L

Labels

“Since the days of FDR, the left, in all its incarnations, has had a fear of being labeled, usually because whatever the current name their ideology is commonly known as, it’s synonymous with ‘doesn’t work’.” – ED DRISCOLL (the American blogger)

"Only a label is required. The label is the motive. The label is the evidence. The label is the logic. First a racist and now a misogynist. That explains everything. That and the craziness." -- PHILIP ROTH

Labor

“Labor is like anything else: It’s worth what you can sell it for. There is no such thing as ‘should’ when it comes to prices; people like what they like and they want what they want, and their economic priorities are what they are. A wage is a price, and there is no moral dimension to prices any more than there is a moral dimension to its being cold in the winter.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“The entire idea of 'labor' as a social class standing in counterpoint to 'capital' is antiquated, of course, and the main problem of the poor in the United States is not that they are worked too hard but that they do not work at all.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“When the labor force consists of just one guy who is working, unemployment will be 0% and Obama will be triumphant.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

“Employment is not about respect. It's about trading labor for money.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

“If they were smart enough to get bored, they wouldn’t be doing a job like this in the first place.” – DAVID LODGE

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

"I pay them abominably and they supplement their wages by cooking the books. Servants prefer it that way. It preserves their independence and self-respect." -- EVELYN WAUGH (in "Work Suspended", 1942)

"Ninety percent of the workforce feigns effort, and of the ten percent who do put their hearts and minds into the job, no more than one in ten is any damn good." -- CHARLES McCARRY

Labor Unions

“Government is simple provided two conditions are met: You do it locally, and you do it without unions.” -- MARK STEYN

“But whatever the arguments for private-sector unionization as a protection against the robber barons of capitalism red in tooth and claw, there is no justification whatsoever for public-sector unions. After all, government is a monopoly – even if it goes bankrupt it is never going to go out of business.” -- MARK STEYN

“A labor union should be thought of as an organization whose activities appear to be directed against the company but are really directed against other workers – non-organized ones.” – TOM BETHELL (the Brit-born Americanized economic writer.)

“With all that the unions have spent on elections in the past five years, you would think the economy would be stimulated by now.” – JIM GERAGHTY

“Unions aren't brotherhood far as I can see, simply another form of organized crime.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS (in his 1980 novel “Jack Be Nimble”)

"Syndicalism and socialism are two different things: if the state becomes his employer, then the worker has to fight the state." -- ANTHONY BURGESS

Labor Unions (Public Sector)

'In effect, public employee unions are a mechanism by which every taxpayer is forced to fund the Democratic Party.' – MICHAEL BARONE

"’Collective bargaining’ (for government workers) is outrageous because it is an affront to democracy: a system of collusion between politicians and unions, which cuts out the taxpayers whose money they are spending.” – JAMES TARANTO

“When public employees are collectively bargaining, who are they collectively bargaining against?” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

Labour Party, The British

“The British Labour Party still thinks in terms of producing wealth solely in terms of manufacturing objects that hurt if you drop them on your toe.” – ANTHONY LEJEUNE (the long-time European correspondent for NATIONAL REVIEW)

“Labour is a crusade, or it is nothing.” – HAROLD WILSON (The 2-time Labour Prime Minister in the 60s. Horrible little twerp.)

"Ed Miliband. The man is odd and not in an endearing manner." -- TIM STANLEY (The Telegraph Blog)

«Laissez-Faire»

"Though the people support the government, the government should not support the people." -- GROVER CLEVELAND (the Democrat President – one of the few useful ones, along with Andy Jackson, James K. Polk and Harry Truman)

«When things are controlled by bureaucrats, it takes a real effort of imagination to envisage them not being so. We assume that in the absence of direction, chaos must ensue. But the motto must be, ‘Don’t just sit there, undo something.’ The best way to bring in reforms is fast. The best way to get rid of rules is all at once. The best time to liberalise an economy is far sooner than the experts think you should. » – MATT RIDLEY (In April 2021)

Language

“Political chaos is connected with the decay of language; one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.” -- GEORGE ORWELL

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

“People who don’t care about language can never understand why people who do mind do.” – GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT

“If there is a better losing cause than the fight against slovenly language, I am unaware of it.” – JOSEPH EPSTEIN

“Bad language is viral; it's in the atmosphere, and we all pick it up.” – JOSEPH EPSTEIN

“It has to be asserted that for the law to be known, is of more importance than to be right.” – (DR.) SAMUEL JOHNSON (actually, the good Doctor was referring to “laws of grammar”, here)

“Language is thought in fancy dress.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

“Words are the only things that last forever.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

“Academic literary study seems these days to be ninth-rate philosophy, or drunken verbiage without the alcohol. The use of arcane and meaningless language as a means of career advancement is perhaps the most salient cultural characteristic of our age.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE (in Jan. 2008)

“If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.” – CONFUCIUS

“Conservatives often like to imagine that to win the war, all you need to do is win the big battles over key issues like national security and the economy. Liberals know better than that. What really counts, they realize, are not the cities but the secret supply trails leading through the jungle to Dien Bien Phu: the minds of the young, the way they are taught, no, better than that – the very language itself. He who controls the dictionary holds the key to the citadel. No coincidence, I think that Chomsky’s speciality is linguistics.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

“Language is a public good. You don’t have a right to treat it anyway you like, to free-ride on common understandings. Someone who shouts ‘fire’ in a crowded theater cannot exculpate himself by insisting that in his family, ‘fire’ means ‘popcorn’. You an innovate with language, but you cannot privatize.” – CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL

“The power of words is like the sprung dynamics of a cricket bat. What appears to be a bit of flat stick is an instrument capable of carrying a ball two hundred yards in four seconds”. – TOM STOPPARD

“Sexual repression is the best friend language has, but when you can say anything you end up saying everything.” – FLORENCE KING

“We should have more clichés. They are in truth, as someone said in jest, the poetry of the people. Without clichés there are no proverbs, no shared references, and language itself is scarcely possible. Without dead metaphors we cannot speak, depend on it.” – DOT WORDSWORTH (the UK SPECTATOR's language matron-in-residence....)

“After all, the power to redefine words is the power to redefine reality.” – RYAN T. ANDERSON (Of the Heritage Foundation)

“I speak French like a native. I wish I could speak it like a Frenchman.” -- FRANKIE HOWERD (the old English music-hall comic – a bit light in the loafers {when that was still illegal over there} but quite funny – maybe because of that...)

“The abuse of language has got to stop. …We cannot condemn as bigotry everything that we don’t agree with. Words like bigotry have to go. …That’s what you do. You destroy meanings, you anesthetize people, and you turn people off. You turn the mind off. You kill the brain. We cannot have this. We cannot have this abuse of language going on.” – CAMILLE PAGLIA

“It also doesn't help that to the English ear, Arabic, like German, is a language which makes people in authority 80 percent scarier. (I suspect that if you could force all parties to negotiate in Portuguese or Italian, the whole Middle East problem could be sorted out in a month.) – RORY SUTHERLAND

“If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.” – CONFUCIUS

"Language is the Leftist battlefield." -- JOHN ROSSOMANDO

“Language is the apparel in which your thoughts parade in public. Never clothe them in vulgar and shoddy attire.” - GEORGE W. CRANE (A psychologist and physician, best known as a conservative syndicated newspaper columnist for 60 years, and published at least three books. He was the father of Republican U.S. congressmen Phil and Dan Crane)

“Liberals are obsessed with language and controlling the words people use. If they can control our words, they can control us. They simultaneously promote as many languages as possible in American — other than English — and frantically censor words and speakers. Soon the only words we’ll be allowed to use are: 'I’m offended'. ('Estoy offendido.')”– ANN COULTER

“I'm all for people calling themselves what they want, but using the plural pronoun 'they' for one person makes nonsense of the entire language.” – LYNN BARBER (English journalist – SUNDAY TIMES – December '15)

“I speak two languages, Body and English.” – MAE WEST

“Instead of inhabiting a universe where sticks and stones may break our bones but words can never hurt us, we've been ushered into one where the language you use carries more weight than the way you behave.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

“To have another language is to have a second soul.” ("Avoir une autre langue, c'est posséder une deuxième âme.") -- CHARLEMAGNE (742-814 AD)

“Life's disappointments are harder to take if you don't know any swear words.” – BILL WATERSON (the author of the excellent “Calvin and Hobbes” cartoon. And I always told my kids, when they were small, that they could use any swear words they wanted – as long as they were in a foreign language.)

"A language is a dialect with an Army and a Navy." – MAX WEINREICH (a “Jewish linguist”)

"No one in America seemed to know how to pronounce any foreign word." -- MARK HELPRIN

"If you change the language, you change the thoughts. If you change the thoughts, you change the actions." -- GEORGE ORWELL

"Anyone who is not at least trilingual is a hick." – KARL LAGERFELD

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

"With a new language, of course, the last thing you learn is taste." -- MARTIN AMIS

“Language is about it, it isn’t it.” – PAUL JENNINGS (the British humorist)

“No one understands a word of ‘dolphinese’.” – CARL SAGAN

“Policing language is one of the most powerful tools for policing thought.Language can work as a kind of gnosis, and one of the chief weapons the cultural left uses is their monopolistic claims on language. They invent a new meaning on their own, and then use that new meaning to out, shame or cancel those who didn’t get the memo.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“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)

“An elemental language among all men. The cough, the laugh, the sob, the scream, the fart, the sigh. Amen.” -- JOHN UPDIKE

“If a lion could talk we wouldn’t be able to understand him.” – LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

"I find the phrase 'deep dive' useful. As soon as you hear it, you know that the person offering it is not to be trusted. It is one of a growing collection of official words and phrases which mean the opposite of what they state. Others include, 'We welcome the report', 'We take allegations of x very seriously', 'Your call is important to us', 'We've been very clear', and 'diversity'." -- CHARLES MOORE

Language (translation)

"Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful. -- EVGENY YEVTUSHENKO (the famous Soviet emigré writer from the 60s who college girls all had the hots for but who I was always convinced was a KGB double-agent. Still am, in fact....)

"The language of Europe is translation." -- UMBERTO ECO

"Translators are a curious, generally seriously impoverished breed. Encounters with them can be deeply unsettling. At a party in London I was once introduced to a man who said ‘Hello, I your Polish translator are.’ My Swedish translator wrote inviting me to ‘crash in his pad in Stockholm’ if I wanted to ‘save some bread’. Quite apart from provoking anguish over what’s happening to your books, you wonder what strange demon drove them to take up the career in the first place." – WILLIAM BOYD (in 1984)

Laos

“Why do we believe in God? This is why: When the French controlled Vietnam, we depended on the French to help us, yet they deserted us. During the Vietnam War, we depended on the Americans – they deserted us too. Now we are in the hands of the enemy, who do you think we can turn to?” – KOK KSOR (Hmong “Montagnard” refugee leader in the U.S., in July 2005)

“Laos is the sort of country where, if you thought you knew the answer, you didn't even understand the question.” – J. VINCENT LAWRENCE (One of our first, along with the legendary Tony Poe, Agency case officers up in northern Laos. He served personally with Gen. Vang Pao from 1962 to 1966. “Vint” was an absolutely splendid fellow.)

“I decided that Vientiane was the most laid-back capital-city in the world.” – PETER MOORE (the Australian travel writer, here in 1999. And what he says about Vientiane was certainly true when I was there in 1970, but I have trouble imagining that all that remained unchanged after 14 years of Stalinist rule....)

“A British diplomat and friend of Graham Greene who had served twenty years in Indo-China, much of the time in Laos, decided one day to write his memoirs. He smoked a few pipes of opium, drank some whisky and sat down at the typewriter, only to find that he could not remember a thing. My acquaintance with Laos lasted only eight years but I find much the same difficulty as the diplomat. Crossing the Mekong was for me like crossing the Lethe, the river of forgetfulness.” – RICHARD WEST

“I was in Laos when Vietnam fell; and Laos itself was already more or less Communist. Troops of the Communist Pathet Lao, in apple-green uniforms and pastry-cook caps, patrolled the market-place and the bank of the River Mekong. The foreigners were already leaving, the Corsican gold-smugglers, the soldiers and airmen of fortune, the drug-fuddled proprietors of vegetarian restaurants and psychedelic night-clubs. Life still had its dream-like charm, but already there were intimations of nightmare. The Kingdom of the Million elephants was becoming Communist Laos, a title as incongruous as the People’s Republic of Shangri-La.” – RICHARD WEST

"If Laos is lost we will likely lose the rest of Southeast Asia and Indonesia." -- PRES. DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER (in 1955. It's hard to realize now but it’s true that in the late 50s/early 60s, Laos was considered more strategically important to the US than Vietnam itself...)

"I am a good friend to Communists abroad, but I do not like them at home." -- SOUVANNA PHOUMA (the multiple and long-term "neutralist" Prime Minister of Laos -- in fact, he was in power when I was up there in 1970 -- so theoretically, I was fighting the North Vietnamese for his ass....)

"It could be argued that with the signing of the 1962 (Laos) Geneva Accords (officially known as "The International Agreement on the Neutrality of Laos"), the U.S. and South Vietnamese lost all chances of winning a war with the Soviet- and Chinese-backed North Vietnamese." -- JAMES E. PARKER, JR. (the longest-serving of my fellow CIA paramilitary case officers with the Hmong in Northern Laos -- Codename "Mule" -- here, in his excellent last book, "Battle For Skyline Ridge")

"Laos is as different from Vietnam as Long Island is from Big Sur." -- HUNTER S. THOMPSON (who visited Laos, vulture-like, in May of 1975, and -- I can safely say -- didn't understand a thing about the place. But not a single fucking thing.)

Laos (“secret war in”)

“In the hearts and minds of Sky, we never lost.” – JAMES E. PARKER, Jr. (One of my fellow CIA paramilitary “case officers” in northern Laos. His code name was “Mule”. Wrote a terrific book about it, which happens to be called “Codename: Mule”. By the way, in case you’re wondering, my code name was – rather extraordinarily -- “Hippie”, given to me by our #2, Burr “Clean” Smith, one of the original “Band Of Brothers”, because my hair was maybe 1 mm longer than the others’ and because I liked rock music. And “Sky” was the code name for our whole CIA paramilitary operation up there. It was given by one of its most legendary Case Officers, Jerry “Hog” Daniels, who came from Montana – “Big Sky Country”.)

"The North Vietnamese military never defeated the CIA's Asian army defending Laos. Not before 1968 when they attacked under the cover of the Pathet Lao; not after 1968 when they attacked with tanks and jets and heavy artillery and sappers and tens of thousands of foot soldiers. Against enormous odds, the CIA provided the necessary leadership and paramilitary support to the local forces to hold off the very determined communist invaders. And most conspicuous in that support were the outstanding men the CIA collected to do the job. enormously brave soldiers every one: Hmong, Thai, lowland Lao, Air America, Continental (Air Services), USAF, and CIA paramilitary case officers." -- JAMES E. PARKER, JR. ("Mule" -- ending his superb, semi-posthumous 2019 book, "Battle For Skyline Ridge")

“Vang Pao was the biggest hero of the Vietnam War.” – WILLIAM COLBY (Funnily enough, I met both over there – “Ambassador” Colby in Vietnam, and VP, of course, in Laos)

(Las Vegas – see Nevada)

Law, the

"Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure." -- THOMAS JEFFERSON

“It has to be asserted that for the law to be known, is of more importance than to be right.” (DR.) SAMUEL JOHNSON (actually, the good Doctor was referring to laws of grammar, here, but still, it applies generally)

“Free institutions will only survive when there is the rule of law. This is an absolute on which there can be no compromise: the subjection of everyone and everything to the final arbitration of the law is more fundamental to human freedom and happiness than democracy itself... Once the law is humbled, all else that is valuable in a civilized society will vanish, usually with terrifying speed. On the other hand, provided the rule of law is maintained intact, the evil forces in society, however powerful, will be brought to book in the end." -- PAUL JOHNSON

“’In my youth’, said his father, ‘I took to the law,

And argued each case with my wife;

And the muscular strength which it gave to my jaw

Has lasted the rest of my life.” – LEWIS CARROLL

“Most of the time, the law is just fine as it is. The problem is lack of will to enforce it.”--ANDY MCCARTHY

“Due process is process that is due.” – ANDREW. C McCARTHY

"The entire American legal system is based on the premise of trial by jury, and the only way you can get on a jury is if you prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you don't know squat about the case you are about to try. The legal system needs to be revised to include three categories: 'not guilty', 'guilty', and 'are you shitting me?'" -- DENNIS MILLER

"You can't serve papers on a rat; you've got to kill him or let him be." – CHARLES PORTIS (memorably spoken by Marshall Rooster Cogburn, John Wayne, in the original 1969“True Grit”)

"Successful kleptocrats tend, perversely, to favor the rule of law, so as to protect what they have stolen." -- MARK GALEOTTI (the author of "Putin's Wars")

"The United States is a nation of laws, badly written and randomly enforced." – FRANK ZAPPA

"Don't tell me what the Law is, tell me who the Judge is." -- ROY COHN (so true, in post-Obama America...)

“Contemporary Liberal sentiment endorses the abrogation or elaboration of law to ensure that no one suffers, but the first and most important task of law in a democracy is not to right individual wrongs, but to ensure that no one suffers because of the State. And the simple, tragic truth is that this may be accomplished not by a Czar or a committee, or by reorganization, or by accession to office of the Benevolent or Wise, but only by limiting the State's power.” -- DAVID MAMET

"If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell." – CARL SANDBURG (the famous American pote.)

“Social cement.” -- BRUCE ANDERSON (his nifty definition of law)

“If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

“The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.” -- ABRAHAM LINCOLN

“If President Obama gets to choose which laws he’ll enforce, do we get to choose which laws we follow?” – MARK STEYN

“A law that doesn’t apply equally to everyone is not a law at all but merely naked application of power.” -- JACK JOLIS

"You do what you think is right, and let the law catch up." – JUSTICE THURGOOD MARSHALL (This is exactly the opposite of how it’s supposed to work.)

"The American legal profession is a suffocating cartel that saps 10 percent of American GDP and through its members in legislatures and regulatory authorities adds 4,000 statutes and regulations a year to the law books, steadily tightening its strangulation of American life, all and always in the name of a society of laws and the ever more equitable refinement of civilization." -- CONRAD BLACK

“If there is no moral foundation for a system of laws, then the law is reduced to 'These are the rules. They’re the rules because I say so, and I control all of the guys with guns.' We can ask those who survived Pol Pot, Stalin, or Mao how that worked out…So the law is either codification of morality or it is thuggery. The real argument is about which moral code will be implemented by the law. To claim to reject a moral underpinning for the law is either a wish to live in a place where the law is whatever one guy says it is today, or else it is a disingenuous attempt to substitute your own moral code for the one that has already been codified.” — TOM REYNOLDS (The libertarian “Beregond” on Twitter)

“The law is reason free from passion.” – ARISTOTLE

"Societies could not be created on sheets of parchment. They could not, even with the most golden of fountain pens, be signed into existence. Inevitably men will succumb to their own reality. The abandonment of the Constitution could be likened to a house settling into its own foundations." -- SHIVA NAIPAUL (writing about a country very much like Guyana, in his 1983 "Love And Death In A Hot Country")

"Using the word 'allegedly' every third word doesn't do you any good, legally, if you're the one doing the alleging.' -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON (bon point, conseiller....)

