K

Kardashian, Kim

"Kim's ass is gross! It's like cottage cheese inside a trash bag." -- PARIS HILTON    (an ex-friend of Kim's)

Kasich, John

“Kasich is Hillary Clinton with erectile dysfunction “ – JARED WYAND (an amusing fellow on the Twoot, in March 2016)

Kennedy, John F. (Jack)

“John Kennedy may have had some policies that didn't involve Marilyn Monroe, but who remembers what they were.” – MARK FORSYTH (The English author of “The Elements Of Eloquence”, in November 2013)

“The best thing JFK ever did was to make mens’ hats obsolete.” – JOHN PODHORETZ

"He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights; it had to be some silly little Communist." – JACKIE KENNEDY (a very useful quote, this.)

"John F. Kennedy was to the right of Mitt Romney." -- CHRIS PLANTE (in Dec. 2022) 

Kennedy, Robert F., Jr.

"RFK Jr. is the white sheep of the family." -- SCOTT ADAMS      (author of "God's Debris")

Kennedy, Ted

“The dolt. You could fit his (Ted Kennedy’s) brains into a snuff box and still have room for a change of clothes. If someone shot him in the head, he’d live, because they wouldn’t have hit a vital organ.” – TONY HENDRA (the English satirist, actor, and writer who worked mostly in the United States.He was a star writer of the old NATIONAL LAMPOON, where these words appeared)

Kennedys, The

“A clan of low-rent grifters and halfwits such as the Kennedys converted into an ersatz royal family.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

Kenya

"The Kenya settlers are not cranks of the kind who colonized New England, nor criminals and ne'er-do-wells of the kind who went to Australia, but perfectly normal, respectable Englishmen, out of sympathy with their own age." -- EVELYN WAUGH      (in 1930)

Kerry, John F.

“…the emanations from the mirrored funhouse that we call John Kerry’s brain” – JONAH GOLDBERG (hours after he won the Iowa caucus, 20 Jan 2004.)

“John Kerry is a vain thin-skinned droning blueblood with an indestructible sense of his own status but none of his own ridiculousness.” – MARK STEYN

“The good news about Mr. Kerry, and I mean this seriously, is he does not appear to be insane.” – PEGGY NOONAN (Author and ex-speechwriter extraordinaire to Reagan… who’s sadly dissolved  into squishiness in her dotage)

“So, to recap: John Kerry is a human toothache and he will never, ever, ever be president of the United States. Period. I'm Jonah Goldberg and I approved this message.” – JONAH GOLDBERG (in October 2006)

“Thirty-three years after denouncing Vietnam veterans, John Kerry ran for president and offered as his sole qualification his claim to be... a Vietnam veteran!” – JAMES TARANTO

“John Kerry is the male Jane Fonda. (And I can't offhand think of anything worse that could be said of any American male. Let alone one that purports to represent us abroad.)” – JACK JOLIS

"Who is John Kerry? He's basically Jane Fonda with less testosterone." – TREVOR LOUDON (a conservative “public researcher” from Christchurch, New Zealand. And I believe we both arrived at the same conclusion independently of each other.)

"John Kerry is the physical presence of American absence." – MARK STEYN

“John Kerry should not be in charge of climate change — he should be in charge of addressing the national debt, because the only thing in life he ever has had much talent for is marrying money.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON (in April 2021) 

“John Kerry wasn’t famous for his war exploits; he was famous for his anti-war theatrics. Also, there was that human-toothache thing.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“There is no diplomatic situation that John Kerry cannot make worse.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY

Keynesianism (and J.M. Keynes)                                                                            

“Keynes' own remark that practical men of affairs are often the slaves of some defunct economist has not lost its piquancy now that the defunct economist is Keynes himself.” – DAVID DILKS                                 (The British historian and author of “Churchill And Company”)

K.G.B., The

"During the Soviet Union, the KGB was a weapon without money. Now it's a weapon with money.” – MARINA LITVINENKO (The widow of Alexander Litvinenko, the FSB officer who defected and was poisoned by Putin's   thugs in London, in 2006)

"How can I be a gangster if I worked for the KGB? Come on." – VLADIMIR PUTIN  (on being called a “gangster” by Marco Rubio)

"There are no 'former' Chekists."– VLADIMIR PUTIN (and the “Cheka” was the 1st version of the Soviet KGB)

