" -- LORD BYRON (real name GEORGE GORDON BYRON)
“Justice is what everybody claims he wants but nobody seems happy about when he gets it.” -- P. J. O'ROURKE
“On Judgment Day I'm going to be praying for mercy, not justice.” -- P. J. O'ROURKE
“Justice is karma on a timetable. Justice is what karma becomes when a bunch of Type-A dudes get hold of it.” -- ROB LONG
"Justice doesn't need a modifier." – BEN SHAPIRO
"Two wrongs don't make it right. But it makes it even." -- MIKE DAVIS (Former Chief Counsel for Nominations, U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary and Law Clerk for Justice Gorsuch)
“For most people, it would be exceedingly painful to live in a world where you get what's coming to you.” -- DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN (The only one of two Democrats– the other being Ed Koch – I ever voted for.)
“The (US) federal justice system wins 97 percent of its cases without going to trial, a success rate unknown to all but the most neurotic and insecure dictatorships – and even there they usually feel obliged to go through the motions of a show trial.” -- MARK STEYN
“Show me the man, and I'll show you the crime.” -- LAVRENTIY BERIA (of course, Stalin's hit man, the head of the NKVD)
"Anytime you have to put a modifier in front of 'justice', you can wave bye-bye to justice." -- RUSH LIMBAUGH (on 20 Dec. '19)
“Unfortunately, the law has nothing to do with justice. It’s merely a method for dispute resolution.” – MICHAEL CRICHTON (in his 1994 novel, “Disclosure”)
“You want justice. No wonder you have enemies.” – MARTIN CRUZ SMITH
"Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent." -- ADAM SMITH
“Justice without mercy is cruelty. Mercy without justice goes to waste" – ST. THOMAS AQUINAS
"You would much rather stand accused of witchcraft in Salem 1692 than be a Republican falsely accused of anything in NYC or DC in 2024. (And it's not even a close call. Most of those wrongly accused of witchcraft were acquitted -- the mass hysteria gripping blue cities is far worse." -- STEPHEN MILLER (the excellent "senior adviser" to Trump)
“You can’t fix real injustice if you can’t face reality.” – MARY WAKEFIELD
"For justice to even have a hope of prevailing, it must be kept untainted by emotionalism. This principle should extend to all aspects of any properly-organized civic arrangement, and its regular violation by the Left is one of many reasons why the Left isn't fit to run our lives." -- JACK JOLIS
“When corruption becomes the norm, the legal system will be rigged to ignore it… and a moral code will evolve which glorifies it.” – SAMUEL M’CHEYNE GLASSER
Justice, “Economic”
"'Economic Justice' just means 'communism'." -- DAVID MAMET
“When a noun must disguise itself behind an adjective, beware.” – DANIEL J. FLYNN (author and the Senior Editor of THE AMERICAN SPECATOR, in June 2019)
"Anytime you have to put a modifier in front of 'justice', you can wave bye-bye to justice." -- RUSH LIMBAUGH (on 20 Dec. '19)
Justice, “Restorative”
"Restorative Justice is BS. It’s made our cities no go zones." -- CARL GOTTLIEB (my like-minded “X”-pal)
Justice, “Social”
“What do you call it when someone steals someone else's money secretly? Theft. What do you call it when someone takes someone else's money openly by force? Robbery. What do you call it when a politician takes someone else's money in taxes and gives it to someone who is more likely to vote for him? Social Justice. » -- THOMAS SOWELL
"Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, 'social justice'." -- THOMAS SOWELL
“Putting any adjective in front of ‘justice’ makes it the opposite of justice.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE
“Stop adding "justice" to words when you just mean ‘what I want’." – CHARLES C.W. COOKE
“If you use the social justice crowd’s nonsense words against them, they can never tell.” – CHARLES C.W. COOKE
" ‘Social justice’ is Faculty Lounge for ‘free stuff’." – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE
“Justice is punishment for Stealing Other People's Money. 'Social justice' is reward for Stealing Other People's Money.” – DR. MARTY FOX
“My idea of 'social justice' is I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. If you disagree with my idea, tell my how much I owe you, and why.” – WALTER E. WILLIAMS (the late black “Dr.”, radio talk show host, writer, and sometime Rush Limbaugh replacement)
"Justice doesn't need a modifier." – BEN SHAPIRO
"Envy plus rhetoric equals “social justice’." - THOMAS SOWELL
“Social justice is not a philosophy. If it were, its practitioners would not struggle in vain to come up with a definition for it. It is priestcraft. It is a self-justifying writ for the power of a mob that is sure it is right.” – JONAH GOLDBERG
"Punishing an innocent person for the deeds of someone else isn’t justice—it’s the tribal morality of prison gangs, the mafia, lynch mobs, and Hamas. " -- JONAH GOLDBERG
“When a noun must disguise itself behind an adjective, beware.” – DANIEL J. FLYNN (author and the Senior Editor of THE AMERICAN SPECATOR, in June 2019)
"Anytime you have to put a modifier in front of 'justice', you can wave bye-bye to justice." -- RUSH LIMBAUGH (on 20 Dec. '19)
"The point of policing the borders of respectability (which is what social-media 'social justice' warriors spend their days doing) is to draw the lines in such a way as to put your enemies outside of them. It doesn’t have to make sense morally or politically, which is why the Taliban is welcome on Twitter while Donald Trump isn’t. The Taliban doesn’t matter to progressives, and Donald Trump does." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON (on 2 Nov.2021)
"Social justice is vague and infinitely plastic, which is, of course, the point. A nebulous moral mandate in the hands of people with armies and police forces at their disposal is one of the most dangerous things in the world." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
"Social justice, a concept, like 'wellness', of which one can never have enough and so may be sold any amount." -- DAVID MAMET