“Why on earth we let 18-year-olds vote when we won’t sell them a handgun or a beer is a mystery to me. (No, I don’t want to lower the drinking age to 18 — I want to raise the voting age to 40.)” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law.” – CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

"I was beginning to learn something most important in the matter of law, that provided one was the defendant, a delay could be something to be looked forward to." -- J. P. DONLEAVY

«My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.» – BARRY GOLDWATER

«When the state was at its most corrupt, laws were most numerous.» – TACITUS (Roman senator and historian, 56-117 AD)

"There are lots of things in life that need to be expensive to prevent people overusing them. The legal system is one such thing." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

"If the law is complicit in crime, is it the law? If, when not complicit, it not only fails to protect but proscribes self-protection, then it is not law but fraud. Anarchy arises not from those who defend themselves by natural right, but from officials who fail in their calling, look the other way, succumb to threats and blackmail, or who are themselves criminal. If without defending me the law says I can't defend myself, it is no longer the law." -- MARK HELPRIN

"Do we have law? Because if we do, I'll go home and knit tea cozies. If we do not, in fact, have law, and just the unfulfilled hope of it, then how can what we do threaten something that doesn't exist except partially or as always unrealized hope?" -- MARK HELPRIN

"You never do anything illegal unless you have The Law on your side." -- SALVADOR VILLASENOR (A successful California bootlegger, advising his son victor, who was trying to enter the business)

“Unfortunately, the law has nothing to do with justice. It’s merely a method for dispute resolution.” – MICHAEL CRICHTON (the author and also a lawyer, in his 1994 novel, “Disclosure”)

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

"The courts should be strictly judicial and not dabble in policy - except interpretation of the Constitution. It is not at all proper for courts to try to make laws or to read law school theories into the law and policy laid down by the Congress. We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. F.B.I." -- HARRY S TRUMAN (in May 1945)

“Law, Common”

“The life of the Common Law has not been logic; it has been experience.” – OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

“Law and Order” (law enforcement)

" ‘Organized’ law enforcement bears a disturbing resemblance to organized crime.” – JAMES TARANTO

"The execution of the laws is more important than the making of them." -- THOMAS JEFFERSON

Law, “International”

“If you wanted to construct the precise opposite of the U.S. Constitution it would look an awful lot like ‘international law’”. – MARK STEYN (…ah yes, the Sage Of New Hampshire via Canada and Belgium – the two, as he says, most boring countries in the world…)

“’International Law’ is the new colonialism, the imposition on the world’s peoples of the moral certainties of a remote, unaccountable Western elite. Indeed, the old imperialists were far more tolerant of local customs and culture than the monolithically leftist body of activist law.” – MARK STEYN

“Years ago I used to believe passionately in international law. Like so many others I loved to talk the talk and wondered how best to walk the walk. But the more I traveled, the more I sensed that, good as the intentions of many advocates of the ICC (the International Criminal Court) are, they are largely based not on politics but on narcissism. It appeals to people who believe the world can be perfected. It appeals to people who think that the world doesn't need armies, just good lawyers. And it appeals to people who want to assume the mantle of genuine moral heroes of the past at a fraction of the physical and mental expenditure. For my part, the more appalling places I went to, the more the thought crystallised in my head – not 'How can we bring these leaders to justice?' but, simply, 'How can we get these leaders off their people's backs?' ”. – DOUGLAS MURRAY (the bril young Brit essayist and polemicist, in August 2012)

"The first and only thing you need to know about international law is that there isn't any."– PROF. WALTER BERNS (A great man. One of the only 2 good profs. I had at Cornell – the other being Allan Bloom. And Prof. Berns spoke these words to us on the first day of class of his course in “International Law”.)

“Despite what you may think, the international realm is still much closer to a state of a nature than our domestic politics. Sure, we have this thing called international law, but it’s ultimately non-enforceable if actual nation-states choose not to enforce it. The U.N. has no armies, thank God. The logic of the world outside our borders is far closer to the logic of the prison yard than it is to anything within our borders.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"As a general rule, the more times someone repeats the phrase “international norms,” the less they have any actual strategy." -- STEPHEN MILLER (Trump's Senior Adviser, and, as far as I'm concerned, the most useful guy in Trump's White House)

“Lawfare”

“‘Lawfare’ – the long march of the left to make politics justiciable rather than democratic.” – CHARLES MOORE

Lawrence, D. H.

“Lawrence had great appeal for the sick and infirm. It’s a funny thing, I’ve never come across any kind of Lawrence-disciple, queer or not, who wasn’t in a proper pickle about sex.” – SIR KINGSLEY AMIS (in 1994, the year before he died)

Lawyers

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

“It is not easy for someone living in Britain to understand the mixture of dread and fascination which the lawyer inspires in the American people.” – HENRY PORTER (Someone living in Britain. Actually, a writer living in Britain.)

“To state a lie firmly, categorically and with great authority, undeterred by the fact that all concerned know it to be a lie, is one of the principal activities defined by the term practicing law.” – STEPHEN VIZINCZEY

“Because they don't know anything, lawyers find it very hard to agree to anything.” – DONALD WESTLAKE

“99% of lawyers give the rest a bad name.” – STEVEN WRIGHT (The American – Bostonian – comedian and actor)

“The rule of law is being usurped by the rule of lawyers.” – CHARLES MOORE (31 October 2015)

“A barrister (lawyer) should never be 'steamed up'. One cannot see clearly through steam.” – JON CANTER

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

“There is no limit to what lawyers can do. They wage wars better than generals, know medicine better than doctors and interrogate terrorists better than the CIA. We do not have enemies, just defendants.” – ALEX ISIDORO (a perceptive citizen from Yardley PA., in March 2007)

"For most of us, thankfully, the cost of engaging a lawyer outweighs any potential gains from arseholery, so we simply don't bother. But if you are a lawyer already, that constraint does not apply: you can be an arsehole for free in your spare time." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

“Lawyers bring a certain cautiousness to the table. Working out the worst possible outcome is of course part of their job; but it does, quite unconsciously seep into their worldview. For lawyers in politics, the elimination of risk becomes the highest aim of government.” – ANDREW WATTS (contributor to the SPECTATOR)

“Lawyers can steal more money with a briefcase than a thousand men with guns and masks."-- MARIO PUZO (“Don Vito Corleone” in The Godfather)

“We are all honorable men here, we do not have to give each other assurances as if we were lawyers.” – MARIO PUZO (The Godfather)

“All lawyers are bad unless they’re your lawyer.” – ERIC HARLEY (one of the two “Red-Eye Radio guys – the one from Texas – on 14 Dec 2020)

“We have five percent of the world’s population and thirty percent of the world’s lawyers, none of them good for anything much but dealing with other lawyers, generating megafees that cumulatively function like a black hole at the center of the business world, sucking dollars into it, adding to the cost of every manufactured item from dental floss to hydraulic presses.” – JOHN UPDIKE

Laziness

“Like many lazy people, once I started working I could not stop; perhaps that is why we avoid it.” – CYRIL CONNOLLY

“And if, in being idle, I create nothing and leave nothing behind to remind others I was once here, is fine with me. After all, it was all written with Homer. How can one improve on a Rembrandt or outdo a Mozart? One can’t and therefore why beat yourself to death trying? It’s so much more pleasing, after all, to eat a delicious plate of pasta, drink a fine Bordeaux or contemplate a gorgeous view.” – SAMUEL M’CHEYNE GLASSER (my old Alpha Delta Phi fratty brother)

“Hard work pays off in the future; laziness pays off now.” – STEVEN WRIGHT

“I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because he will find an easy way to do it.” – BILL GATES

“Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.” – ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

“I used to deny that I was lazy, but now I can no longer be bothered.” – JACK JOLIS

"Laziness is the most undervalued and underappreciated of all the human 'vices'." — JACK JOLIS

“Man tends always to satisfy his needs with the least possible exertion,” -- ALFRED JAY NOCK (He called this "Epstean's Law", after a pal of his)

"The idea that you should work like a maniac until you are sixty-five and then take time off is crazy -- I'd much rather take time off along the way." -- PETER COOK (the great, self-described "indolent" English comic)

"But laziness can do a lot, too, in the way the Colorado River can carve the Grand Canyon if you give it time enough." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

Leadership

“It is very difficult to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look ridiculous on a horse.” – ADLAI STEVENSON (He was the egghead shnook ninny who lost twice to the clueless shnook ninny Ike back when I still wore short pants – and he was not, in my memory, a man of great yuks, unless you’re the kind of person that finds, say, the likes of Tom Lehrer funny. Still, this is sort of a neat quote – I had a dickens of a time figuring where to file it under….)

“Rudy (Giuliani) is a natural S.O.B., one of those rare, near-extinct politicians whose strong leadership abilities and personal behavior are completely unrelated and probably inimical.” – FLORENCE KING

“Natural leaders don’t have any will to power.” – GEOFFREY HOUSEHOLD

“Weakness is provocative. If you lead ass-backwards, you're going to get it kicked.” – MICHAEL LEDEEN (referring, needless to say, to Barack Obama....)

“First-rate people want first-rate colleagues; second-rate people want fifth-rate colleagues.” – EDWARD LOWINSKY (the famous 20th century German-American musicologist)

“Machiavelli asked if a leader should rather be loved or feared. It never occurred to him to include ‘laughed at’." -- ROBIN MASTERS (a commenter on NRO, and I simply cannot imagine who he was referring to....)

“Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help, or concluded you do no care. Either case is a failure of leadership.” – COLIN POWELL

“The greatest leadership is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things, he is the one who gets the people to do the greatest things.” -- RONALD REAGAN

“I've made a lifelong study of leadership and come to realize that success in politics requires sacrifice. Preferably by others, and sometimes of others, Hey ho.” -- MICHAEL DOBBS (The Conservative Brit politician and author of “House Of Cards”)

“There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.” -- ALEXANDRE LEDRU-ROLLIN (French revolutionary, uh, leader, in 1948)

"In politics when something works out just right for leader you can bet it was planned that way" – FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

"Only a kind of magical thinking can sustain the inordinate self-confidence that is the source of a great leader's appeal." -- MICHAEL KNOX BERAN

"None except those above him had ever taken him seriously." -- ALAN JUDD

"Leadership is about displacing boundaries." -- DANNY DE BELDER (an original take from my great Belgian pal)

“I might not be a team player. But I can be a team captain.” – BORIS JOHNSON

"Real leaders didn't explain." -- TOM WOLFE (I'm not sure if I'm entirely on board with this, but on the other hand, it's my man Tom Wolfe...so it goes in...)

“We have to have leaders who say: 'You what? We don't have to be perfect to be good & we just need to be better than all the alternatives'." -- VICTOR DAVIS HANSON (in March 2022)

“Leadership consists of becoming a person others are willing to follow, even when they know it may not be in their personal interest to do so.” – DUANE “DEWEY” CLARRIDGE (the high-ranking CIA guy)

Learning

“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.” – ARISTOTLE (I stared at this for a long time before coming to the conclusion that this is only early Aristotelian “on the job training.”)

“We more often need reminding than instructing.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

"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

"I am still learning." -- MICHELANGELO (When he was 87, working on St. Peter's Basilica)

"I don't believe in 'teachable moments'. I don't think anyone in the end really learns." -- CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER (Now that's what I call conservative with a small c. The good Dr. K had to have been the most sensible shrink who ever donned the uniform.)

Lebanon, (The)

“The Western World should support us, or change its name.” – MICHEL AOUN (The Christian Lebanese leader. Actually, an argument can be made that Lebanon is a European country. Certainly no less European than bloody Greece. Just like someone – I forget who {in a compendium of quotations? nevermind…} – once {correctly} called Israel “the heart of Europe”.)

“The Lebanese attitude is that their country may be totally screwed up, but at least their women are hot.” – ANDREW LEE BUTTERS (An American writer living in Beirut. 2006)

“Most of Lebanese pop music is an unremarkable combination of machine-generated drumming, tambourines, and synthesized shepherd pipes that sounds as if an ‘80s band like Bananarama were performing for Ali Baba and the 40 thieves.” – ANDREW LEE BUTTERS

“For years, Lebanon has been a make-believe nation existing on the charity, cynicism, or indifference of its neighbors who pretend to wish for a solution to the “problem” not of Lebanon, but of Israel. The U.N. has passed so many Leb-centric resolutions that the country resembles a new year more than a real country.” – DENIS BOYLES

(An American journalist living in Europe, in August 2006, author of “Vile France: Fear, Duplicity, Cowardice and Cheese”)

“Lebanon is less a country and more an ongoing argument that occasionally issues stamps.” – GIL GROSS (the ABC radio newsman, on the air 24 Nov. 07)

"Never get involved in a five-sided argument that's been going on for two thousand years." -- JAMES WEBB (the Marine, author & ex Senator, on TV in 1979, on not getting involved in Lebanon)

“Lebanon has become a kind of empty parable about endless violence, a morality play with no moral.” – MICAH MORRISSON (writing in the AMERICAN SPECTATOR)

"Beirut is a theme park for paranoiacs." -- STEVEN EMERSON (the American "investigative journalist")

“If anyone has experience running countries the Lebanese have – after all, they are running so many other countries around the world. But running their own country is their day job.” – PETER BIDDLECOMBE

“Lebanon is to money what the Suez Canal is to shipping.” – YOUSEF BEIDAS (once the head of Lebanon’s “Intra Bank”, one of the Middle East’s biggest....)

"Nothing very good ever seemed to happen in Lebanon." -- ROBERT TIMBERG (in his 1996 "The Nightingale's Song")

"No one who's spent any real time in Central or West Africa can be anti-Lebanese." -- JACK JOLIS

Left, (The), & Leftists

“The Left finds it very difficult to give up its power to stage-manage the lives of the people it is trying to help. Allowing people to do what they want causes them deep distress.” – CHARLES MURRAY (Of the famous “The Bell Curve”. Here, writing in April 2006)

“A profound love for humanity, but no time for humans: the very picture of the narcissist celebrity leftist.” – JOSHUA TREVINO (in July 2006, on his own eponymous blog, referring to the actress Ashley Judd.)

“In modern times, the Left has been wrong about everything important – with the one exception of Nazism. Wrong about Stalin, wrong about Mao and Castro, wrong to support North Vietnam and the Sandinistas and Milosevic, wrong, wrong, wrong. And now the Left comes out to say that Saddam Hussein should have been allowed to stay in power, and his overthrow is worse than a mistake, indeed a crime. The enthusiasm for dictators is really quite extraordinary, except that it is so absolutely ordinary.” – DAVID PRYCE-JONES (and Nazism was an aberration of…. The Left! The fight between “regular” socialists and the National Socialists was a gigantic family feud. Squire Pryce-Jones wrote this in Feb. 2006.)

“It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.” – CHARLES PEGUI (French poet, though decidedly NOT of the Left, in 1905)

“The best thing about Leftists everywhere is that when they win power, they suddenly find themselves in a rope glut. The stuff is everywhere. ‘Wow, look at all this rope!’ they say. Then they either hang their opponents, or they hang themselves.” – DENIS BOYLES (and American journalist living in Europe, in Feb. 2007. I appreciate the sentiment, but it doesn’t make much logical sense – when Leftists are in power, there’s a rope scarcity... along with everything else, of course....)

“The political left is religious emotion divorced from religious belief.” – CHRISTOPHER DAWSON (British historian, 1889-1970)

“Lapsed left-wingers, like lapsed Catholics, have a tendency for confessions and exegeses.” – ANTHONY BROWNE (ah, those “exegeses”, they’ll get you every time…. Browne, incidentally, is a celebrated illustrator of children’s books)

“Fashion dictates that all tyrants are good as long as they’re anti-West.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

"The trouble with the left has always been intolerance. Their way of thinking is based on how things should be. That is why all of them, both men and women, look so troubled and downright frustrated." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

“Teaching people to take offense is one of the Left’s black arts. Outside of sex and drugs, the Left is pretty much joyless and it kills joy constantly.” – DENNIS PRAGER (In NRO, 13 August 2013, in defending the Washington Redskins' name – now gone. Incidentally, the Redskins' name came from when they were the Boston Redskins, which they'd become after originally being the Boston Braves, but decided they wanted to differentiate themselves from the then-baseball Boston Braves. The baseball team has since moved to Atlanta by way of Milwaukee, and the football team went to Washington.)

“The Left does not value truth. It is a liberal and conservative value but not a Left value.” -- DENNIS PRAGER (Prager University, October 24 2020 on Fox News)

“If I have learned one thing from life, it is that race is the engine that drives the political Left. When all else fails, that segment of America goes to the default position of using race to achieve its objectives. In the courtrooms, on college campuses, and, most especially, in our politics, race is a central theme. Where it does not naturally rise to the surface, there are those who will manufacture and amplify it.” – WARD CONNERLY (the ½ black, ¼ white and ¼ Siberian-American anti-“affirmative action” hero.)

“The Left has taken what passes for their principles as an absolute religion. They don’t think anymore.” – NAT HENTOFF (the old VILLAGE VOICE jazz writer and belated ex-lefty, in 2009)

“All my life I have identified the left with idleness, greed, and treason." – PHILIP LARKIN (the great English poet—most famous for his “they fuck you up, your Mum and Dad” line -- and great pal of Kingsley Amis.)

“There is, in all radical causes, a kind of disgust with human nature.” – ROGER SCRUTON

"We're Going to Take Things Away From You on Behalf of the Common Good" – HILLARY CLINTON

"With the Left, it's not the nature of the evidence; It's the seriousness of the charge" – RUSH LIMBAUGH

"The Left understands where the real victories are won: Politics is battle, but culture is the war." -- MARK STEYN

“The left doesn't want to win the argument, it wants to cancel the argument.” – MARK STEYN

“The liberal left's arguments are very amenable to organizations, if antithetical to individuals.” – ROD LIDDLE

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

“Our sentimental, left-wing friends are not always compassionate. They know how to stick the knife in.” – SHIVA NAIPAUL (that’s putting mildly. From his 1985 essay “My Brother And I”)

“The left is part of American culture only in the same sense that a virus is part of the body it is attacking. Leftism is a child of the French Revolution and it is inimical to all the cultural elements that made America a success.” – J. P. MULHERN (A commenter on National Review Online's “The Corner”)

"There is only one political value that the Left has stood by through three generations, and that is the political value of disturbing your neighbor." -- R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR. (The "happy warrior" founding editor of the AMSPEC, of course. And, also of course, you can't try to "improve mankind" without disturbing, not only your neighbor, but everyone else as well. And their dogs...)

"My conclusion was that when any entity fell under the dominance of Liberalism it lost all sense of its fundamental purpose. A city lost all sense of its purpose, which is governance. A university lost all sense of its purpose, which is education. You name the entity, if it falls under the dominance of Liberalism it became utterly confused as to its goal. Now, under Liberalism’s more extreme evolutionary stage called progressivism or the left, progressivism or the left cannot even maintain a public toilet facility for men or for women. Going to the bathroom at a public comfort station today can be a source of embarrassment, even an actionable civil rights matter where the left is in charge;" -- R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR. (July 2017).

“Stupidity is a luxury and you will find time and time and time and again that those who are overwhelmingly on the left are those who can afford to be.” – EVAN SAYET (conservative commentor, who began as a liberal with Bill Maher, and this just proves what I've always said – that leftism is so unhinged from reality that it has to be considered a luxury.)

"A Leftist assumption: Making money doesn't entitle you to it, but wanting money does." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“Liberals are the aggressors in the culture war. In the minds of progressives you are free to live anyway you want so long as it's progressive. You have the right to have me pay for things you want, solely because you want them and progressives say you need them. Any institution that agrees with progressivism is free to stay clear of the State if it wants to. But any institution that desires to go a different way must be ground down and forced to conform. It is this act of resistance and not any explicit ideological commitment that renders dissident institutions 'right wing'. Indeed 'right wing' is often just a liberal word for 'non-compliant'." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“So many of the lovers of humanity in bulk have no feelings for persons.” – SAUL BELLOW

"The left just doesn't get America. I say this as a fellow-traveler of liberalism and as one who recognizes that many liberals fear the heartland. They see it as a dark place of primitive religions and too many guns. ... The left does not merely disagree with the right; it fears it."-- RICHARD COHEN (Cohen is Washington Post columnist, and more liberal than him you don't get. He wrote this on the WaPo website on Dec.6 2011. Anyway, I have two comments to his comment: 1/ "primitive religions"? Well, one of them is, that's for sure, wallahi billahi. And 2/ there is no "right" in America -- only an "anti-left".)