“If you think it's the K.G.B., it is.” – JOHN SCHINDLER (author and ex-NSA official)

"The Soviet Union was a criminal state. The most criminal element of the criminal state was the KGB. It was a gang of bandits." -- OLEG GORDIEVSKY    (the high-ranking KGB officer who defected to the Brits at the height of the "Cold" War)

“As far as I'm concerned, the KGB gave birth to the antiwar movement in America.” – ION MIHAI PACEPA

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

"The KGB was an organisation that had hanged, starved, shot, and worked to death more Soviet civilians in time of peace than the whole number of combatants killed in action on both sides in World War II." -- CHARLES McCARRY 

“The secret police was beyond the reach of time and history. It was protean. That was its secret. The Cheka had become the GPU, and then the OGPU, and then the NKVD, and then the NKGB, and then the MGB, and then the MVD, and finally the KGB: the highest stage of evolution. And then lo and behold!, the mighty KGB had been obliged to mutate into two entirely new sets of initials: the SVR – the spies – stationed out in Yasenevo, and the FSB – internal security – still in the Lubyanka, amid the bones.

And the view in the Kremlin was that the FSB, at least, was nothing more than the latest in the long tradition of rearranged letters – that, in the immortal words of Yeltsin himself, “those motherfuckers in the Lubyanka are still the same old motherfuckers they always were.” – ROBERT HARRIS (the novelist, in 1998)

“If you want to see the danger of a state where security services achieve political power, look at Putin's Russia." -- CHARLES MOORE (in April 2022)   

"Nothing entertains a Muscovite so much as the sight of the chekisti making a mess of things." -- FREDERICK FORSYTH (and of course, "chekisti" was the nickname for Lenin's original version of the KGB)
 

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

Khaddafi, Muamar

"One begins to have a sneaking admiration for Col. Gaddafi. People who have met him say he is mad. He certainly does behave in public like the Michael Jackson of politics. But you do not stay in power in an Arab country for 40 years without possessing some skills. One of Gaddafi's is his capacity to act as a distorted mirror of the follies of his own culture -- desert romanticism, the bogus deployment of religion, the myth of the Arab strongman -- and of our own. It was a good joke on his part, for example, to get his country made chairman of the UN Human Rights Council, to endow the London School of Economics for research on the same subject, and to persuade the British and Scottish authorities that the Lockerbie bomber was dying. He understands all too well how western elites behave. Recently, he has been mocked for handing out $400 in cash to every Libyan citizen who asks for it. But it looks quite clever to me -- a burlesque of our own politcy of 'quantitative easing'." -- CHARLES MOORE

Kierkegaard, Søren

“Kiekegaard courted unpopularity with immense success and then complained of it.” – MICHAEL TANNER (a British philosophy professor and Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University)     

Kindness

“In this world you must be a bit too kind to be kind enough.” – PIERRE CARLET DE CHAMBLAIN DE MARIVAUX                                                           (the pre-revolutionary French novelist and dramatist)

"We can't help everyone... but everyone can help someone." -- RONALD REAGAN

"If you can't be kind, at least be vague." -- JUDITH MARTIN (the famous "Miss Manners" columnist) 

Kipling, Rudyard

“All the knowledge in the world is divided between me and Rudyard Kipling. Kipling knows everything, and I know the rest.” – MARK TWAIN

Kissinger, Henry

"There were some things Kissinger did that were disastrous, such as legitimizing Red China. But on balance I feel about him as I feel about his old boss Tricky: I like them both -- because the Left hates them both." -- JACK JOLIS

"The Chinese Communist Party is an existential threat to the civilized world today because of Henry Kissinger." -- J. MICHAEL WALLER (an ex-spook -- a good one -- and a honcho at the Center For Security Policy, on the occasion of K's death)

“Kitsch”

“Communism is kitsch with teeth.” – ROGER SCRUTON

Knowledge

“The only way to remain happy is to know nothing or everything. Unfortunately, it is impossible to know nothing for very long” – CARY GRANT

“Knowledge is only ignorance postponed.” – DAVID HUME (nice one, Dave…)

“To see what is in front of one's nose needs constant struggle.” – GEORGE ORWELL

“The classic mistake of expertise: learning more and more about less and less until finally we know everything about nothing.” – MICHAEL LEDEEN

“Recall the old quip about the increasing specialization of higher education: We come to know more and more about less and less, until at last we know everything about nothing. It may be that in a world of ever-increasing complexity and variety, we just end up knowing next to nothing about an enormous number of things.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

“There's no such thing as bad knowledge, of course, but not everything in the world is worth knowing.” – ANDY FERGUSON

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

"Experts come to know more and more about less and less." -- A. J. P. TAYLOR

“Knowledge is the one possession which cannot be confiscated at the border.” – DAVID MAMET (and therefore, according to him, this is what made the Yids so shmaht – because they were always being chased from pillar to post, and could only schlep knowledge around with them easily....)

“I never expected to know stuff. I never thought I was the sort. It doesn't seem so long ago that I'd have thought that devolution max was a cough drink, or that Sunni and Shia were the couple who sang 'I Got You Babe'. Yet here I am, all of a sudden, broadly understanding what a Higgs Boson is, aware of why it matters that Hamid Karzai is a Pashtun, and liable to not even snigger, at least half the time, when I hear the name 'King Bhumibol'.” – HUGO RIFKIND

 “In football, as in Hollywood, as in the Council of Economic Advisers, nobody knows anything.” – KYLE SMITH (the premier movie reviewer of the great NY POST, in June 2012)

“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” – T. S. ELIOT

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

“Pursuing knowledge for the sake of knowledge is not a political concept or politicians would know a lot more.” –  P. J. O'ROURKE

"Knowledge. How much we want it, and how we're afraid of it." -- DONALD WESTLAKE (written in 1995 -- and as time goes on, the latter part seems to be overtaking the first part....) 

"No one knows nothing." -- IRVING CAESAR (The lyricist of the Broadway musical "No No Nanette" said this to the one and only Mark Steyn, and I've heard a more perfect sentence-long double entendre in my life...)

“Knowledge advances funeral by funeral.” – PAUL SAMUELSON         (Yeah, that Paul Samuelson – that liberal who inflicted that Economics 101 textbook on you...)

“Only a small portion of our knowledge is our own gained from experience, put to a test and retained. The rest is assumed and should remain open to question.” -- DANNY DE BELDER (my great pal, The Sage Of Flanders) 

“The vast accumulations of knowledge—or at least of information—deposited by the nineteenth century have been responsible for an equally vast ignorance. When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when every one knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not. And when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.” – T. S. ELIOT                                                                         (“The Sacred Wood”, 1921)

"Everyone is conservative about what he knows best." – ROBERT CONQUEST

“All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don't know by what you do.” – ARTHUR WELLESLEY, THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON

“Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket, and do not pull it out and strike it merely to show you have one. If you are asked what o'clock it is, tell it, but do not proclaim it hourly and unasked, like the watchman.” – PHILIP STANHOPE , LORD CHESTERFIELD  (1694-1773)

“All the knowledge in the world is divided between me and Rudyard Kipling. Kipling knows everything, and I know the rest.” – MARK TWAIN

"Most people don’t know anything about most subjects, which is exactly how it should be: The world is far too complicated for most of us to have anything more than a superficial familiarity with most subjects. " -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"They say that knowledge is power. Power is power. People say differently don't understand power. Or knowledge. Knowledge is what gets you killed." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"The number of things I don't know is infinite -- or infinite minus one, if such a number exists, since I discovered something the other day." -- DOT WORDSWORTH

“All the wealth we’ve accumulated is ultimately between our ears.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“Nobody knows anything.” – WILLIAM GOLDMAN                                                                                                (the famous American screenwriter)

“I was born knowing everything. Meanwhile, you don’t know anything.” – DION DIMUCCI                           (the great American rock and roller, in an interview in 2020, at the age of 80)

"Knowing what you don't know is a form of knowledge, and very different to the ignorance of not knowing what you don't know." -- BEN SCHOTT     (amplifying, in 2018, Donald Rumsfeld's famous 2002 dictum about "known unknowns")

"The first dark age was characterized by a lack of information. For centuries almost nobody -- even the most privileged people of the day -- had access to any knowledge. The second dark age, by contrast, is characterized by a surfeit of information. Indeed there is so much information around us that nobody has a chance of absorbing even a calculable portion of it. Today people have information coming at them all the time from every direction, and almost no ability to sift it. As I say, it's a new dark age, characterized not by monkish silence, but by uninformed howling." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY

“What would be worse than knowing everything? You’d be condemned  to a life in which there was nothing left to learn, no discoveries to be made.” – MARK MASON                                                                            (the English journalist Mason might want to interview Mr. DiMucci, see above....)