"All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible." – GEORGE ORWELL

"The mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.” -- GEORGE ORWELL (in his “The Road To Wigan Pier”, 1936)

"So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot." - GEORGE ORWELL

"It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy." -- GEORGE ORWELL

“It is an article of faith among the modern Left never to 'blame the victim', but when it comes to revolution, all bets are off.” – MICHAEL WALSH (the American thriller writer and political commenter)

“Like Satan, the Left must always have something to ‘fight,’ lest it be rendered impotent, because its driving force stems not from philosophy but emotion — hatred, resentment, envy, and malcontentment.” -- MICHAEL WALSH

“The modern left is nothing but a compilation of interest groups competing for, or to allocate, wealth that they don't produce.” – C. SPACKLER (A commenter to NRO)

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

"Today’s left relies on emotion, which can be manipulated far easier than the truth." — CARL GOTTLIEB (on X, 21 May 2024)

“In a noble effort to liberate the human race from violence and oppression we broke all records for mass slaughter, piling up tens of millions of corpses in less than three-quarters of a century. When the Asian figures are properly calculated, the aggregate to our credit may reach the seemingly incredible number of 100 million. Those who are big on multiculturalism might note that the great majority of our victims were nonwhite.” -- EUGENE GENOVESE (History professor at Rutgers,, and ex-Communist. He was big in the anti-Vietnam War movement when I was over there. He was a big pain in the ass then, but I’m happy to pronounce him alright now.)

“For the Left, Government is the water in which they swim, the underlying belief of their lives. Government is not merely one of the ways in which humanity may be convened to order its various affairs (the others being Religion and the Free Market), but the only way. Liberalism is that religion which has, for the Left, replaced Religion.” -- DAVID MAMET

“The struggle of the Left to rationalize its positions is an intolerable, Sisyphean burden. I speak as a reformed Liberal.” -- DAVID MAMET

“The Left worships power, because it feels that power can be used to Do Good, and Absolute Power, could it only be achieved, because it could eradicate evil. The record of all human history does not suffice to eradicate this delusion; neither will the threat of death nor of our country's dissolution.” -- DAVID MAMET

“One of the basic truths of politics is that the Left is far more oblivious to human suffering than the Right. The Left always speaks the language of compassion, but rarely means it. It favours ends over means.” -- PETER OBORNE (British journalist – sound on economic matters, but an anti-American squish when it comes to foreign policy – his is not an uncommon attitude amongst many English conservatives, who are not any more noticeably pro-American than their Labourites...)

“The Left's problem is that it has no limiting principle to its idealism. It may deny that it is utopian, and some liberals even recognize the folly of utopianism in the abstract. But those same liberals will not tell their idealistic cohorts to abandon utopianism. It is too useful in motivating those who do not so much think their way through politics as feel.” -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“The Left has never sufficiently grappled with the fact that they make the same policy prescriptions no matter what the alleged malady is.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"Lefties shout 'Violence never solves anything!' only when the good guys use violence." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"The most damning criticism of the left has boiled down to their approach to both politics and culture: 'You will be made to care.' About 25 years ago, the left decided that tolerance was no longer good enough. You had to celebrate whatever they celebrated and hate whatever they hated. 'If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem' is the single most totalitarian idea in wide circulation in American life.' -- JONAH GOLDBERG (4 Sept. '20)

“Once the Left starts on something, it won't stop. Because it cannot stop. The logic of its position always demands a totalitarian solution.” – MICHAEL WALSH (writing under what I think is his real name, DAVID KAHANE)

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

“The only endeavor that our friends on the Left do not deem to be the ‘moral equivalent of war’ is actual war.” – JIM GERAGHTY

“In the supposedly reality-based community, reality is a construction of intricately woven dung huts sheltering left-wing tropes as fact. ‘Memes’, as the kids these days call them, get started here. They are the thoughts that affect the presuppositions people make when weighing in on the news of the day.” – ERICK ERICKSON

“In my experience, the left can nearly always claim to have good intentions, but what it does nearly always has disastrous results.” – NIALL FERGUSON

“My own view is that left-wing positions largely come about from resentment – I agree with Nietzsche about this – a resentment about the surrounding social order. They have privileges, I don’t. Or, I have them and I can’t live up to them. Things should be organized differently. And there’s always some sense on the left that power is in the wrong hands.’ –R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR.

"The left has developed an irrational fear of the Russians, about whom they are positively obsessive. I am not sure why this is. Perhaps it is because today the Russians are no longer communists, and the erstwhile Liberals had long admired certain aspects of the communist system. As I recall, they admired the Marxist-Leninist tax code, and its attendant slow-growth economy." -- R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR.

“The Left does parties better than the right, because they are both more creative and the people more psychopathically fractious.” – ROD LIDDLE

“The lies lefties tell you aren't half as ridiculous as the lies they tell each other.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

“The Left in its American expression is very little more than infantile spoon-banging organized into voting blocs.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“The Left believes in effectively unlimited state power, (and) it is difficult to reconcile a taste for unfettered state power with a belief that those entrusted with that unfettered power are violent and psychopathic white supremacists." – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“I do not much blame the Left for hesitating to talk about Big Ideas. The Left has been losing the Big Idea debate for a generation or more, in no small part because its last Big Idea killed 100 million people, give or take.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"Tolerance and accommodation are not sufficient for the culture warriors of the Left. What's demanded instead is positive affirmation, which is why culture war is war instead of conversation." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“The Left corrupts every institution it touches: the news media, the educational and academic institutions, the cultural institutions, professional organizations, government bureaucracies, everything from National Geographic to the English department at the University of Texas. This is not a case of 'both sides do it'.If you want to understand why Americans have so little faith in institutions that were once granite pillars of respectability, you must understand the Left’s co-opting of them.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

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

“Hope is not a plan, except to leftists, where it’s usually just about the only plan, everything else being mean-spirited and uncompassionate.” – MICHAEL WALSH

“The well is bottomless to bottom feeders and there is no bottom feeder that can surpass Leftism.” – PAUL KOTIK

“The progressive left, having won the culture war, has unconsciously taken on many of the least attractive aspects of its Christian opponents. The left has always had a puritan streak, but what is fairly new is the extent to which it has abandoned libertarianism, leaving the right to take up the cudgels on behalf of free speech and other individual rights.” – TOBY YOUNG

“How much longer can the liberal left survive in the face of growing scientific evidence that many of its core beliefs are false?” – TOBY YOUNG (Here in Jan. 2016 referring specifically to the myth of the “Noble Savage”)

“The biggest lie lefties tell themselves is that they're against conformity.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

“The hysterical and intolerant arm of the modern left does not have much time for sex, per se; that is simply another means by which powerful men suppress and exploit vulnerable women, and all forms of contact between the two sexes should therefore be rigorously policed, with strict regulations as to how and when and where one might make an advance to a woman, with transgressors punished.” – ROD LIDDLE

“There are no normal people at all in this online leftist activism: normal people are all at work or down the pub. It is a tiny fraction of the population – I’d say much less than 0.5 per cent – and they are all psychotically furious about everything and think that your are scum. And they are winning.” – ROD LIDDLE

“The language of the left is a truly transformative grammar. There are words which, when uttered by a leftie, lose all sense of themselves – such as 'diverse' and 'vibrant' and 'racist'. It is not simply that these words can mean different things to different people – it is that when the left uses them they are at best a euphemism and at worst a downright lie.” – ROD LIDDLE

“The Left's whole political edifice is built upon a perpetually shifting succession of imaginative falsehoods.” – ROD LIDDLE

“The left believes nobody should be imprisoned for anything unless they are racist, have committed a crime against a woman, or are well off. In those cases, throw the book at them.” – ROD LIDDLE (9 October 2021)

“Nothing will ever stop the screaming from the left.” – ROD LIDDLE (31 October 2020)

"All top-down attempts at leftie social engineering end up causing more misery and injustice than the misery and injustice they were designed to alleviate. This is chiefly because they come up against that most un-leftie of things, reality -- but also because liberals are incapable of looking at actual outcomes and are able only to wring their hands to despair and wish for stuff. The world is not an ideal place and attempts to pretend they can make it so are always misbegotten." -- ROD LIDDLE

“Modern leftists seem still to believe that they are all Hunter S. Thompson – open-minded and rebellious outsiders who look on with disdain from the fringes of society. In fact, in their old age, they’re the old guy down the street, the guy who won’t stop telling you about the glory days 40 years ago – and who won’t give you your ball back either, lest you hurt yourself with it.” – CHARLES C.W. COOKE (The English-born NATIONAL REVIEW writer and editor.)

“The Left – always wrong but never in doubt.” – JUAN RAMIREZ (An American Cuban exile, on the Twoot, March ’14)

"Socialism —> Literally censoring platforms that you already own and control because you are the government. Fascism —> inducing or encouraging private companies to do it for you, often with implicit promises of rewards or threats of punishment." -- KEN GARDNER (A Twoot-philosopher from Texas, in September 2022)

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

"If you want to know what the left is up to, just look at what they are accusing us of."– NEWT GINGRICH

"The Left should defend and rejoice over World War I. It was the fulfillment of their dreams. No single event has done more to advance the power of the state and of state socialism. Britain barely had a state before 1914. By 1918 it was one of the most tightly governed and bureaucratized patches of soil in the world. The Russian revolution would never have happened had there been no war in 1914. The great Christian and conservative empires of the world would probably all still exist. War also brought about the sexual, social, and cultural revolutions that are still convulsing what used to be Christendom." -- PETER HITCHENS

«The most dangerous people are always those with no sense of humor. Without exception they are nasty, agressive and stupid. Not geniuses by any stretch of the imagination. Not many laughs in the Kremlin. Not many in the Theater Workshop.» -- ROGER LEWIS (The author of, among other stuff, a Peter Sellers biography.)

“What I resent most of all about the Left is that they exploit American decency.” – DINESH D’SOUZA

«We live in a time when honours and praise go only to people on the left, essentially because they seem harmless. And what makes them seem harmless is precisely that they're uttering all the things that have caused so much harm.» – ROGER SCRUTON (in April 2015)

«I think it's quite ironic how the left is basically the new religious right.» – AMINA WASHINGTON

“The Left is the Left, noisy, threatening, and palpably undemocratic. These people would have us in camps in a heartbeat, trust me.” – JAY NORDLINGER

“To understand the left you need to remember that it does not care about 99 percent of the things it claims to care about. The left fights all sorts of social and political battles not because it believes in them, but to radicalize, disrupt and take power. It is an activist machine dedicated to destroy common ground, not only with the right, but even with its own allies on the left. Progress turns what was once progressive into what is reactionary. And what was reactionary into what is progressive…the left will destroy the things you care about, because you care about them. It will destroy them because that gives them power over you.” – DANIEL GREENBERG (blogger, in July 2015)

“The Left spends a lot of your money not solving problems it created in the first place.” – JACK JOLIS

"Leftism is an extravagant, ruinous moral conceit that only the decadent rich can indulge -- and whose baleful economic and social effects only the filthy rich can survive." -- JACK JOLIS

"Leftism is a pathology of human nature comprised of equal parts of : envy, wishful thinking and bossiness." -- JACK JOLIS

"The Left, based as it is on wishful thinking rather than reality, quite rightly regards the truth as its enemy." -- JACK JOLIS

"It's impossible to observe (much less experience) the 'fruits' of Leftism and honestly remain a Leftist." -- JACK JOLIS

"Things have evolved, over on the Left -- it's abandoned 'The Means of Production' in favor of 'The Means Of Inducement'." -- JACK JOLIS (in Feb. 2022)

"Leftism is a full-frontal assault on Human Nature. This is why it can't be implemented without repression... (repression at the very least)." -- JACK JOLIS

“For many on the left, the Constitution is a hoary holdover, a ghoul-white hand of the past clamped over the brave mouth of enlightenment.” – JAMES LILEKS

"One can see what is wrong with the left-wing movement by the ugliness of its women" – ARTHUR KOESTLER (The author of "Darkness At Noon", a famous womanizer – Among others, he shtupped his friend Orwell's wife – In fact, he wrote this in a 1944 letter to his friend George Orwell.)

“All leftist political parties are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy.” – GEORGE ORWELL (Not sure how true this is, but it’s my dad’s old pal Orwell, so I’ll include it here.)

“Leftists are wired always to prioritize emotion over empiricism, to do the wrong thing because it feels right.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

“An evil man will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over the ashes.” -- SUN TZU (I don't like quoting Sun Tzu, if he even ever existed, too much -- but this one pretty well describes the Democrat Left in America in the 21st century....)

"Leftists don't talk, they bark." -- JOSY PENA-ALCANTARA (a pro-American French lady who’s tried to avoid politics but has been provoked by the Left)

“The goal of the left is to make reality negotiable.” – NICK SHORT (author of the “Politically Short” blog)

“After decades of considering the question, I have concluded the answer is this: standards. The left hates standards – moral standards, artistic standards, cultural standards. The West is built on all three, and it has excelled in all three. So the big question is why? Why is the left hostile toward Western civilization?” – DENNIS PRAGER

“It is necessary to understand the indispensable role hysteria plays on the left.” – DENNIS PRAGER

"Knowledge of evil inevitably leads directly to rejection of the Left." -- DENNIS PRAGER

“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

“If you lived under socialists, you'd hate them too. They make everyone poor. Everyone who comes from a Communist country, Russians, Eastern Europeans, even Latinos from Cuba, feel this way. When you know what will happen, when you see it – you're Republican.” – FARIDA LAZAREVA (The 57-year old refugee lady from Russia who lives in a neighboring apartment in the same building in the Midwood section of Brooklyn to Bernie Sanders)

“The ideological Left has long since abandoned the class struggle as a major part of its psyche, preferring to fight battles over culture and identity politics instead.” – LUKE THOMPSON (head of something called the “Applecart Political Consultancy”, in September 2016)

"Leftism is first and foremost a denial of reality.” – DENNIS PRAGER

“Avoidance of pain is the central psychological impetus of leftism. This explains the infantilizing ‘safe rooms at the institutions the Left most controls — the universities. Leftists deny reality for two reasons. One is that leftism is a religion (a secular one), and therefore it has dogmas that supersede truth. The other reason is that reality is filled with disappointment and pain, and avoidance of pain is the central psychological impetus of leftism." -- DENNIS PRAGER

"The Left doesn’t fight evil; it fights those who do." -- DENNIS PRAGER

“For the Left the purity of their ideology matters far more than anyone else's liberty or prosperity.” – MICHAEL GOVE

“The key, the absolute key, is that the left is always looking for a reason why the government has to control you.” – BEN STEIN

“The lefties are ghastly, so many of them, because, like Rousseau, they believe in the perfectibility of man, and are peeved when life, with its much and nettles, disappoints them. Possessed by a sense of virtue they deny to others, it is no surprise that so many become humourless prigs.” – MICHAEL HENDERSON (English journalist and sportscaster, in February 2017)

«If you are not being shocked, offended or insulted, you are not living in a free society. And if you are okay with that, you are either a fascist or a slave. (And everyday it becomes clearer and clearer that too many on the Left choose to be both.)” – JOHN NOLTE

“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)

“Anytime you betray America, you can count on the support and backing from the American left.” – CHRIS PLANTE (on WMALDC on 6 June 2017)

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

"Leftists: they're not happy -- unless they're unhappy." -- CHRIS PLANTE (on his syndicated radio prograp, 5 April 2024)

"In a culture where humorless leftist scolds seek to impose their rule upon us normals by sucking every drop of joy out of life, it is the conservative smarts who is the true subversive." -- KURT SCHLICHTER

"Leftism is about making excuses that are designed to justify taking what is yours." -- KURT SCHLICHTER

"Leftism is a lie bought by fools and told by creeps." -- KURT SCHLICHTER (24 Dec 2022)

"Leftism is a way for failed daughters to try and punish their parents." -- KURT SCHLICHTER (13 October 2020)

"A liberal is a socialist with a guilty conscience

A social-democrat is a socialist wet dream

A progressive is a socialist pig in lipstick

A communist is a socialist in a hurry

A national socialist is a snob socialist dressed by Hugo Boss

A fascist is a post-socialist socialist" -- JACK JOLIS

"For the Left, history is optional." -- JACK JOLIS

"The most important thing to know about the Left: 'It' is never about what 'it' is supposedly about. Leftism is the Politics Of The Ulterior Motive." -- JACK JOLIS

"Communism, like Leftism generally, is the Politics of the Ulterior Motive." -- JACK JOLIS

"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

"The Left proclaims a great devotion to 'humanity' collectively, but because its program depends on changing human nature and human nature is intrinsically immutable -- disappointment and recrimination inevitably follow." -- JACK JOLIS

"Leftism is a pathology of human nature made up of a toxic mix of Envy, Wishful Thinking and Ruthless Bossiness." -- JACK JOLIS

"Nothing amazes, surprises, shocks, 'disappoints' or even angers me about the Left. The Left is what it is; it will never change and it will always be among us, attacking us, trying to change our nature -- and thus must be fought. Always. Forever. That's the real endless war'." --JACK JOLIS

"Leftists are unhappy people. They think that making others as unhappy as they are will make them happy, but in that -- as in everything else -- they are sadly mistaken. So they die as they live -- unhappy." -- JACK JOLIS

"Nobody ever 'thinks' their way into Communism (or any of its Leftist variations) -- they invariably emote themselves to it." -- JACK JOLIS

"The Left isn't here to debate -- the Left is here to rule." -- JACK JOLIS

"Might it be that the Left's respect for women ends at the lapel pin, the pussy-hat march, and the awards podium?" -- KYLE SMITH

"The oldest mystery about the Left is how it continues to be a formidable force when everything it has ever tried has been a catastrophe, often a homicidal one." -- LOU AGUILAR (and the mystery is only explicable in the context of Lefitsm being a pathology of human nature. Lou is a Cuban-American columnist.)

"Lincoln Steffens, the twentieth century's preeminent muckraker, classed the Left (in descending order of power) into Reds (anarchists and Marxists), Pinks (intellectuals), and goo-goos (those whom Lenin tagged 'useful idiots'). My own ordering has long been, bottom to top, fools, wicked fools, and savages." -- DAVID MAMET

"The Left blacklists, cancels, and indicts contrary opinion not in opposition to dissent, but to dissuade from mutiny -- that is, to behavior that threatens the existence of the group. The Left identifies the group as Humanity; but finally it is just the Left." -- DAVID MAMET

"Communism wherever it was instituted matured into savagery.

Leftist America is following Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, and Cuba into slavery.

Is it God's plan that mankind must revert (individually or in groups) to savagery?" -- DAVID MAMET (in 2022)

"The Left, which has long held that facts were 'cheating', has now come to deny that they, in fact, exist." -- DAVID MAMET

«Just like the terrorists in the Middle East surround their hideout with women and children so if you bomb the hideout you kill these innocent people, the 'social justice warrior'-types do the same thing. They find a hypothetically vulnerable group, and they use them as a protective shield while they move incrementally forward. If you object, suddenly you're picking on the poor, vulnerable people.» – JORDAN PETERSON

“As far as racism goes, the modern Loony Left seem to forget that Hitler was Left wing." -- MORRISSEY (the ex-lead singer of The Smiths, real name Stephen Patrick Morrissey. And a rare pop singer who gets it.)

"Leftists always lie. They love war when it achieves its agenda. When their allies are about to get their snot knocked out they oppose it. The idea the Left loves peace is laughable." -- JOHN ROSSOMANDO

"Language is the Leftist battlefield." -- JOHN ROSSOMANDO

"Communism, Socialism, Social Democracy, nationalization, central planning and progressive social engineering -- what begins with centralized planning ends with centralized killing." -- TONY JUDT (the English historian in his "POSTWAR: A History Of Europe Since 1945", and a guy with a reputation as a Leftist -- so good for him)

"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him." -- ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

"The left reacts to the American flag the same way a vampire does to garlic." -- KEVIN SORBO (the actor)

"Leftists are malcontents who exist to torment everyone, including themselves." -- CHRISTIAN CAMARA (a "lobbyist", on the twoot)

"Many lefties are afflicted by a streak of misanthropy which they hope the revolution will cure. On the contrary, the revolution merely enlarges the scope for misanthropy to express itself." -- LLOYD EVANS

"I live here in a world of fantasies and I cannot tolerate the world as it is." -- JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU (the godfather of the Left)

“What socialism, fascism and other ideologies of the left have in common is an assumption that some very wise people—like themselves—need to take decisions out of the hands of lesser people, like the rest of us, and impose those decisions by government fiat.” – THOMAS SOWELL

"Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good." -- THOMAS SOWELL

"The American Left has now completely and utterly cut itself off from outside audit. There can be no dissent from their worldview." -- THOMAS SOWELL (in 1996... so how much truer is this today...)

"Many on the political left are so entranced by the beauty of their vision that they cannot see the ugly reality they are creating in the real world." -- THOMAS SOWELL

“Life, for the Left, is the battlefield.” – RUSH LIMBAUGH

"The Left is saying to America 'We are so morally superior to you that we can and must employ any means necessary to achieve our unpopular political ends. But you cannot respond in kind or deter us by mimicking our own tactics, because should both parties do so, the resulting disorder would undermine the republic. And that is something you won’t dare do'.” --VICTOR DAVIS HANSON (April 2023)

"Patriotism is not a popular sentiment on the contemporary left." -- MICHAEL KAZIN (The Leftist historian, in "Dissent" magazine, in 2019)

"The Left has always hated America, though they never had the numbers within their ranks to outwardly express their disdain. Now, with the progressive Left culturally ascendant and the ‘woke’ masses graduating colleges and taking their left-wing cancer into the workplaces of their respective careers, they have a motivated, passionate, and absolutely insane mob that’s begun a campaign against this nation’s history." -- MATT VESPA (The editor of TOWNHALL)

"I just think, ah, COVID is God's gift to the Left." -- JANE FONDA (7 October 2020)

“Race – which the Left simultaneously instructs us both does and does not exist and explains everything.” – LIONEL SHRIVER (12 Dec. 2020)

"This class struggle plays hell with your poetry.” -- JOHN REED (the first of three Americans buried in the Kremlin Wall -- the other two being Bill Haywood, "a labor organizer" and Charles Ruthenburg, the founder of Communist Party USA)

“The crimes of the left always go unpunished.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY

“Whatever the left says, their instincts always make them behave otherwise. The cannot help themselves.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY

"Leftism is a religion of self-loathing. It teaches white people to hate their race, boys to hate their sex, women to hate their femininity, Americans to hate their country, Westerners to hate their history. What a contemptible, toxic thing it is." -- MATT WALSH (American authr and columnist for "The Daily Wire")

"The left is such an odd place." -- OMRI CEREN (The National Security advisor for Sen. Ted Cruz, in Nov. '21)

"The Left, bent on the total transformation of America into a progressive utopia, uses every corrupt thing it can muster to aid its cause, from Soviet-style show trials to Pravda-like propaganda to threats, intimidation, doxxing, and mob rule." -- ANN COULTER (on 17 Nov 2021)

"The left doesn't have foreign enemies, the left has political enemies." -- DAN BONGINO (4 March 2022)

"The Left never wants to admit what it's doing -- but it loves doing it." -- JOE DiGENOVA

"The Left eats its own, but not fast enough." -- MICHAEL RECTENWALD (the one-time Libertarian Party candidate for president. As a rule, I don't like Libertarians, but this I like.)

"Leftists preach the doctrine of diversity and inclusion and are always on the hunt for heretics." -- GAVIN MORTIMER (A British author of military and sports non-fiction books)

"The Left uses incompetent, corrupt government to demonize faith, culture, and community. Then, when the inevitable catastrophes ensue, demands more power for government to fill the manufactured void. We mourn, but we won’t pretend we don’t know what’s afoot." -- ANDREW C. MCCARTHY (After the Uvalde Massacre, in May 2022)

"The Left: Sociopaths looking for alliances with psychopaths." -- ROY CAMERON

"Every time you listen to the left, you're screwed: I am a liberal, but I am not a leftist. There's a difference." -- JAMES CARVILLE (in June 2024, and I'm sorry James, there isn't. And there hasn't been for quite a long time, now...)

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

"Before socialism and communism take over almost any place, they dumb down the population." -- DR. BEN CARSON

Left-Right

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

“Conservatives think liberals have bad ideas, while liberals think conservatives are evil.” -- HARRY STEIN (author of “I Can’t Believe I’m Sitting Next To A Republican”)

“Liberals wish America had a people worthy of their government, while conservatives wish America had a government worthy of its people.” – FRED SCHWARZ

“Socialists may scheme their schemes. Liberals may dream their dreams. But we Conservatives have work to do.” – IAN MACLEOD (the ex-UK Chancellor of the Exchequer and ex-Editor of the UK SPECTATOR)

“It may be that conservatives are better arguers, but liberals are better artists.” – SAM GUZMAN (of the Christian Science Monitor)

“Sunny smile versus furrowed brow; gay abandon versus conscientious dutifulness; Mr. Pleasure versus Miss Do-gooder; in short, Cavalier versus Roundhead – has always been the great divide. Although the Cavalier has the sunny smile and the gay abandon, and the instinct for fun and pleasure, he is at the same time the pessimist who believes in original sin, in unregenerate man and in the impossibility of progress; while the Roundhead, who has the furrowed brow, the conscientious dutifulness and the antipathy to fun and pleasure, is also at the same time, maddeningly enough – considering the number of his grievances – the optimist who believes in the regeneration of man, the perfectibility of human nature and the possibility of progress. Which type is most likely to have the widest general appeal; to accord most with the experiences of the ordinary man in the street? The Cavalier, who, because he does not have a mission to change human nature or to facilitate progress or to create Utopia, is much less likely to muck anyone around and much more likely to let everyone go to Hell in their own way than are the Puritans, who most certainly do dream of creating a land fit for saints to live in, from which you and I, unless we pull up our socks, will quite certainly be excluded.” – PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE (The late English doyen of conservatism, writing here in 1999. And this, admittedly long, quote is tantamount to being a short course in political “science” – and, incidentally, a pretty good explanation of why the “right”, i.e., the anti-left, is instinctively more genuinely popular than the left. Also, being a good conservative, he’s one of the last – along with me – who uses “gay” in the correct sense.)

“The Democrats are a political party in the classic sense, a coalition of disparate interests that unite to scratch each other’s backs and pick everyone else’s pockets. But granting special favors to specific groups is contrary to conservatives’ core beliefs.” – FRED SCHWARZ (Fred was an Australian medical doctor who became an anti-communist, founded the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, and moved to California. He died in 2009.)

“The Left holds an unconstrained vision: Given the right political and economic arrangements, human beings can be improved, even perfected. Success is defined by what people have the potential of becoming, not by people as they are. The Right holds a constrained vision: People come to society with innate characteristics that cannot be reshaped and must instead be accommodated. Success in political and economic policy must be defined in light of those innate characteristics.” – CHARLES MURRAY

(he of the famous “Bell Curve”. What he’s saying here, is – in a nutshell – “deal with people as they are, as best you can.”)

“I am not a fascist nor will I become one unless it were the only alternative to Marxism. It is mischievous to suggest that such a choice is imminent. As an Englishman I am not in the predicament of choosing between the two evils.” – EVELYN WAUGH (In 1936.)

“You always hear that you’re supposed to start out liberal, then become conservative at some point. My view is, you should start out conservative, then get more conservative over time.” – M. STANTON EVANS

"The right took over the anti-establishment position, they took over jokes and dirty speech, and the left withdrew into this purist, fanatical morality." -- SLAVOJ ZIZEK (Squire Žižek is a Slovenian Marxist philosopher, and I wish all Marxist "philosophers" were as perceptive as he is.)

“A liberal would stand on picket lines to extort higher wages from employers. A conservative would help them find a better job.” – JANIE JOHNSON (an important présence on the Twoot)

“Conservatives are natural pessimists, based on a realism about fallible human nature that fuels our opposition to the coercive utopianism of the Left.” – STEVEN F. HAYWARD

"The vice of capitalism is that there is an unequal share of the blessings; the virtue of socialism is that there is an equal share of the misery." -- WINSTON CHURCHILL

“We live at a time when it has been truly said that the Right has won politically but the Left has won culturally; Orwell would have preferred it the other way around.” – GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT

“Liberals in fact enjoy the complexity (of government), not only because they love government--love to obsess on it, and think it is the last best hope of man on Earth--but because complexity justifies big government. Big complex question. Big complex response. Laws and rumors of laws. Conservatives don't live for government and don't love it, either. They like other things. They think government is a necessity and a potential evil. This is because they know human nature, and they know humans run governments. Ergo extremely flawed and even damaged people are governing us. Ergo don't give them a big sandbox to play in; keep it as small as possible. That way their depredations will be, by definition, limited.” – PEGGY NOONAN

“Liberals go to therapy. Conservatives go to church.” – ANN COULTER

"Leftish people are always glum because things are never quite as perfect as they wish them. Rightish people have more fun." -- LIONEL TRILLING (the American literature-wallah, 1905-1975)

“The great political asymmetry of our time is: liberals see no enemies to the left, conservatives no friends to the right.” – TOM BETHELL

“The reason so many go from left to right is the realization that the Right is, well, right.” – ANTHONY BROWNE

“The Left’s great triumph has been to remain credible after adopting policies that it had demonized; the Right’s failure has been to win the arguments but lose the debate.” – ANTHONY BROWNE

"Conservatives have the advantage over the Left by being unembarrassed by history." -- CHARLES MOORE (Columnist for the {UK} DAILY TELEGRAPH and ex-Editor of the {UK} SPECTATOR, 22 March 2008)

“The conservative approach to life holds that there is 'a time and a place for everything'. The left thinks it is always the time and always the place.” – CHARLES MOORE

"Parents tend to be more upset by children moving to their right than to their left. This is because non-conservative politics is pseudo-religious.” -- CHARLES MOORE

"The Right believes in biology, but not in evolution; the Left believes in evolution, but not in biology." -- STEVE SAILER

“The thing I like best about being a conservative is that I don’t have to lie. I don’t have to pretend that men and women are the same. I don’t have to declare that failed or oppressive cultures are as good as mine. Leftism has outlived its own failure by hiding itself within the most labyrinthine construct of social delicacy since Victoria was queen” – ANDREW KLAVAN (American – Hollywood! -- novelist and screenwriter)

“I was a liberal once. I knew that liberal policy was wrong — but I also knew that conservatives were evil. Racist, sexist, uncaring, one step from Nazis. This was a religious truth to me. Well, of course it was. All leftists are taught this. That’s how the left keeps you in the fold despite the evidence of your own eyes. Leftists do to their followers what the townspeople did to Jim Carrey’s character in that movie The Truman Show. They teach them to fear and hate the unknown so much that they won’t test alternative ideas no matter how bad things get. ‘Life in Liberal World may be a mess, Truman,’ they tell you, ‘but oh the horrors that wait for you out there in Conservative Land!’ ” – ANDREW KLAVAN (in 2013)

“Desolate wide open spaces full of biting things and stinging things always seem to push people toward the reflexive and unforgiving political right; cities, by contrast, tilt towards the left.” – ROD LIDDLE

“Your history will always come back to haunt you, but only if you are on the right. If you are on the left, it won't matter at all.” – ROD LIDDLE

“There was a study, a couple of years back. It reckoned that conservatives use nouns more than liberals do. I have no idea what the hidden implication of that is.” – ROD LIDDLE (On 25 May 2019)

"At times of existential crisis, the voting public tends to tilt quite sharply to the right, understanding perhaps that the right deals in outcomes rather than wishful thinking." -- ROD LIDDLE

“From the dawn of the Progressive Era through the 1930s, the intellectual and ideological landscape was fractured within this larger (Marxist) camp. The fight between left and right was for the most part between left-wing and right-wing socialists. But virtually all camps subscribed to some hybridized version of Marxism, some bastardization of the rousseauian dream of a society governed by a general will.” – JONAH GOLDBERG (I believe the correct adjective is rousseauvian.)

“The first task of any fascist reformation is to discredit the authority of the past, and this was the top priority of the New Left.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“Liberals are the aggressors in the culture war. In the minds of progressives you are free to live anyway you want so long as it's progressive. You have the right to have me pay for things you want, solely because you want them and progressives say you need them. Any institution that agrees with progressivism is free to stay clear of the State if it wants to. But any institution that desires to go a different way must be ground down and forced to conform. It is this act of resistance and not any explicit ideological commitment that renders dissident institutions ‘right wing’. Indeed ‘right wing’ is often just a liberal word for ‘non-compliant’." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“As a gross generalization, libertarianism advocates freedom to do whatever you like (short of harming others). Liberalism supports freedom to do whatever liberals like; everything else is suspect.Libertarianism is about curbing state power to let people be and do what they want. Liberalism is about using state power to make people do and be what liberals want. And that makes all the difference in the world.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“But history tends to leave the conservatives with the worst jobs. It is the Left’s role to wheel the economy into the casualty unit, while conservative governments need to pull on their surgical gloves and operate.” – FRASER NELSON

“Republicans generally see politics as an unnatural vocation. The forced outrage, the mock piety, the pursuit of consensus, and the outsized need to take account of people’s feelings: It’s all a bit too fake for people from the world of business, finance, or the military. But for many liberals, politics (like the fields of education, journalism, and, most of all, acting) is an authentic calling. They don’t see acting as dishonest; they see it as inspiring. They don’t see acting as dishonest; they see it as inspiring. They don’t feel quite so dirty pretending to be outraged. They know their lines – and want to read them. I think this shortcoming generally speaks well of Republicans as people, but in politicians it can be infuriating.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“But the reality is that almost every ‘socially liberal, fiscally conservative’ politician turns out to be fiscally liberal – in the same way that, if you mix half a pint of vanilla ice cream with half a pint of horse manure, it’s not hard to figure which taste will predominate.” -- MARK STEYN

"Democrats are in power. Republicans are in office."– MARK STEYN

"One of the differences between the left and right is that the right is forever looking for another towel to throw in"– MARK STEYN

“You can't have conservative government in a liberal culture, and that's the position the Republican party is in. Liberals expend tremendous effort changing the culture. Conservatives expend tremendous effort changing elected officials every other November – and then are surprised that it doesn't make much difference. Culture trumps politics. Liberals understand that it's the 729 days in between elections that you win all the prizes that matter, on all the ground conservatives have largely abandoned.” – MARK STEYN

“The Right is always going to win the intellectual argument; the Left is always going to win the emotional one.” – RUSH LIMBAUGH

“We are for the ladder. Let all try their best to climb. They are for the queue. Let each wait his place until his turn comes. If it comes.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

“The Left is always looking for traitors, while the Right is always looking for converts.” – FRASER NELSON (The Editor of the {UK} SPECTATOR)

“Liberals are political creatures who have the luxury of laying much of the time in a world of their own dreams. They are cushioned and abetted by friends, colleagues, the media – the zeitgeist. If things go wrong, it wasn’t their fault. Conservatives, on the other hand, are harried with daily reminders that their ‘cherished’ free market system has so far failed to create one or another supposed ideal, (equality, say).” – TOM BETHELL

“In liberals' ideal world, everyone lives in abject poverty and stands in long lines, but we all live in the same abject poverty and stand in the same long lines -- just like in their beloved Soviet Union of recent memory! (Except the commissars, who get excellent health care, food, housing, maid service and no lines.)” – ANN COULTER

“Today it is the Right that speaks a language of commonalities. To be on the Left, meanwhile, is to doubt that one can speak of humanity at all.” – TODD GITLIN (the “sociologist”, in April 2010)

“Democrats say government can make you taller, smarter, and get the chickweed out of your lawn. Republicans say that government doesn’t work, then get elected and prove it.” – P.J. O’ROURKE

"To paraphrase Tom Wolfe, it seems that the long dark night of hatred and intolerance is forever descending on the right, but somehow keeps landing on the left." -- BRANT HADAWAY (A commenter to National Public Radio concerning the scandal over an NPR producerette called Sarah Spitz who said she fantasized about watching Rush Limbaugh die a slow and painful death, and the actual quote from Tom Wolfethat Mr. or Mrs. Hadaway was paraphrasing is "Fascism is forever descending on America, but it always seems to land in Europe.")

"Utopia is a liberal temptation; conservatism is comfortable with the good enough." -- BRET STEVENS

“Liberalism permits Western civilization to be reconciled to its dissolution.” -- JAMES BURNHAM (Burnham was an ex-Trotskyite who helped Bill Fabuckley found NATIONAL REVIEW back in '55. He was also a supporter of Rhodesia to the end, famously saying in its defense, "When you've no longer got any options, you've no longer got a problem.")

"Whereas conservatism is fundamentally a temperament to delight in reality, liberalism is an anxiety about reality." -- R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR. (of course, the "Fabuckley" of the AMSPEC)

“To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.” – CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER (Krauthammer’s Law)

“Democratic leaders in Washington are in a worse position than Republican leaders in Washington. Neither likes their base, really, and both think they are smarter. But the Democrats think, deep down, that their base is barking mad. The Republicans don't. They just think their base is a bore.” – PEGGY NOONAN (Noonan’s Corollary to Krauthammer’s Law)

“Conservatives want freedom from coercion, liberals want freedom through coercion.” – JAMES TARANTO

“Conservatives really like work. Liberals really like 'jobs'.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“The Right doesn't take politics as seriously as the Left. For the Left, politics is life. For the Right politics is a hobby at worst and a call to service at best.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“The Right and the Left, I saw, differ not about programs, but about goals – the goal of the Left is a Government-run country and that of the Right the freedom of the individual from Government. These goals are difficult to reconcile, as the Left cannot be brought either to actually state its intentions, nor to honestly evaluate the results of his actions.” – DAVID MAMET

“The Left's hatred or the Right is based, as is most hatred, upon fear. The Left truly does not understand what the Right means – the principles of Conservatism are not merely foreign, and not even, primarily, objectionable, to the Left. They are incomprehensible, and so inspire the fear of the unknown. This fear is expressed as hatred of evil. What is the Conservative position the Left is absolutely incapable of understanding? That we have a choice.” – DAVID MAMET

“The Left thinks the Right (America) is ruining the world. The Right thinks the Left is ruining the country. I endorse the latter view.” – DAVID MAMET

“My son asked me to explain the difference between a Conservative and a Liberal. I went on at some length. He thought for a while and said, 'Then, basically, it's the difference between the Heavenly Dream and the God-Awful Reality.” – DAVID MAMET (...and I'm not so sure how “heavenly” the dream is, either.... Equality? Just imagine for a second if everyone actually was completely “equal” – fucking nightmare would be a more apt description...)

“Conservatives really like work. Liberals really like ‘jobs.’ That's a subtle distinction for some, but I think it's a major cultural and sociological divide. Conservatives don't see too much nobility in poverty (though they don't necessarily see shame in it either). Liberals treat poverty like it is a sacrament of some kind. Conservatives emphasize habits of the heart. Liberals emphasize material conditions. Liberals exalt labor unions, whose purpose is to maximize the number of jobs offered but curtail as much as possible the amount of work required to get a paycheck. Conservatives think jobs should be allotted based entirely on merit. Liberals think jobs should be allotted based, at least in part, on considerations of need, race, and gender.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“When prosperous liberals vote their values, not their interests, that’s enlightened. When poor conservatives do it, it’s dumb.” -- CLIVE CROOK (a senior editor for The Atlantic and a columnist at Bloomberg – a liberal, for sure, but not an insane one.)

"I always find that when anyone says 'You know, I'm not interested in politics', it means they're really right-wing at heart." -- POLLY TOYNBEE (The grande dame of London left-wingery, and her chillingly revealing comment reminds me of nothing so much as what one of her predecessor soul-mates, Leon Trotsky, once famously said, to wit, "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.")

“The reason why conservatives understand liberals better than liberals understand conservatives is because you cannot avoid the liberal mindset in this culture even if you wanted to. It's flipping everywhere: and you have to learn to recognize at least the basics in sheer memetic self-defense. Contrariwise, it is exceedingly easy for liberals to ignore conservatives if they so desire; and most liberals do. Honestly, if conservatives could ignore liberals we probably would; we would, if we could, but we can't, so we don't.” – MOE LANE (the conservative blogger)

“Different people prefer different exercises. The Republicans' favorite exercise is running for the hills. The Democrats' favorite exercise is kicking the can down the road.” – THOMAS SOWELL

"Liberals want to help people who are disadvantaged, whereas conservatives want to stop people from being disadvantaged." -- THOMAS SOWELL

“Conservatives make apologies for benevolent dictators. Liberals forgive totalitarian movements because of the principles to be found somewhere beneath an ocean of blood.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“Liberal presidents tend to want to change America while conservative presidents tend to talk about the need to change the government.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

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

“The principal delusion of liberals is that liberalism is popular. The principal delusion of conservatives is that liberalism is popular.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

"I've always voted Labour but always felt secretly relieved when the Tories won." -- DAVID LODGE (the great comic novelist David Lodge is an Englishman, you see)

“When you give conservatives bad news in your polls, they want to kill you. When you give liberals bad news in your polls, they want to kill themselves.” – E.J. DIONNE (Dionne is a big lib – and if what he says is true it's because the conservatives have good reason to believe the pollsters are liberals and their results artificially skewed against them.)