Koran, The

“The Koran is a wretched book in which I have not been able to discover one single idea of value.” – ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER (in 1819)

“The Koran is a confused, wearisome jumble that could be read by a European only from a sense of duty.” – THOMAS CARLYLE

"I studied the Koran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammed." -- ALEXIS DE TOQUEVILLE

“Islam's biggest enemy is the Quran. If people learn what is in that book, Islam will be finished.” – ALI SINA (Ex-Iranian Muslim, and founder of the Faith Freedom Foundation)

“There really isn't much in the Quran to suggest that Allah gives a hoot for non-believers.” – MARY WAKEFIELD                                                                       (A columnist at the UK Spectator)

“The Koran's ‘Kill infidels wherever you find them’ has ‘Nothing’ to do w/Muslims killing infidels wherever they find them ... and Islam means peace.” – BOSCH FAWSTIN

“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)

"As long as there is this book (the Koran) there will be no peace in the world." -- WILLIAM GLADSTONE

“If the Qur'an was the word of God, it had been dictated on a very bad day.” – CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

"The Koran -- it's worse than the bloody Bible. No stories." -- ALAN JUDD

"He flicked through the Koran's pages. It looked pretty menacing stuff, even viewed at high speed. It also seemed worryingly long." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS (on the prospect of having to read the damn thing)

Korea

“Koreans don’t like anyone who isn’t Korean, and they don’t like each other all that much either. They’re hard-headed, hard-drinking, tough little bastards, the Irish of Asia.” –P. J. O’ROURKE

"Koreans are cruel -- even by Asian standards." -- JACK JOLIS

Korea (North)

“North Korea is Upper Volta with nuclear weapons.” – MARK SEDDON (Brit journalist ,and a bit of a lefty, and, I’m bound to say, he’s being a bit hard on poor old unassuming Upper Volta, here, which is these days known as Burkina Faso  and which, so far as I’m aware, has never threatened anyone with world war….)

“North Korea is, militarily speaking, like a giant bee. It can deliver a horrible sting, but once it does, it will die.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“All interactions with North Korea eventually devolve into ransom negotiations.” – JOSHUA STANTON      (a US Army veteran on the Twoot)

“There are around 25 million people living in North Korea. If their leaders do not bring about Armageddon, but do someday fall, then there will be a need to deploy 25 million full-time psychiatrists to the Korean Peninsula.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY                                                                                                                                (in December 2017)

“North Korea is the world’s worst régime; the world’s most unnecessary and humanly wasteful basket-case.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY                                           (in August 2019) 

“Kim Il Sung is a monumentally astute and visionary statesman.” – HARRISON SALISBURY                      (the “great” NEW YORK TIMES superstar, in the 50s and 60s – and just remember that the next time you pick up The New York  Times... should you ever be minded to....)

“Anybody who wants to move to North Korea is welcome to do so.” – BILL GATES                                         (one of the few sensible  things he ever said)

"The North Korea problem should always be thought about as a proxy battle with the CCP. While China's control of the country is not total, it's close." -- MIKE POMPEO

Korea (South)

“Sometimes South Korea feels like our buddy who’s still convinced he can patch things up and get back together with the crazy ex-girlfriend who tried to run him over with her car.” -- JIM GERAGHTY

Korean War, The

“All the resourcefulness in the world meant nothing against hordes. The hordes. That had been an American infantryman’s joke during the Korean War. A Chinese squad was made up of three hordes and a mob, or something like that. Funny.” – NELSON DEMILLE

Kumbaya

“But singing ‘Kum Ba Yah’ does not work. Sitting around a metaphoric campfire, holding hands, and singing communal songs does not make human beings happy. Sweaty, yes. Sooty, perhaps.... but not happy.” – TODD G. BUCHHOLZ

“Kwanzaa”

“And don’t talk to me about Kwanzaa – Kwanzaa’s a punchline, at this point.” – LARRY O’CONNOR (on his WMAL radio program, on 12 December 2018)

“I once tried to explain ‘Kwanzaa’ to my Central African assistant. He laughed and replied ‘Hé patron, ti est trop drole!’ (‘Yo boss, you’re too funny!’ in Central African French).” – JACK JOLIS