“Conservatives see people as assets, and progressives see people as liabilities.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"The Left is a coalition of economic interest groups, while the Right is a coalition of philosophies" -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

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

“Conservatives see personal responsibility as the ideal manifestation of freedom. Liberals see absence of personal responsibility as the ideal manifestation of freedom.” – SCOTT WILSON (the 25-year military vet who's one of the wiser commenters on NRO)

“The only capitalism that the Left can imagine is crony capitalism. When the Left says 'We hate capitalism', it is saying in effect what the Right says when it abominates the government's 'picking winners and losers' in the market. The difference is that the Left cannot imagine any other kind of capitalism – one based on free markets rather than favoritism – while the Right can.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“For the Latin (continental European) people the word 'democracy' signifies more especially the subordination of the will and the initiative of the individual to the will and the initiative of the community represented by the state.... Among the Anglo-Saxons and notably in America this same word 'democracy' signifies on the contrary, the intense development of the will of the individual, and as complete a subordination as possible of the state.” – GUSTAVE LE BON (The French anthropologist in his “La Psychologie des Foules”)

“Socialism is the residue of Judeo-Christian faith, without religion. Capitalism, accepting human sinfulness, rubs sinner against sinner, making even dry wood yield a spark of grace.” – MICHAEL NOVAK

“Conservatism is a grouping of ideas; progressivism is a grouping of special interests.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“The difference between libertarianism and socialism is that libertarians will tolerate the existence of a socialist community, but socialists can’t tolerate a libertarian community.” – DAVID BOAZ (the libertarian writer and member of the CATO Institute.)

"Under capitalism the rich become powerful; under socialism the powerful become rich." -- RUSH LIMBAUGH (while this is not the most trenchant thing he ever uttered, it is at least -- as far as I know -- pretty original.)

“The Left probably has an advantage here, as their core philosophy is ‘yes, we can’ build utopia, and our philosophy is, ‘no, you can't, and you'll do a lot of damage trying.’ " – JIM GERAGHTY

“The emerging rule seems to be that whenever blue-state politicians have the power to do what they really want to do – and to hell with unintended consequences – they proceed at their peril. In contrast, red-state politicians, if left to their own devices, will expand free markets, thereby enhancing their own states’ prosperity.” – TOM BETHELL

"The Right only knows how to make arguments; the Left, almost exclusively in our time and place, knows how to make art." – ROD DREHER (I don't agree with him at all, but even if he's right, so what? What's better, to be right and unartistic, or to be wrong and artistic?)

"We are the party of the muscle car, they are the party of light rail."-- LARRY O'CONNOR (the jolly metrosexual conservative talker of WMAL and Breitbart)

“Common parlance tends to confuse justice with benevolence, and war with forcefully reforming foreigners. The unhappy result is that the right tends to endorse a half-forceful, benevolent imperialism, the left wants wholehearted benevolent involvement without force, and the American people would prefer that this confusion go away. Events will make sure it does.” – ANGELO CODEVILLA

“Both the Left and the Right denounce crony capitalism, but we’re furious about the cronyism, and they’re furious about the capitalism.” – JIM GERAGHTY

“In a conservative world, people are allowed to disagree.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

“I love being a conservative. We conservatives are proud of our philosophy. Unlike our liberal friends who are constantly looking for new words to conceal their true beliefs and are in a perpetual state of reinvention, we conservatives are unapologetic about our beliefs.” – ADAM BALDWIN (the actor – distantly related to Alec the Lefty and the Long Island Baldwins....)

“The moral intuition of conservatives is, perhaps surprisingly, more complex than that of liberals. Hence conservatives often see liberals as benign but naïve; liberals, however, who find many conservative concerns incomprehensible, think conservatives are evil or mad. Fair enough.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

"Space, car-ownership, home-ownership and affordable family-formation make people more conservatism. Economics alone do not explain politics. City dwellers, although they are well-paid, are effectively serfs in suits. They rent homes, can't drive, rely on the state to move them about, and can't afford to spawn. Hence they vote left. Give them a bit of space, a house and a motor, and they'll be conservatives." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

“If you look out your front door and can see the ocean, you're probably a liberal. If you can see cows, you're probably a racist.” C. J. WERLEMAN (American columnist for “Middle East Eye”, in Nov 2016)

"I mean, really, why are leftists such pansies?Here's my guess:

A right-winger turns on his favorite television show and has his favorite character tell him his favorite candidate is demonic. He turns on the news and hears 'journalists' edit out stories of Democrat malfeasance while emphasizing Republican corruption. He goes to the movies and has his political beliefs insulted and derided. His favorite singer hates him. His professor excoriates him. His employer would fire him if he knew what he thought.

It makes you tough. It makes you smart. It makes you educate yourself as to why you believe what you believe and what the arguments for and against it are.

A leftist? He floats in a candy-cane cloud of self-congratulating self-reinforcement. Hollywood, the news media, academia, they all tell him: 'You're smart. You're good. You're right. You're nice. You're going to win the election. Anyone can see that. How could you lose? Anyone who disagrees with you is bad, stupid, mean, wicked.'

No wonder these people whine and cry when things don't go their way. Spending their days in a pink haze of bias, how could they ever have seen it coming?"– ANDREW KLAVAN (Jewish, New York-born, ex-liberal, now-"tough guy" mystery novel and Hollywood writer -- Clint Eastwood's "True Crime"& Michael Douglas'"Don't Say A Word". He said this in Jan. '17, months after the left turned to quivering jelly at Trump's victory.)

“Conservatism is gratitude. Conservatives tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it, while liberals tend to begin from outrage at what is bad and broken and seek to uproot it.” – YUVAL LEVIN

“I’ve never liked the term 'right'; it reinforces the mythology that conservatism is even remotely aligned with fascism and Nazism. Such regimes, in their expansive power, have more in common with the Big Government of so-called 'progressives'. And nationalism is inconclusive; FDR was no shrinking violet, and it was JFK who urged 'what you can do for your country'.”– ARNOLD STEINBERG (in the AMSPEC Feb. 2017)

"Although the right reads the left, the left rarely reads the right. Why should it, when the left owns American culture? Nearly every university, newspaper, TV network, Hollywood studio, publisher, education school and museum in the nation. The left wrapped up the culture war two generations ago. Throughout my own adult lifetime, the right has never made one significant move against the liberal culture machine." -- DAVID GELERNTER

“In hunter-gatherer societies, goods are finite. If someone has more than his fair share of meat, there is less for everyone else. That's not true of capitalist societies, where successful entrepreneurs create wealth without taking anything away from others.” – TOBY YOUNG

"The Left acts as if the Right regards cultural shifts like a TV weatherman hanging on a lamppost in a hurricane report." -- JAMES LILEKS

"Conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit." -- MICHAEL MALICE

"The whole modern world has divided itself into Progressives and Conservatives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types -- the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder by the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution." -- G. K. CHESTERTON

“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

"The Left has wielded the Right’s preference for manners as a club against the Right, claiming offense in order to cow them into silence." -- BEN SHAPIRO

“Not one person has ever been charged or prosecuted for the tens of millions of deaths under Stalin. The left takes care of its own. The right has a conscience. Big difference. But maybe we have a fighter this time (Trump).” – BEN STEIN (In Feb. 2018)

"Unhappy conservatives generally believe they are unhappy because life is inherently difficult and tragic, and because they have made some unwise decisions in life. But unhappy liberals generally believe they are unhappy because they have been persecuted. Unhappy Americans on the right blame the problems inherent to life, and they blame themselves. Unhappy Americans on the left blame America. That alone goes far in explaining the unbridgeable differences between Right and Left." -- DENNIS PRAGER

"The heart of the wise inclines to the RIGHT, but the heart of the fool to the LEFT." --ECCLESIASTES 10:2

“The Left is coming for your Rights.” – CHRIS PLANTE (on his radio WMAL show on 14 January 2021)

"The greatest single characteristic of people on the far left is they have zero sense of humor. I mean, these are the most bitter, angry, really disappointing and disgusting people because they're so sad with life. I've never seen a group of people that are so unhappy." – MIKE HUCKABEE (ex-Governor of Arkansas, ex-GOP presidential candidate)

"For Republicans every day is the 4th of July. For Democrats everyday is Halloween." -- MIKE HUCKABEE

“Welcome extended to the opposition – is the principal matter, in my opinion, that distinguishes the right from the left.” -- ROGER SCRUTON (23 June 2018)

"Conservatives want nation-without-state; the Left wants State-without-nation." -- PAUL COLLIER (a big lib -- author of "The Future Of Capitalism", but a pretty good quote, regardless)

“The Democrats, traditionally a party for blue-collar workers, now represents the well-educated and the well-off who don’t need low-income jobs. The Republicans are now the party of the working-class. 18 of America’s poorest 19 states are Republican controlled. The Democrats run the five richest state legislatures. The American poor aren’t socialist by instinct. They want jobs and better life prospects. Trump offers that, or at least appears to. The Democrats, meanwhile, are busy getting hung up on his ‘dehumanising’ proposals to prevent obligatory transgender lavatories in schools.” -- FREDDIE GRAY (Deputy Editor of THE SPECTATOR)

“We want to make poverty more rare. They want to make poverty more comfortable.” – VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE (1 March 2019)

“Capitalism works for men who do. Socialism works for men who don’t.” -- DANIEL J. FLYNN (author and the Senior Editor of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR, in June 2019)

“Liberals put their faith in government, Conservatives put their faith in people” -- ANDREW SCHEER (The Canadian Conservative leader in July 2019)

"To liberals, compassion seems to be defined by how many people are dependent on the government; to conservatives, it’s defined by how many people no longer need help." -- STAR PARKER

"Americans on the Right want to believe their fellow Americans are inherently good and this whole political thing will work itself out. Therefore they simply will not accept we’re facing violent communists who will happily kill you for what they believe. As communists do." -- JESSE KELLY (A good conservative guy on the lesser-known conservative cable channels)

“While the right tend to think that their opponents are merely wrong-headed, the left always seem to think that their opponents are evil. This causes a great asymmetry in our politics.” -- DOUGLAS MURRAY

“People of the right do not ask for pity, because they recognize that to do so is not just self-indulgence but also only adds to the general misery. So they don’t go around pleading for sympathy, which is not just a difference between right and left, but between victims and victors. Something the left might think on, if they could.” -- DOUGLAS MURRAY

“There is no ‘Right’ -- there is only the Left (totalitarian statists) and the anti-Left. If the Jacobins had sat in the balcony instead of the left side of the Paris National Assembly in 1789, they would've been called ‘Balconists’ instead of ‘Leftists’, and we'd have been spared this artificial ‘Left-Right’ ideological bullshit barometer.” – JACK JOLIS

"Leftism is a pathology of human nature made up of a toxic mixture of excessive Envy, Wishful Thinking and Ruthless Bossiness." -- JACK JOLIS

"The far left hates everyone, themselves included! But I'm no fan of the far right either." -- ELON MUSK (I, see above, need to have a chat with young Elon….)

"The key to understanding the modern Left is realizing that every word it uses has a double meaning. Only the truly initiated comprehend the actual meaning." -- JOHN ROSSOMANDO (Expert on national security and intelligence matters, author of "The Arab Spring Ruse")

“The Right has abandoned the nation and the Left has abandoned the people.” -- ALAIN DE BENOIST (a conservative French political philosopher and journalist. I don't know when he said this, but I saw him quoted as saying it in May 2024)

"I never thought I'd live to see the day when the right wing would become the cool ones giving the middle finger to the establishment, and the left wing becoming the sniveling self-righteous twatty ones going around shaming everyone." -- JOHN LYDON (a.k.a.Johnny Rotten, leader and lead singer of the Sex Pistols, on 6 May 2021)

"We must bring down the thing called liberalism, which is powerful but decadent, and salvage a thing called conservatism, which is weak but viable." -- WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.

Legacy

“The Body of B. Franklin, Printer; like the Cover of an old Book, Its Contents torn out, And stript of its Lettering and Gilding, Lies here, Food for Worms. But the Work shall not be wholly lost; For it will, as he believ’d, appear once more, In a new & more perfect Edition, Corrected and amended By the Author.” – BEN FRANKLIN (His self-penned epitaph, on his tombstone)

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

"It's fine to leave behind a body of good work, but it's the good fun they'll be talking about over your body." -- P. J. O'ROURKE (who died in 2022, about his life-long friend, the great author, historian and Vietnam vet Winston Groom, who died in 2020)

Legislation

“It is more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.” – CALVIN COOLIDGE

“If a bill is too big to read, it's a good sign you shouldn't be passing it.” -- MARK STEYN

"The essence of mental and spiritual health is, after all, to care deeply about a very few, particularly precious, and intimately familiar things, and to regard the rest of reality with generous indifference. Of course, if everyone were sane in this sense, nothing ever would get done—and that would, I suppose, be a bad thing. We seem to have some need, for instance, for politicians, at least under our current system. Considered rationally, however, only a person who is somewhat deranged could ever possibly care enough about politics to want to participate in its processes. Anyone able to read a piece of legislation with interest is already a tad demented, and anyone willing to write a piece of legislation clearly suffers from a minor obsessive psychosis. So God bless them, but God spare us their derangement." -- DAVID B. HART,(author of The Beauty of the Infinite and Atheist Delusions.)

"The urge to pass new laws must be seen as an illness, not much different from the urge to bite old women. Anyone suspected of suffering from it should either be treated with the appropriate pills or, if it is too late for that, elected to parliament [or Congress, as the case may be] and paid a huge salary with endless holidays, to do nothing whatever." – AUBERON WAUGH

"The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state." - TACITUS (Roman senator and historian, 56-117 A.D., and, by the sound of it, history's first teanum convivalis popularis)

“No one says ‘There ought to be a law’ anymore, because we know there probably is.” – JAMES LILEKS (a demotic contemporary take on wot Tacitus said, above....)

“Most legislation aimed at eliminating unhappiness and discontent has resulted in misery. Human beings are flawed, and as unlikely to create contentment with amended or increased legislation as they were to create perfect legislation in the first place.” – DAVID MAMET

“The new year brings new laws – over 40,000 statutes at the state level, each another incremental criminalization of some element of life. If every law in the country were eliminated tomorrow and a new batch drawn up, it's hard to see how we could write more than 500, because after that you're writing laws as stupid as 'The guy who runs the copier at Kinko's shall be licensed by the state' or banning beer with caffeine. Hold on: California just did that. Number of laws repealed? You can guess. The only laws that get repealed these days are sodomy laws, because we want to get the government out of certain bedrooms clucking in disapproval, so it can be hustled into other bedrooms to shout 'Hurrah!' “ – JAMES LILEKS

“A 2,700-page law is not a ‘law’ by any civilized understanding of the term. A 2,700-page law is, by definition, an affront to self-government.” – MARK STEYN (He went on to say: “Law rests on the principle of equality before it. When a bill is 2,700 pages, there’s no equality: Instead, there’s a hierarchy of privilege micro-regulated by an unelected, unaccountable, unconstrained, unknown, and unnumbered bureaucracy.It’s not just that the legislators who legislate it don’t know what’s in it, nor that the citizens on the receiving end can never hope to understand it, but that even the nation’s most eminent judges acknowledge that it is beyond individual human comprehension”. By the way, Steyn said this before the Democrats passed a 5,000-page law, in 2020.)

“It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.” – JAMES MADISON

"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators." – P. J. O’ROURKE

“The great mistake of the gridlock theorists is to suppose that all progress comes from legistlation and that more legislation consistently represents more progress.” – LARRY SUMMERS (the famous somewhat-chastened liberal economist and ex-president of Hahvahd.)

“An inexorable law of politics: the larger the document, the weaker the content.” – GERALD WARNER (The Scottish columnist, author, broadcaster and political adviser)

“Nancy Pelosi said ‘We have to pass it to find out what’s in it’. That’s the definition of a stool sample.” – JIM HORN (Horn is my old buddy from Bangui days, where he was a valiant CIA communicator. He used to live in California, where he did his best to stop the encroachment of the Jihadists)

“It's easy to forget that laws are supposed to do something useful.” -- JOSIE APPLETON (An English lady who's in charge of something called “The Manifesto Club”, an organization which lobbies against Government over-regulation – and I say bravo to her.)

“Legislation is increasingly press-release law, which makes everyone feel good but causes havoc when applied to the real world.” -- JOSIE APPLETON

“Term Limits would cure both senility and seniority, both terrible legislative diseases.” – HARRY TRUMAN

“A 'loophole' is just a law that liberals don't like.” -- DAVID HARSANYI (Senior Editor at THE FEDERALIST)

"Laws are like trees in the forest, and the animals in the forest move between and among the trees." -- MARK HELPRIN

"More law means more sin." -- SAINT PAUL (quoted by Alan Judd in "Accidental Agent")

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

"It is usually safe to assume that any proposed law will do the opposite of its name – 'Orwell’s Law'." -- ELON MUSK

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” – PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (As if.)

Leisure

"All great civilizations are based on loitering." -- JEAN RENOIR (The Frogue "auteur du cinema" made this comment in 1949 while in Calcutta, of all places, and it's either one of the great insights or one of the great fatuities of all time -- I'm not sure which....)

“You can goof off at work, but you can’t goof off at goofing off.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

"I tell you, we are here on earth to fart around, and don't let anyone tell you any different." -- KURT VONNEGUT (With the notable and honorable exception of his short story "Harrison Bergeron", which everyone ought to read, I never shared my youthful contemporaries' enthusiasm for this rather labored and over-rated bore. However, this quote of his, which I just stumbled across, is so felicitous, that I'm considering founding an entire political movement around it....)

"The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play." -- ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE (historian, 1889-1975)

“Most of our vices arise from the abuse of our leisure hours.” – JOHN D. HALLIDAY (in the UK SPECTATOR, August 2020)

"Leisure is an indispensable ingredient in a growing consumer market because working people need to have enough free time to find uses for consumer products, including automobiles." -- HENRY FORD (and these are the words that got twisted, over the decades, into the apocryphal quote of Ford's whereby he supposedly paid his workers enough so that they could buy one of the cars they made.)

Leningrad (see St. Petersburg)

“Leningrad is a sullen ghost town of 5 million dead souls that is fast disappearing in sand and mud.” – WLADYSLAW PLESZCYNSKI (the long-time Managing Editor of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR)

Lenin,(-ism)

“In political conflicts, the goal is not to refute your opponent’s argument, but to wipe him from the face of the earth.” – VLADIMIR I. LENIN (Sounds like the president of Iran, 2006. In fact, it sounds like Howard Dean, 2006, or any American Democrat today…)

“Lenin was the first case of the modern intellectual in great power.” -- FRANK JOHNSON (British political journalist in 2006)

“All those who do not follow the line that I have set out will be smashed.” – HO CHI MINH (in 1946. Nice. The good old Leninist “agrarian reformer”.)

"Lenin simply battered away with a blunt instrument at the darkest corner of people's souls". -- NADEZHDA LOKHVITSKAYA (who wrote under the name of "Teffi")

Lennon, John

“John Lennon ain't no revolutionary, man. He's just a fucking idiot.” – TODD RUNDGREN

“Like self-regarding liberals everywhere, Lennon professed to love humanity. He just didn't care for people very much.” – MICHAEL HENDERSON (the British journalist, in October 2010)

“There is nothing wrong with Mr. Lennon that could not be cured by standing him upside down and shaking him gently until whatever is inside his head falls out.” – BERNARD LEVIN (the legendary British essayist)

“Excepting the sung ones, almost every word that ever came out of John Lennon’s mouth were insipid and banal. And some of the ones he sang, too: Is there a modern pop song as willfully stupid and indefensibly trite as ‘Imagine’?” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

Lennon, John and Ono, Yoko

“They deserved each other, truly they did.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE (not a fan, truly he’s not.)

“He fell for a batty Japanese-American 'artist', Yoko Ono, whose talent was as invisible as her charm, and he began to speak in capital letters.” – MICHAEL HENDERSON

Lesbians (-ism)

“And no gay man I’ve ever questioned has the slightest interest in female homosexual sex. When it comes to lesbianism, we gay men have – naturally – all the right attitudes on the political questions; and the obvious fellow-sympathies too. We wouldn’t persecute and we don’t disapprove; it’s none of our business. But (secretly) lesbianism bores us, for the truth is – though not a truth we would dare acknowledge on any of the various rainbow coalition committees with acronyms formed from the permutations of L (lesbian) G (gay) and T (trans-gender, transsexual) – that gay men find it hard to see why anything that did not involve a man should be called sex at all. Only lesbians and heteros would call a blonde and a brunette writhing on a tiger-skin rug ‘sex’. Gay men would call it novelty wrestling.” – MATTHEW PARRIS

"You can always spot a lesbian by her big thrusting chin." -- ROGER LEWIS (the biographer to the stars, and I must say I'd never noticed this before -- I shall make it a point to look out for it in the future.)

"The closest thing to a lesbian experience I've ever had was when I kissed a liberal guy." -- SIERRA MARLEE (a “social media” bimbo – she calls herself a “freelance journalist” – in October 2017)

Lesser of Two Evils

“There is a difference between bad and worse. In fact, most of life consists of choosing between them.” -- JACK JOLIS

“When we choose the lesser evil we must remember that it is still evil.” -- LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI (a Polish philosopher. And yes, Leszek, but it’s also “lesser”.)

Libel

“You should tell the truth as often as you can, but in such a way as people don’t believe you or think that you’re being funny.” – AUBERON WAUGH (Evelyn Waugh’s son, and here he was giving advice on how to avoid falling foul of Britain’s expansive libel laws.)

Liberals,(-ism)

"What saddens me above all are the clear signs of rot and decadence germinating within American society—a rot and decadence that are no longer the consequence of liberalism but are the actual agenda of contemporary liberalism. It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other. It cannot win, but it can make us all losers." -- IRVING KRISTOL

“A liberal is someone who will defend to the death your right to agree with him”. – RICHARD CORLISS (heh.)

“A liberal is someone who would not take his own side in a fight.” – WILLMOORE KENDALL

"We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good" – HILLARY CLINTON

"When you tell a joke to a liberal, there's always that split-second where they process whether they're allowed to laugh or not." – DENNIS MILLER (And ex-lib, so he knows. And it's bad enough when they're not allowed to laugh, but YOU're not allowed to either....)

“No one likes liberals. The men are wussy and the women shrewy. It’s just a fact.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

“Liberals are telling us they are lying to us – proudly. Listen to them.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

"Liberals: They're either stupid or think you are." -- KURT SCHLICHTER (on 3 Jan ‘20)

"Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy." – JOHN DERBYSHIRE (I like that “well-heeled”)

“It has been said by others and I’ll say it again. No one ever satisfied the liberal interest groups.” – JAMES CARVILLE (the uber-Clintonista, and long-time Democrat “strategist”. And I must say, this is an extraordinarily candid admission of the obvious, for a leading liberal to make.)

"Every time you listen to the left, you're screwed": I am a liberal, but I am not a leftist. There's a difference." -- JAMES CARVILLE (in June 2024, and I'm sorry James, there isn't. And there hasn't been for quite a long time, now...)

“Liberalism permits Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution.” – JAMES BURNHAM

"Unless you think hard about political questions in our culture, you are liberal by default. You have to think your way out of liberalism." – HEATHER MACDONALD (the conservative LA-based writer and blogstress, in 2003)

“Sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos. It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other. It cannot win, but it can make us all losers.” – IRVING KRISTOL

“Democratic liberals visit Moscow in an advisory role.” -- D. KEITH MANO (obviously, during the Cold War. And don't let any shamefaced, revisionist liberal bastards tell you now that during the Cold War “we were all in this together” -- we fucking weren't – the liberals were almost unanimously and at all times craven apologists for the commies....)

“The basic tenet of moral philosophy is all about trying to be good. If you’re trying to be good, even if you’re making a really bad job of it, then you’re good.” – HUGH FEARNLEY-WHITTINGSTALL (and mountains of corpses can be directly attributed to this absolutely insane way of thinking by this absurdly named Brit Oxford “don”…. And don’t tell me this doesn’t belong under “liberalism”…)

“Perhaps the greatest irony is that the liberal classes, who pioneered the idea of paying people not to work, are so thoroughly opposed to any form of unbridled leisure.” – ADAM J. FREEDMAN (An American lawyer in New York, 1995)

“I hate conservatives, but I really hate liberals;” – MATT STONE (The sainted co-producer and creator of “SouthPark”, as well as “Team America”. The Brave. The Few. The Anti-liberals in Hollywood.)

“Liberals love humanity, but hate people.” – DICK ARMEY (ex-Republican Majority Leader of the House, from Texas. And what he says here has previously been said of the Left in general, but he said this. So there.)

“White liberals in their hunger for humiliation will take as revealed truth anything an angry black man says.” – S.I. HAYAKAWA (the diminutive tam-o-shanter-wearing Jap who was the President of San Francisco State University during the height of the late 60s leftist student riots, when he bravely faced down the young Stalinists, and he actually went on to be, at least for 1 term, a Republican Senator from California. Great little guy.)

“American mores imposed certain taboos. The word ‘socialism’, for example, is never used. Europeans might consider that policies of a democratic-socialist tendency date from FDR’s First Administration, but the philosopher John Dewey’s terminology for it was ‘liberalism’.” – JOHN GRENIER (American political scientist, from Alabama)

“Why did liberals allow smugness and guilt to turn them into sheep, harried by a few intellectual bullies, until the only liberalism – much though they would deny it – was to be found among libertarians of the Right?” – MINETTE MARRIN

“Modern liberalism is fundamentally at odds with democratic government because it demands results that ordinary people would not freely choose. Liberals must govern, therefore, through institutions that are largely insulated from the popular will.” – JUDGE ROBERT BORK

“I have a really interesting political point of view, and it’s not always something I say too loud at dinner tables here, but you can’t go from a $2,000-a-night suite at Le Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal.” – ROBERT DOWNEY JR. (the ex-liberal actor -- “Iron Man” – in May 2008, speaking to the NY TIMES, in Hollywood.)

“Liberalism is just communism sold by the drink.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

"No one has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal." – P. J. O’ROURKE

“At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child – miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

“When liberalism collapses – and it will, won't it? – it may not be because we conservatives out-argued it. It may not be because of the sum-total columns of our rational, reasoned dissent. We may not even persuade a single lefty that we're right. What may happen is that it will descend into farce. Liberalism may slip on its own banana peel. Let's all stay out of the way when it does.” – ROB LONG

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

“Liberalism is no longer merely a philosophy of government, as it was in the Progressive era, but rather an integral part of modern government itself, which is why it cannot be killed off despite failures in policy, lost arguments, or even by lost elections.” – JAMES PIERESON (President of the W.E. Simon Foundation and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, in Feb. 2011.)

“The liberal establishment is only halfheartedly in favor of America, only halfheartedly committed to the Western Inheritance. You see this in situations of conflict, when the first instinct of liberals is to side with the enemy. And that is the aspect of liberalism which – when they wake up to it – ordinary people most dislike.” – ROGER SCRUTON (the late British writer and philosopher, writing in THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR in Feb 2009)

“Liberalism is a luxury item. Primitive peoples have no use for lawyers, agitators, and community organizers; when everyone is equally badly off, people seek out the hunters, the inventors and the tough guys, not EPA administrators or associate professors of gender studies.” – DAVID KAHANE (David Kahane is the pseudonym of the conservative Hollywood screenwriter and author MICHAEL WALSH.)

"All liberalism is, in the end, vengeful and punitive." -- MICHAEL WALSH

“Modern liberalism is a half-crazed thing – perhaps best defined as anti-Americanism across the board.” – TOM BETHELL (the English-born American author and journalist.)

“Liberal economic policies are always counterproductive, and that word should be taken literally. They aim to counter the forces of production.” – TOM BETHELL

“The liberal mind, preferring an ideal world to the real one, is satisfied with good intentions and waves off unintended consequences. Rarely can liberals see beyond their own wishful thinking.” – TOM BETHELL

“The difference between a liberal and a communist is that a communist admits it.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE (the English author and columnist for the UK SPECTATOR)

"Just as every good Swiss keeps his rifle at home, ready to spring into action at any hour of the day or night to repel an attack on the Heimat, so every good progressive must be prepared at a moment's notice to transform himself into a white corpuscle and rush to the point of infection to attack any germ of heresy or doubt that infiltrates the body of the revolution." – CHARLES McCARRY

“Modern liberalism is best thought of as the maximum level of socialism that democracy will bear.” – TOM BETHELL

“If America was a house, liberals would root for the termites.” – GREG GUTFELD

“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

“As is ever the case with liberals, it is the sudden onset of reality which has fundamentally altered their mindset. And this can be a bit of a bugger, really.” – ROD LIDDLE

“There's nothing quite like white liberal self-flagellation to create misery for all races – it's worse, in its effects, than colonialism.” – ROD LIDDLE

"That has been western liberalism's final gift: the creation of a society in which we are enjoined to hate everything we have ever done. The rest of the world looks on quite askance at our Year Zero self-flagellation." -- ROD LIDDLE (in April 2022)

"Western neo-liberalism was an undoubtedly well-intentioned creed. But it involved a denial of realities. It is still doing it today. All we have been left with is the ability to emote, to sob, to emote, to whine, to emote, to clap and to clap and to bang saucepans together." -- ROD LIDDLE (in April 2022)

"If you were asked to fight for your country, what would you be fighting for now? There is nothing left worth bothering about. They have done away with religion, with our history, and with our present and left nothing to put in its place." -- ROD LIDDLE (in April 2022)

“Being liberals, they think that what actually happened, i.e., history, isn’t important and if it offends them it can be rewritten or simply expunged.” – ROD LIDDLE

"White liberals are the most racist people there are, because they put blacks in a box and insist that they think one way -- and if they don't they attack them as illegitimate, all the while denying that their policies destroy blacks." -- DR. BEN CARSON

"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of 'liberalism,' they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened." – NORMAN THOMAS (1884-1968. The “father” of the American Socialist Party, and 4-time Socialist candidate for President. I remember him being a big sentimental favorite among the many be-tweeded libs on the faculty at Deerfield Academy when I was there 1960-63)

"Liberals never, ever drop a heinous idea; they just change the name. ‘Abortion’ becomes ‘choice’, ‘communist’ becomes ‘progressive’, ‘communist dictatorship’ becomes ‘people's democratic republic’ and ‘Nikita Khrushchev’ becomes ‘Barack Obama’. It doesn't matter if liberals start calling national health care a ‘chocolate chip puppy’ or ‘ice cream sunset’ -- if the government is subsidizing it, then the government calls the shots." -- ANN COULTER

“Liberals make up events that didn't happen and get apoplectic over things that never will happen. The definition of 'liberal' is quickly becoming: people who believe their fantasies should be facts.” – ANN COULTER

"Liberals hate America; they hate flag-wavers, they hate abortion opponents, they hate all religions except Islam, post 9-11. Even Islamic terrorists don't hate America like liberals do. They don't have the energy. If they had that much energy, they'd have indoor plumbing by now." -- ANN COULTER

“Liberal foreign policy can be summed up as 'it’s better to do wrong in a group than to do right alone'.” – 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

“For progressives it’s always five minutes to Brecht-O-Clock. What I mean is this desire to fix the people, not the government always seems to be lurking behind liberalism.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"Liberals have been great at telling the rest of us what the 'promise' of America is and then blaming Americans for not fulfilling a promise they never committed to in the first place. When liberals screw up or can’t deliver, it’s not because there’s a problem with liberalism, it’s the system man, the system!" -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“Liberals lie and overcomplicate our lives, and then profit on that overcomplication.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"It has been a mistaken tenet of liberalism that one's political affiliation is a window to one's soul." -- JONAH GOLDBERG (in 1996)

"Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views." – WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.

“A good strategy for reducing the number of discomfiting surprises in life, is to read the books that liberals denounce.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

“There is only one political value that all liberals through the generations continue to profess. It is not personal liberty. It is not public order. It is disturbing the peace.” – R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR.

“Liberals have always felt constrained by the Constitution.” – ALFRED S. REGNERY (the famous publisher’s son, and a publisher in his own right…)

"Down there (in the U.S.), being a liberal is a burden. Up here (in Canada), it is a badge of honour." -- MICHAEL IGNATIEFF (the "intellectual" leader of Canada's Liberal Party, and, yeah, it's such an "honour" that shortly after the fatuous prat uttered these deathless words, in 1911, he led his party to its worst electoral defeat in Canadian history....)

“Liberals get elected not because they understand Americans but because they understand American journalists.” – R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR.

“Boy, when those liberals start mixing into policy, it’s murder.” – JOHN F. KENNEDY (quoted in NEWSWEEK in 1963, on his decision to cut taxes and stimulate the private sector)

“In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. Indeed, conservatism is reduced to irritable mental gestures”— LIONEL TRILLING (the lefty American “intellectual” and Columbia University Grand Poobah, in 1950)

“The liberals’ argument is that there is no argument.” – THOMAS SOWELL

"Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good." -- THOMAS SOWELL

"The real motives of liberals have nothing to do with the welfare of other people. Instead, they have two related goals -- to establish themselves as morally and intellectually superior to the rather distasteful population of common people, and to gather as much power as possible to tell those distasteful common people how they must live their lives." -- THOMAS SOWELL

“By assuming they are smarter than everybody else, liberals leave themselves utterly vulnerable to anyone who plays on their sense of superiority.” – WILLIAM TUCKER (author and frequent contributor to the AMERICAN SPECTATOR)

“The error of the liberal elites is to mistake compulsion for compassion.” – JAMES TARANTO (well, that’s one error, certainly not the only error….)

“Liberalism is the political philosophy that became drunk and disorderly in public. Beyond public indulgence, however, it did maintain one sacred purpose, that being to disturb one's neighbor.” – R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR.

“Inside many liberals is a totalitarian screaming to get out. They don't like to have another point of view in the room that they don't squash and the way they try to squash it is by character assassination and name calling.” – DAVID HOROWITZ

"Liberalism is hideous. It is the antithesis of being pro-human. It looks at life as a burden in and of itself to be managed, rather than as a blessing to be explored and lived to the fullest." – RUSH LIMBAUGH

"It's not the nature of the evidence; It's the seriousness of the charge" – RUSH LIMBAUGH

“Liberalism is what smart looks like to stupid people.” – RUSH LIMBAUGH (actually, it was a black lady caller to his show called Maya, from Kansas City MO, who said this)

"One of the reasons liberals are always unhappy is because they're forever reminded, at every moment, that everything they believe in doesn't work." -- RUSH LIMBAUGH

«Liberals are liberals first and foremost – and anything else they are, second and third and so on.»-- RUSH LIMBAUGH

«That’s the beauty of liberalism – you don’t have to fix anything. All you have to do is tell someone you care.» – RUSH LIMBAUGH

“Inasmuch as liberals have no morals, they can sit back and criticize other people for failing to meet the standards that liberals simply renounce. It's an intriguing strategy. By openly admitting to being philanderers, draft dodgers, liars, weasels and cowards, liberals avoid ever being hypocrites.” – ANN COULTER (that mention of “draft dodgers” rather dates this, I'm afraid, but it's still good enough....)

"The current administration is promoting T-ball nation. With T-ball, everybody gets a hit, everybody gets on base, everybody supposedly wins and everyone goes for ice cream after the game. But life isn't like that." -- DENEEN BORELLI (one of the citizen-ladies who appears in the recent "Mama Grizzly/Tea Party" documentary "Fire From The Heartland")

"Here is liberal economics in a nutshell: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidise it." -- RONALD REAGAN (the man who my old ΑΔΦ frat brother pal Fuzzy Ryan always called "The Rock")

“A friend of mine was asked to a costume ball a short time ago. He slapped some egg on his face and went as a liberal economist.” – RONALD REAGAN

“If limousine liberals knew they were limousine liberals, they'd either have to give up the limousine or the liberalism.” – BEN SHAPIRO (The author of the 2011 book “Primetime Propaganda”)

“A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel.” – ROBERT FROST (The famous pote. Who wrote greatly popular pottery. And, amusingly enough, he was a liberal himself – he filled the Maya Angelou role at JFK's inaugural in 1960, and was practically a patron saint at good old RINO/liberal Deerfield Academy...)

“Liberals tend to sound like some ex-wife in a divorce settlement.” – D. KEITH MANO

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

“Today’s liberal elites chamption a social gospel, without the gospel. For all of them, the sole proof of redemption is the holding of a proper sense of social ills. The only available confidence about their salvation, as something superadded to experience, is the self-esteem that comes with feeling they oppose the social evils of bigotry and power and the groupthink of the mob.” – JODY BOTTUM (In his book “An Anxious Age”)

"A liberal is a power-worshipper without power." -- GEORGE ORWELL (Which is why, of course, they so tend to totalitarianism when they do get a bit of power....)

“It is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect.” – GEORGE ORWELL

"Tell a joke to a liberal. Between your punchline and his laughter, there is a Progressive Comedy Pause. In this second or two, the liberal will process the joke to make sure he is allowed to laugh." -- JON GABRIEL (A political writer, funnyman and extensive blogger, out of Arizona)

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

“A liberal is always a totalitarian at heart, though half of them don’t know it.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

“And liberalism – especially Hollywood liberalism – is a philosophy for the comfortable.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“The principal delusion of liberals is that liberalism is popular. The principal delusion of conservatives is that liberalism is popular. – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

“No wonder liberal women think men are pigs: Their men are pigs.” – PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY (this stalwart veteran conservative American dragon lady died in 2016. And I get a lot of mileage out of this neat little quote.)

"Like so many liberal icons, Marx seldom bathed and left his wife and children in poverty.” – ANN COULTER

“The whole liberal gang out there – if they don’t want to ban it, they want to make it mandatory.” – CHRIS PLANTE (the excellent morning talk-radio guy on WMAL in Washington D.C.)

“The phrase 'ritualistic liberal' was illuminating. I didn't realize until I began looking around me with this phrase in mind how hidebound and bigoted and self-blindfolded are a great mass of New York's intellectual set.” -- ELIA KAZAN (The great film-maker -- “On The Waterfront” -- who, in 1952, denounced fellow commies to Congress and was forever reviled by all liberals, leftists and commies ever since....)

"To fix the game for money is called corruption, to fix the game from sentiment is called Liberalism." -- DAVID MAMET (The ex-lefty, seen-the-light playwright, screenwriter and director, from this book "The Secret Knowledge", all 226 pages of which could practically qualify as an entry into this compendium)

“I spoke with my first conservatives at age sixty.” – DAVID MAMET (This is an even more astounding revelation about liberals even than that famous Mary McGrory (NOT Pauline Kael) line about how she didn't understand how Nixon could have won the '72 election because she “didn't know anybody who'd voted for him” – and this was when Nixon won 60% of the popular vote.)

“I examined my Liberalism and found it like an addiction to roulette. Here, though the odds are plain, and the certainty of loss apparent to anyone with a knowledge of arithmetic, the addict, failing time and again, is convinced he yet is graced with the power to contravene natural laws: The roulette addict, when he inevitably comes to grief, does not examine either the nature of roulette, or of his delusion, but retires to develop a new system.” – DAVID MAMET

“The great wickedness of Liberalism, I saw, was that those who devise the ever new State Utopias, whether crooks or fools, set out to bankrupt and restrict not themselves, but others.” – DAVID MAMET

“Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost. Central to this religion is the assertion that evil does not exist, all conflict being attributed to a lack of understanding between the opposed.” – DAVID MAMET

“Absent in the contemporary Liberal worldview is the understanding that things go wrong.” – DAVID MAMET

"I’m an optimistic guy. I have hope for my Liberal friends. Jellyfish have survived for 165 million years without a brain.” — SEN. JOHN KENNEDY (the Republiican from Louisiana, in October 2022)

“The infamous double-standard has ceased to be merely a flaw of Liberalism, it has become its very essence.” – JOSEPH SOBRAN

"Every liberal is an hysteric whose beliefs are their tranquilizers." -- ROY CAMERON (“ROY CAM”)

"The standard definition of a liberal -- an assemblage of special interest groups." -- DAVID STARKEY

“Whether or not the Soviets still believe in Socialism, the liberals do/ They have abandoned the claim that Socialism 'works', but they still find everything else morally intolerable.” – JOSEPH SOBRAN

“The Soviet Union wasn't an evil to Liberals, it was an embarrassment.” – JOSEPH SOBRAN

“What my father said about businessmen applies to liberals. They’re sons of bitches … in love with death.” -- ROBERT F. KENNEDY

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

"Liberals wanted to help blacks in the worst possible way, and that is what they did." -- FRED SIEGEL (In his book "Revolt Against The Masses", on left-wing social policy starting in the 60s)

“Liberalism has no principles; liberalism is an activity." – HERBERT CROLY (Progressive/liberal extraordinaire, at the beginning of the 20th century)

“Like salesmen trying to pass off refrigerator boxes with painted-on wheels as real cars, liberals get in trouble whenever someone examines their products too closely.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“I never say liberals are unpatriotic, I say they are confused about patriotism. For instance, Barack Obama has voiced his desire to ‘fundamentally transform the United States of America,’ a locution, I think, that is hard to square with a love for America as it is. Don’t believe me? Tell your wife or husband ‘Honey I love you, I just want to fundamentally transform you'.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“Liberals love America the way a wife beater loves his spouse. That's why they're always beating up the country ‘for its own good’. Doesn't the country understand that liberals have to hit it in the mouth because they love it so much?” – JOHN HAWKINS (a columnist at TOWNHALL.com, and his comment nicely complements Jonah's above)

«If God had been a liberal, we wouldn't have had the Ten Commandments - we'd have the Ten Suggestions.» -MALCOLM BRADBURY (the very funny Brit novelist)

“Being a liberal means never having to say you’re sorry.” – DENNIS PRAGER

"Liberals are a people who embrace their destroyers." -- MALCOLM BRADBURY

“Liberalism is a death cult populated by beta males and fugly chicks.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

“Liberalism is a suicide pact in which everyone who isn't liberal is expected to go first.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

"80% of liberals are fucking idiots, and so are the other 20%" -- KURT SCHLICHTER

“I am not saying liberals are Nazis. I am saying they would be if they knew how to fight.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

«Your liberal gods are frauds. Everything you believe in is on the spectrum from stupid to evil. You suck. And you know you suck.» – KURT SCHLICHTER

"Liberals are always wrong, as is to be expected of people who operate from flawed premises and with moral illiteracy." -- KURT SCHLICHTER

“Here's the thing liberals don't get. We'll outbreed them and outfight them. We cannot lose unless we choose to surrender.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

"I suspect the civil war the libs may well provoke will come as a surprise to them even though they'll fire the first shots." -- KURT SCHLICHTER (in August 2018)

“A defining characteristic of this 'politics of kindness' is a strong preference for political stances that demonstrate one's heart is in the right place, combined with a relative indifference to whether the policies based on those stances, as actually implemented, do or even can achieve their intended results.” – WILLIAM VOEGELI

" ‘We have to do SOMETHING!’ is liberal for ‘We're about to do something really, really stupid’." – MICHAEL GRAHAM (the very amusing radio talk host)

«Liberalism: The idea that evil deserves a fair chance.» – LORI HENDRY (a rather fetching blonde chick on The Twoot)

“Liberals hold whites to civilized standards of behavior, but not blacks. From a liberal's point of view, it might even be racist to expect blacks to adhere to civilized standards of behavior.” – WALTER E. WILLIAMS

“The worst enemy that the Negro have is this white man that runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negros and calling himself a liberal, and it is following these white liberals that has perpetuated problems that Negros have." -- MALCOLM X

“Nazis were not liberals but liberals can be fascists.” – J. REID SHEPPARD (a conservative lawyer from Florida)

“Scratch a liberal and you find a fascist underneath.” -- DOMINICO LOSURDO (Normally, it's "Scratch a liberal and you find a communist underneath", but I see that Signore Losurdo -- which means "the deaf one" in Italian -- is a proud "Marxist philosopher". Anyway, given what "fascist" means these days, he's also correct enough....)

“Guilt is the psychological need satisfied by liberalism.” – JAMES BURNHAM

“A liberal’s paradise would be a place where everybody has guaranteed employment, free comprehensive healthcare, free education, free food, free housing, free clothing, free utilities, and only law enforcement has guns. And believe it or not, such a place does indeed already exist: It's called Prison." – SHERIFF JOE ARPAIO (Maricopa County, Arizona)

“I have a really interesting political point of view, and it’s not always something I say too loud at dinner tables here, but you can’t go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal. You can’t. I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone else, but it was very, very, very educational for me and has informed my proclivities and politics every since.” --ROBERT DOWNEY JR. (the ex-liberal actor, in 2008 – and this contradicts the often-repeated cliché that “A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, and a liberal is a conservative who's been in prison”.)

“Most modern liberals are training-wheel tyrants, if you scratch. But sometimes you don't even need to scratch.” – IAN TUTTLE

“Liberals have destroyed the credit limit on their race card...no one cares.” – CHARLES STRASBURGER (CEO of 2 tech companies in the American «mid-Atlantic», according to the Twoot)

“I've finally figured out why Liberals are Liberals. They want everyone to be as miserable as they are.” – BILL MITCHELL (A Trump supporter on the Twoot – and he's not any less right for all that….)

“Liberalism today no longer stands up for freedom, but for political correctness – which is the opposite of freedom.” – VICTOR ORBAN (the PM of Hungary, in 2016)

“Liberals see racism where it doesn't exist, fabricate it when they can't find it, and ignore it within their own ranks.” – MICHELLE MALKIN

"A liberal's perfect day, have an abortion in the morning and watch a giraffe give birth in the afternoon." -- BILL POWERS (an American veteran and conservative, on the Twoot)

"Liberalism is now like a cigarette. It's been marketed to us same as a cigarette – fashionable, sophisticated. It's supposed to be liberating but I think it needs a Surgeon-General's warning: Hazardous to your families and to all the values you were taught as a child." – JASON WHITLOCK (A black American "sports journalist" – an ESPN body, who has since gone on to greater, non-sports platforms. He said this in 2018)

“It sometimes seems that contemporary liberals have only two points of historical reference. The first is Watergate and the second in Adolph Hitler.” – DAVID HARSANYI

"Liberalism has never been about establishing a universal standard. Liberalism is simply intellectual cover for those wanting to gain political power and increase the power of the state." -- ANDREW BREITBART

“Liberals who posture as defenders of science when it comes to global warming flee all reference to biology when it comes to gender” -- CAMILLE PAGLIA

“Being a former liberal and then getting red-pilled is like reading a murder mystery novel and finding out in the end that the killer is you. “ – BRANDON STRAKA (A homosexual ex-lefty who runs the WALK AWAY project, which tries to get other lefties to defect. Oh, and “red-pilled” is hip-talk for “see the light”.)

“A liberal is a feminine man or a masculine woman.” – SAMUEL MCHEYNE GLASSER

“Pretty much the definition of Liberalism is: Creating imagined solutions that end up making a previous non-problem into an actual problem -- while causing a lot of paperwork, expense, confusion and aggravation in the process, and, as a bonus, diminishing everyone's freedom.” – JACK JOLIS

"Liberalism: Non-solutions to non-problems that were created by liberals to begin with. Which result in real problems — that liberals go on to ignore." -- JACK JOLIS

“Liberalism is just one version of Leftism -- which itself is a toxic mixture of Envy and Wishful Thinking, fueled by a ruthless Totalitarian Impulse. In short – a most delightful pathology.” – JACK JOLIS

"Liberals feel guilty about everything in the world... except those things that they SHOULD feel guilty about." -- JACK JOLIS

"Liberalism is the religion of the ignorant and it’s a sedative for the simple-minded." -- DAN BONGINO

"What I like about left-wing liberal do-gooders is that as soon as anyone kicks them in the teeth, they start to say that human beings ought not to be able to chew their food anyway." -- PHILIP THODY (the British professor of French, in 1979)

“The only difference between parasites and liberals is that parasites understand that killing their host wouldn't be good for them.” – JANIE JOHNSON (a big deal conservative wahine on the Twoot)

"Liberalism is an alliance of the top and the bottom against the middle" – FRED SIEGEL (in his “The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class”,The John Batchelor Show, Sept. 2020)

"Protests are the religious services of liberalism." -- ADRIAN VERMEULE (in 28 Nov. 2020)

“It's been amazing to watch how in the Trump age, onetime liberals have become the country's staunchest defenders of censorship and corporate personhood.” – MATT TAIBBI (On 10 Dec. 2020)

“Freedom is an oasis in a desert of slavery. Liberals are poisoning the water.” – DON SURBER (on 30 Sept. 2021)

Liberals, “Limousine”

“Leftism is a luxury only the decadent rich can afford.” – JACK JOLIS

“Only luxury can afford ruinous thoughts. Luxury, and poverty beyond redemption.” – JOHN UPDIKE (from his 1992 novel, “Memories of the Ford Administration”)

“Gentry liberals.” – KYLE SMITH

“Those boiled rabbits of the Left, the Europeanised intelligentsia who get their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow.” – GEORGE ORWELL

"The truly privileged elites know that deep down they are frauds. They suffer from existential guilt. Hence, one of the ways by which they assuage the guilt albatross around their necks is to demonstrate to the world that they are truly compassionate, truly loving, truly caring, truly profound. Hence, they love all ‘undocumented’ immigrants. They love Mother Earth. They love the ozone layer. They love BLM. They love socialism. They love inner cities. They hate the gentrification of neighbourhoods. They love mentors of color. They cherish diversity. They love LGBTQ movies. They adore queer architecture. They are better than you. More caring, more cultured, more empathetic. This permits them to sleep better at night. See, I’m not a fraud. I may be a gargantuan parasitic hedge fund bullshitter but I really care. I may be an overpaid BS actor but I fight for solar panels. Those fly over rubes deserve their lot in life. They are racists who bed their siblings. We are science supporters who fight against Mother Earth rapists whilst flying in our private jets. It is a classic ego defensive strategy that permits the ruling class to exist within their fractured selves. Save this thread. Memorize it. I’m offering you a deep psychological explanation of our times." -- GAD SAAD (Lebanese-Canadian "evolutionary psychologist" and Prof at Concordia University, in Psychology Today, which pulled this article after first publishing it.)

"When my good friends talk down capitalism, while living off its proceeds, that's a luxury belief. When privately-educated children cheer on the idea of communism, you've got to hope that's a luxury belief." -- MARY WAKEFIELD

“Liberal Fascism”

“Most modern liberals are training-wheel tyrants, if you scratch. But sometimes you don't even need to scratch.” – IAN TUTTLE

“Nazis were not liberals but liberals can be fascists.” – J. REID SHEPPARD (a conservative lawyer from Florida)

“Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the object of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.” – LIONEL TRILLING

“I am not saying liberals are Nazis. I am saying they would be if they knew how to fight.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

“A liberal is always a totalitarian at heart, though half of them don’t know it.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

"We need to stop calling them liberals and begin referring to them as exactly what they are: American communists that wish to partake in the destruction of western civilization." -- CANDACE OWENS (the fetching young black conservative lady, in Feb. 2022)

Liberation

“The right of people to be liberated from extreme despotism, the right to D-Day, overcomes the usual respect for borders and the ancient principle of sovereignty. The landing of Normandy justified the recent interventions in Kosovo, in Afghanistan and in Iraq, even without Security Council authorization”. – ANDRE GLUCKSMANN (“The French philosopher, in 2004)

“The depressingly familiar lineaments of so-called liberation struggle the world over had become, I began to understand, an excuse for excess and empty posturing.” – SHIVA NAIPAUL (in 1985)

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

“You said that on occasion America had dictated to other nations. Mr. President, America has not dictated to other nations. We have freed other nations from dictators.” – MITT ROMNEY (in a debate with B. Hussein Corpseman)

Liberia

"Everyone slept below the level of the windows because bullets sometimes went flying through the neighborhood. Nothing in the house actually worked, nothing worked anywhere in Liberia as far as I knew, and we lit our way with penlights and a hurricane lamp." -- DENIS JOHNSON

Libertarianism

“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)

“Which society would be more libertarian: one where the prudish innkeeper is free to ban unmarried couples from his hotel rooms or one where such insidious discrimination is illegal? When freedom and tolerance conflict, which is more important?” – W. JAMES ANTLE III (a regular at the AMSPEC)

“The difference between libertarianism and socialism is that libertarians will tolerate the existence of a socialist community, but socialists can’t tolerate a socialist community.” – DAVID BOAZ (the libertarian writer and member of the CATO Institute.)

"The desire to be left alone is a powerful one, and an American one. It is not an anti-social sentiment. It is not that we necessarily desire to be left alone full stop — it is that we desire to be left alone by people who intend to forcibly seize our assets for their own use. You need not be a radical to desire to live in your own home, to drive your own car, and to perform your own work without having to beg the permission of a politician — and pay them 40 percent for the privilege." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Any ‘conservative’ who says ‘there oughta be a law’ isn't a conservative.” – GARY EATON (a conservative rocker from Southern California, on the Twoot)

«Traditionalist conservatism and libertarianism are grounded in reality, not in abstractions or idealism.» -- JOHN HOOD (Of North Carolina, the Pres. Of the John William Pope Foundation)

«Libertarians want to have their own identity, separate and distinct from that of conservatism. They're a bit like the Canadians you meet abroad who go to almost obsessive lengths to show everyone that they aren't American.» – JONAH GOLDBERG

«Conservatives tend to be libertarian, but libertarians tend not to be conservative.» –JONAH GOLDBERG

«I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size.» – BARRY GOLDWATER

«My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.» – BARRY GOLDWATER

«Left alone, Americans do not become bandits, they become connoisseurs.» – CHARLES C.W. COOKE (the English-born libertarian on how punters behave at a largely free gun show...)

«Libertarians have tended to support leaving people to make a nuisance of themselves.» – MATTHEW PARRIS

"One of the many problems with libertarians is they seem to imagine that liberty is the natural state of man and it just sort of happens. It’s a bespoke ideology for sophomores who inherited a pacified world." -- KURT SCHLICHTER

"Libertarians seem baffled by the notion that sometimes you have to actually cause your opponent pain before he stops doing bad things. We have to be illiberal to force a return to classical liberalism. Libertarians are notoriously fussy about getting their soft hands dirty.

Libertarianism, or at least the rump ideology that remains after its absorption into conservatism, is now the domain of glorified sophomores running their mouths like American politics is some dorm room bull session at the University or College.

They deny the existence of any kind of actual enemy. Of course, to accept the existence of some kind of enemy would require they provide an explanation of what to do about said enemy." -- KURT SCHLICHTER (in October 2023)

«Libertarianism is a spectacular ideology. Maybe the best ever. But it is grossly ill-equipped to stop communism. Because you cannot ‘live and let live’ your way out of communism.» – JESSE KELLY

Liberty

“We are inclined to defend comfort more fiercely than liberty, especially when the comfort is our own and the liberty is someone else's.” – ANTHONY DANIELS

"Give me a large government telling me what I can and can't do while spending most of my money, or give me death!" – FRANK J. FLEMING (writing in PajamasMedia)

“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)

"The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name—liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names—liberty and tyranny.” – ABRAHAM LINCOLN

"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground." -- THOMAS JEFFERSON

“If you believe liberty is fragile, you protect it. If you take it for granted, you don't.” -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"Libertarianism is the greatest political philosophy ever invented, it just has two fatal blindspots: Foreign policy and children." -- RAMESH PONNURU (as quoted by his one-time colleague, Jonah Goldberg)

“You can have liberty without democracy, but not democracy without liberty.” -- ROGER SCRUTON (I’m not entirely sure that this is true...)

“The Declaration of Independence tells us that governments are instituted among men to secure our liberties and to do little else besides. If new programs are violating those liberties, then they will have to go.” – CHARLES C. W. COOKE

“Where the people fear the government you have tyranny. Where the government fears the people you have liberty.” – JOHN BASIL BARNHILL (American writer and publisher at the turn of the 20th century)

“Liberties are not given – they are taken.” – ALDOUS HUXLEY

“If you can’t sell liberty, you suck." -- ANDREW BREITBART

“You are not to inquire how your trade may be increased, nor how you are to become a great and powerful people, but how your liberties can be secured; for liberty ought to be the direct end of your Government.” – PATRICK HENRY (at the Virginia Ratification Convention – ratifying the US Constitution)

“The love of Liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.” – WILLIAM HAZLITT (English author, 1778-1830)

"In the coming animated contest for liberty, either learn to drive a rifle (sic) or ride a railcar." – BILL BUPPERT (an American Ayn Randian "libertarian" writer)

“Capitalism is necessary for liberty, but it is not sufficient for liberty.” -- MILTON FRIEDMAN

"If liberty means anything at all, it is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." – 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)

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

"The object of Liberty is to be free. Not to be good. Nobody is quite sure what good is and nobody should act like they know it." -- ROY CAM (my buddy on the Twoot)

“Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grand-children are once more slaves.” – D. H. LAWRENCE (in 1915)

"Only a few prefer liberty. The majority seek nothing more than fair masters."– SALLUST (The Roman historian, 86-35 B.C., full name Gaius Sallustius Crispus. And amusingly enough, the lead role in the hilarious 1971 Frogue film “La Folie Des Grandeurs” {”Delusions Of Grandeur”}, played by Louis de Funès, was called “Don Salluste”)

“Liberty diminishes in proportion as man progresses and becomes civilized.” – ANTONIO DE OLIVEIRA SALAZAR (a quite provocative – and thought-provoking – statement from Portugal’s long-time dictator, from 1932 to 1968)

“Liberty depends on memory. Doing away with the past is the chief technique of modern tyrants.” – DAVID BARCLAY (the late billionaire co-owner, with his twin brother, of the UK DAILY TELEGRAPH and the UK SPECTATOR)

“When liberty becomes a rationed resource, those with power always win.” – KATE ANDREWS

"Defending liberty can mean defending 'bad' things: the right to offend, to drink, to get fat, to smoke." -- KATE ANDREWS

"Liberty has never flourished where the orange grows." -- MONTESQIEU (Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, no wonder he only used one name.) (I'm pretty sure he was referring to the Mediterranean when he said this -- not Florida.)

Libraries

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

Libya

“Libya always bears something evil / new” – ARISTOTLE

“Libyans are a people rude in peace and rough in war”. – VIRGIL (the reason Libya figured so prominently in the thoughts of such as Aristotle and Virgil is that back in the, er, Olden Days, Libya was “Carthage”.)

“As far as I'm concerned, most Libyans are human biohazards.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS (the modern-day “ancient”.)

"After a long career of anti-Western posturing and actual terrorism, a chastened Gaddafi shitcanned his nukes in 2003 and by 2011 he'd become the closest thing to an 'ally' that America had in his whole nasty neighborhood -- so Felonia Clinton, acting for the Obamarroids and wanting to appear 'tough' -- had him killed. 'We came, we saw, he died!' she exulted." -- JACK JOLIS

Life

“The terrible thing about life is that everyone has his reasons”. – JEAN RENOIR (ze famoos Frogue cinema auteur. And, I hope, this was snappier in the original Frog…)

“Life is a process of coming to terms with the fallibility of human beings.” – SIMON BARNES (British sportwriter.)

“The world is a tragedy to him who feels and a comedy to him who thinks.” – HORACE WALPOLE

“It is certain that it is our brains (conscious or not, awake or not), and not our genes, that make us individual human beings. That’s why, in recent years, our society has legally defined death as brain death. Once our brains are gone, we are gone, even though our bodies – with all their genes – may live on.” – RONALD BAILEY (the science correspondent of REASON Magazine in 2001.)

“The whole world’s in a terrible state of chassis.” – SEAN O’CASEY (from his play “Juno and the Paycock”. Obviously I don’t know what he meant by this – or, indeed, by the title of his play – but I find it terribly funny. I think…)

“What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.” – SENECA (the old Grik grouch named after the upstate NY lake…)

“There is no remedy for death – or birth – except to hug the spaces in between.” – JIM CRACE

“The world is divided into those who can plan their lives and those who can only follow the plans of others.” – ARISTOTLE

“Nobody goes through life undefeated.” – DON IMUS

“A good strategy for reducing the number of discomfiting surprises in life, is to read the books that liberals denounce.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

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

“While the winners write the history, it is life’s oldsters who have the best stories.” – SIMON BAKER (Not the Australian actor, but rather a Brit writing in the SPECTATOR in June 2010)

"There are three things which are real: God, human folly, and laughter. The first two are beyond our comprehension. So we must do what we can with the third." – JOHN F. KENNEDY

"I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult." -- E. B. WHITE (The author of "Stuart Little" and "Charlotte's Web", as well as, interestingly, the fearsome "The Elements of Style",

“Ask for forgiveness, not permission.” – HALEY BARBOUR (the one-time Republican Governor of Mississippi)

“I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.” – GEORGE BEST (Northern Ireland's soccer answer to Mickey Mantle)

“Life is personal, and not political. Life is also personal and not theoretical. If people help you, you like them.” – BEN STEIN

“Life is not confused, if you know how. But it is muddled.” -- OLIVER HARDY

“Life is like a cucumber: One time it’s in your salad. Nine times it’s up your bum.” – AIDAN HARTLEY

"The main objective of human life was not to be wealthy or wise or influential or even happy, but simply to get off the planet with as much of one's dignity intact as possible. You didn't want to be beheaded or roasted on a spit. You didn't want to be eaten by cannibals. You didn't want to be garroted by a scarf that got caught in the wheels of your car. Much less your scooter." -- JOE QUEENAN

“One does wish, does one not, to avoid rannygazoo.” – P. G. WODEHOUSE

“The grown-up world was no different from school; it was a world where bullies came out best, where excuses satisfied no one, least of all oneself, where cowardice corroded one's soul and left one sick.” – BRIAN MOORE (The Northern Irish novelist who lived in Canada.)

“To live is not to hold the last redoubt. To live is to maneuver.” – WHITTAKER CHAMBERS

“Life can little more supply,

Than just a few good fucks, and then we die.” – JOHN WILKES (1725-1797; the radical English journalist, politician and, I guess, amateur pote. Also the ancestor and namesake of Lincoln's assassin.)

“Life is long enough if you know what to do with it.” – SENECA (old Roman philosopher fella, 4 BC – 65 AD)

“There must be a place in the modern world for things that have no power associated with them, things that are not meant to advance someone's cause, or to make someone's fortune. There must be room, in other words, for paperweights and fishing rods and penny sweets and leather hammers used as children's toys. And there must be time for wandering among old churchyards and making the perfect cup of tea and balancing caterpillars on a stick and falling in love.” – GEORGE ORWELL (crikey – the old boy could, apparently, even sound like a young girl when he got wistful...)

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

“If life on earth is not a road to heaven then it is a treadmill, a merry-go-round minus the merry.” -- PETER KREEFT (A Dutch philosopher in his book entitled, originally enough, “Heaven”. And, incidentally, “Kreeft” means “lobster” in Dutch)

“Walking the wire is life, everything else is just waiting around.” – KARL WALLENDA (the great high-wire aerialist, and progenitor of generations of other high-wire aerialists)

"You cannot record life and live it properly at the same time." -- MARY WAKEFIELD

“Life is just a clueless searching for one damn thing after another.” – HARVEY MANSFIELD (one of the very VERY few conservative Harvard professor. Of government. And here he was paraphrasing the conservative writer William Voegeli.)

“When people urge you to ‘treat each day as if it were your last’, and idiots quite often do urge you to do this, they do not mean to wire yourself up to a drip in a hospice and transfer your savings into your wife’s name, which is what surely awaits us all on our last day. They mean for you, instead, to be self-indulgent on an epic level. If I were treating each day as if it were my last, this column would commit so many hate crimes that the magazine would be closed down and its staff arrested. And if everyone did so often the country in general could resemble Mogadishu – where the vibrant local population really do treat each day as if it were their last, and with good reason.” – ROD LIDDLE

“Life is one long game of dodgeball.” – DENNIS MILLER

“Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.” -- JOHN LENNON

“The guiding principle in life should be ‘Don't be a jerk’." – KURT SCHLICHTER

“Life must be seen, before it can be known.” – DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON (This may well be the most banal entry in this whole Compendium, but... it looks handsome...)

"The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat." -- LILY TOMLIN

"The meaning of life only raises its question when one is sheltered, secure, and sleeping and eating well." -- J. P. DONLEAVY

"Jesus by the time you learn all about life the fucking thing is all over." -- J. P. DONLEAVY

"We are strung together by God on a thread of song and dance." -- PLATO (Not sure about the translation from the Greek here -- didn't Plato live before monotheism? -- but this is how it's cited by the writer Michael Knox Beran in NR, Feb. 2014)

"Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older think back, you'll be able to enjoy it a second time." -- DALAI LAMA, THE

“Men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy, and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion.” -- MICHAEL OAKESHOTT (The great English political philosopher, 1901-1990)

“Everything is penultimate.” -- MICHAEL OAKESHOTT (sort of fatuous, but... also dead cool.)

"I long ago come to the conclusion that all of life is six-to-five against." -- DAMON RUNYON

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

“You only live once, but if you do it right once is enough.” – MAE WEST

"The art of living consists...in some considerable degree in knowing how to be cheated." -- GOUVERNEUR MORRIS (the greatest bon vivant among the Signatories of the Declaration of Independence, and certainly the one with the coolest first name.)

"Life is a ride from goo-goo to ga-ga." -- JOSEPH EPSTEIN

"When I survey my past life, I discover nothing but a barren waste of time with some disorders of body and disturbances of the mind very near to madness." -- SAMUEL JOHNSON

“A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.” -- JACKIE ROBINSON (Not that you'd ever known it from the bio-flick “42”, but he was a Republican, by the way – probably the only one every seen in Brooklyn, before or since.)

“Life is a combination of magic and pasta.” -- FEDERICO FELLINI

“It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. Its called living.” -- SIR TERRY PRATCHETT (British comic/fantasist author, who died in 2015)

“You know, no matter what you do, you’re always someone’s son of a bitch.” – JEAN ANOUILH (“Tu sais, on a beau faire, on est toujours le salaud de quelqau’un”)

“Fearing no insult, asking for no crown, receive with indifference both flattery and slander, and do not argue with a fool. -- ALEKSANDR PUSHKIN (poet, novelist, and playwright, 1799-1837)

“All life is paid for in blood.” – ADOLPH HITLER

"I'm working as hard as I can to get my life and my cash to run out at the same time. If I can just die after lunch Tuesday, everything will be perfect." -- DOUG SANDERS (professional golfist)

"You can't really win, but you can fight." -- MARK HELPRIN

"You learn to live in mystery and anger." -- MARK HELPRIN

"In the end the whole world is nothing more than what you remember and what you love, things fleeting and indefensible." -- MARK HELPRIN

“Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.” -- ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

"We all of us to some extent chart our voyages through life based on the weather occurring in our loved ones." -- DONALD WESTLAKE

“Luck or cunning were the most effective attributes in this world and cunning, though a worked more slowly, was the more reliable.” – DAVID LODGE (rather amusing English novelist)

“In fact, there was no such thing as society: just a collection of little self-contained boxes, roped untidily together and set adrift to float aimlessly in the waters of time, the occupants of each box convinced that theirs was the most important box, heedless of the claim of the rest. Success did not consist in getting into the box where most power was exercised: there were many people who were powerful and unhappy. Success consisted in determining which box would be most pleasant for a time, then you could make it as comfortable as possible until you could get out.” – DAVID LODGE

"The claim that every man kills the thing he loves seemed to him a wild guess compared with the near certainty of a man turning into the thing he hates." -- EDWARD ST. AUBYN

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

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

“Life teaches you how to live it if you live long enough.” -- TONY BENNETT

“In three words I can sum up everything I have learned about life.. it goes on.” -- ROBERT FROST

“Life is first boredom, then fear.” -- PHILIP LARKIN (the great English pote and pal of Kinglesy Amis’)

"It is never a struggle between good and evil, but between the preferable and the detestable." -- RAYMOND ARON (grand fromage Froggie egg-head, 1905-1983)

“Nothing pleasant in life is preceded by being lined up against a wall.” -- DAVID NOBBS

“He felt that he couldn’t function in the physical world unless he took it for granted. It was hard enough wielding a cricket bat without knowing about its molecular structure.” -- DAVID NOBBS (in his terribly funny novel “Second to Last In The Sack Race”)

“What was life, at bottom, but plumbing?” -- JOHN UPDIKE (“at bottom” -- nice one, John)

“How quickly we become history, while wanting always to be news.” -- JOHN UPDIKE

“Real life is in essence anti-climactic.” -- JOHN UPDIKE

"The purpose of life is to pay attention." -- JOHN UPDIKE

"The business of life is letting go." -- JOHN UPDIKE

“No matter how many ways our lives are demonstrated to be insignificant, we can only live them as if they were not.” – JOHN UPDIKE

“Life was a mess and a scramble at the best, men put here on Earth with hungers they must satisfy or they will die, and then they die anyway.” – JOHN UPDIKE

"It's like we've all been digging and digging, shoveling out a hole, and we can finally stop. Only now there's this hole here." -- CATHERINE NEWMAN (the author of "We All Want Impossible Things")

"The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions." -- PHILIP ROTH

“All life is a debt. We spend our lives paying interest. The capital is repaid on death.” – ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

“Maybe life was all pointless in the end, but you still had a duty to make pretty patterns from your travel through time. You had to serve or create to keep futility at bay.” – MARTYN HARRIS

"Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag. Use your memory! Use your memory! It is those bitter seeds alone which might sprout and grow someday." -- ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN

"Carefree days -- in retrospect, one of the secrets of life was to know them at the time." -- ALAN JUDD

“All your normally daily business. Look at any of it closely enough and it soon becomes unreal and impossible to take seriously.” – ALAN JUDD

"The lives of most people are neither character-driven nor plot-driven, but driven by random currents, trends, and moods. Lives are moody, rather than plotty." -- STEVE TESICH

“Life was a tease, a series of receding targets that were designed to keep you moving, like a laboratory experiment with rats.” – GUY BELLAMY

“I can see that my life is disintegrating around me, but I can’t see where I have gone wrong. I have plotted a boringly conventional route through life’s little hazards, but the pitfalls and the pratfalls must have been concealed in the folds of my map.” – GUY BELLAMY

"I'll tell you why we're here. We're here to till the soil, to create beautiful things, to reproduce ourselves." -- GUY BELLAMY

"The object of life is to gratify yourself without getting arrested." -- B. F. SKINNER (the old "behaviorist" charlatan, quoted here by Walker Percy in his "The Thanatos Syndrome")

"Life is fits and starts, mostly fits." -- WALKER PERCY

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

“Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.” – CYRIL CONNOLLY

“La vie est brève, Un peu d’amour,

Un peu de reve,

Et puis Bonjour.

La vie est vaine,

Un peu d’espoir,

Un peu de haine,

Et puis, Bonsoir.” – ALFRED DE MUSSET (French pote, 1810-1857)

“Life is a mystery and it’s an unsolvable one. You just simply live it through and as you draw your last breath you say ‘What was that all about?’ ” – MARLON BRANDO

“I’ve only learned three things in life that are always true:

1/ People on the telephone can always tell if you’re lying down.

2/ Nothing in life is absolute, except absolute bullshit.

3/ Women always look better when they’re in a car, and you’re looking a them from outside.” – JACK JOLIS

"Life consists of choosing the marginally less-bad options." -- JACK JOLIS

“The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who can see it coming and jump aside.” – HUNTER S. THOMPSON

"There is more to life -- to anybody's life -- than can be found in even the most detailed scrutiny of a man's worst defects." -- ERIC JACOBS (the biographer of Kingsley Amis)

“Man was born free, but not necessarily born with will or cash.” – V. S. PRITCHETT (in 1942)

“Life is ugly. We all know that. You don’t need to go to the movies to learn that life is ugly.” – BILLY WILDER

"The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind." -- HUMPHREY BOGART

"Life was all a matter of contrasts. You can't enjoy anything without a contrast to it." -- WILLIAM BOYD

"Living, it seems to me, is really no more than a long process of steady embitterment." -- WILLIAM BOYD

“Life was made up of equal parts of idiocy, fear, irony and pain.” – NELSON DEMILLE (The words of one of the many put-upon characters in his great 1978 novel “By The Rivers Of Babylon”)

“A young man writes his life in pencil, a middle-aged man in ink, and old man reads the pages, and a dying man rewrites them.” – EVERETT EHRLICH

“Every moment in life was purchased at the cost of the moment that might have been.” – EVERETT EHRLICH

"The tragedy of life is the certainty that you'd do better next time couple with the certainty that there is no next time." --SAMUEL BECKETT

“A good rule in life: if you’re not sure what their feelings are – don’t.” – MICHAEL FRAYN

“Some men go skimming over the years of existence to sink gently into a placid grave, ignorant of life to the last, without ever have been made to see all it contains of perfidy, of violence and of terror.” – JOSEPH CONRAD (heh, the old grouch says it like that’s a bad thing... Meanwhile, I knew there was a reason that Conrad is my favorite “old” author”.)

"Life should be an adventure, not a catered safari." -- BING WEST

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

"Life is not the making of beds but the unmaking of them." -- LIANA BURGESS (Anthony Burgess' 2nd wife, the daughter of an Italian countess, as quoted by him.)

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

“Life is better understood as a predicament, not a race.” – CHARLES MOORE

"Courage is knowing it might hurt, and doing it anyway. Stupidity is the same. And that's why life is hard." -- JEREMY GOLDBERG (A self-described "writer, speaker, coach" who, "hosts retreats, and teaches workshops" -- in short, a bit of a professional charlatan and bullshit artist. Still, I'm not sure this quote is wrong....)

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

"Life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer you get to the end, the faster it unrolls." -- WARREN PLATTS (a good guy, Twoot-pal of mine -- a USN Gulf War vet)

"We're not all in the same boat, but we're all in the same storm." -- PETER JAMES CARROLL (Pseudonym: Henry Normal. Writer, poet & TV producer from Birmingham, England)

"We all live two lives: the one we learn from, and the one we live after that." -- BERNARD MALAMUD (in his "The Natural")

“If experience taught us anything, it was not to think too much, but to sharpen up the responses.” – LIONEL DAVIDSON (the moral – written, indeed, on the last page – of his superb 1960 spy novel, “The Night Of Wenceslas”)

"Maybe there's nothing more or less to it than what you should expect, a good thing between two bad things. Air and sunshine, and on either side, being in a box." -- GRAHAM SWIFT

"Life's not ever so unfair that there's not a worse unfairness than yours, and that you can't ever get so stuck in your ways that there aren't worse ways of being stuck." -- GRAHAM SWIFT

Life, Secret Of

"There are two secrets of life nobody tells you: screwing and dying. What they tell you about is love and the hereafter. But it is screwing and dying you have to deal with." -- WALKER PERCY

"That was the secret! All this time she had made a mistake. She had thought (and her mother had expected) that she must do something extraordinary, be something extraordinary. Whereas the trick lay in leading the most ordinary life imaginable, get an ordinary job, in itself a joy in its very ordinariness, and then be as extraordinary or ordinary as one pleased. That was the secret." -- WALKER PERCY (in his extraordinary 1980 novel "The Second Coming")

Life After Death

“Life, if the grave really ends it, is monstrous and dreadful... either a preparation for something greater and more lasting, or it is meaningless.” -- GEORGE ORWELL

"The ache stays there because the person stays there." -- MATTHEW PARRIS

"You came to life. It was no more logical or explicable than if, after you die, you find yet another surprise that is illogical and inexplicable." -- MARK HELPRIN

"You wke up with the answer to the question tht everyone asks. The answer is Yes, and the answer is Just Like Here But Worse." -- SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA (the Sri Lankan author of the novel "The Seven Moons Of Maali Almeida")

Life Stories

“The longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life/ told to others, but – mainly – to ourselves.” -- JULIAN BARNES

"When I survey my past life, I discover nothing but a barren waste of time with some disorders of body and disturbances of the mind very near to madness." -- SAMUEL JOHNSON

“Lifestyle”

"My policy on cake is having it and eating it," – BORIS JOHNSON

"My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income."-- ERROL FLYNN

”My accountants can't understand how it costs so much to look so cheap." – DOLLY PARTON

"I'm working as hard as I can to get my life and my cash to run out at the same time. If I can just die after lunch Tuesday, everything will be perfect." -- DOUG SANDERS (professional golfer)

"'Lifestyle' is the main battlefield of politics on the 364 days of the year that are not Election Day." -- KEVIN D.WILLIAMSON

“Worth and sufficiency consist of being able to hawk and hunt, ride a horse, play at cards and dice, swagger, drink, swear and take tobacco with a grace.” – ROBERT BURTON (in his magisterial “The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621)

Limits

«As soon as you set a limit to your endurance, you are lost.» – DAVID LODGE

“Listening”

“In fact, the idea that the nation is constantly engaged in some vast collective and reflective debate is simply a fantasy entertained, with varying degrees of insincerity and wishful thinking by the political and media class. Were the ‘listening’ politicians actually able to hear the body politic at its daily occupations the sounds would largely be of digestion, punctuated by the occasional snore or grunt. Nor is there anything dispiriting in that matters in life is the discourse of politicians.” – ROBIN HARRISnnnnnnnnnnnn (a prominent political adviser in John Major’s Conservative British government)

“No man ever listened himself out of a job.” – CALVIN COOLIDGE

"A word in your shell-like ear" -- BILL CANAWAY (the screenwriter of the splendid 1965 "The Ipcress File", in which Maj. Dalby {Nigel Green} is speaking to Harry Palmer {Michael Caine} )

Literacy

“I wonder if illiterate people get the full effect of alphabet soup.” – JERRY SEINFELD

Literature

“Literature has its own life, you know: you can’t just use it for ends of your own.” – MARTIN AMIS (actually, I should have put this under “post-modernism”, as, inasmuch as that absurd concept means anything at all, this is a refutation of it. Also, come to think of it, it’s a nice rebuke to this very Compendium. Heh…)

“France now has more than 3,000 literary prizes, and no literature.” – PAUL JOHNSON (in 2003. And the rest of the world is, I’m sure, not far behind…)

“In literature, ‘importance’ is not important; only good writing is.” – KINGSLEY AMIS

"A classic is a book everyone is assumed to have read and forgets if they have read or not." -- ALAN BENNETT

“The novel was the first mass-produced cultural artifact.” – DAVID LODGE

“Everything in Homer (700 BC) is a ‘first’ for European literature, Europe being illiterate at the time.” – PETER JONES

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." -- ERNEST HEMINGWAY (the one book, of course, that hopped-up Leftists so often succeed in banning.)

Litigation

“There is a great deal of money to be made from misery, and even more from vague dissatisfaction. First we doctors prescribe tranquilisers ; then patients become addicted to them and sue the drug companies ; then the lawyers for the patients hire us (doctors) to testify that the tranquilisers did, or did not, ruin the plaintiffs’ lives. The present wave of litigation puts me in mind of a cliché it’s an ill wind…» -- THEODORE DALRYMPLE, M.D.

“Leroy's Second Rule, whether you like it or not - never take on the government as a private corporation; you will lose, even when they do as well.” – LEROY W. SINCLAIR (my old ΑΔΦ fraternity brother, pal, mentor, and one of the few good, i.e., sane, Democrats I’ve ever had the pleasure of “discussing” with… and I’m sorry I never got around to asking him what his First Rule was about.)

“Law suits. They’re what we got when we stupidly made dueling illegal. (At least with dueling, when the shootout was over, the world was down one useless idiot…)” – KATHY SHAIDLE (author, blogstress and contributor to PJMedia)

“We live in a world in which nothing that happens to us is our own fault. Slapstick has outlived its day. A slip on a banana peel isn’t funny any longer: it’s a lawsuit.” – TIM CAHILL (in 1997)

“In the last phase of the evolution of rascality, raiding becomes litigation.” – PROF. JOHN GREENWAY (the late, great Gonzo Anthropologist from Colorado)

“A lawsuit is the suicide of time.” – THOMAS EDISON

“I was never ruined but twice: once when I lost a lawsuit, and once when I won one.” – VOLTAIRE (No, I don’t know either – but he’s famous enough and this is idiosyncratic enough to sneak in....)

Liverpool

“The legend of Liverpool is clung to with increasing desperation. In few other places have I met so many people who churn out the inherited clichés about themselves with such zest.” – SHIVA NAIPAUL (in 1978)

Logic

«In logic contradictions cannot exist.» -- SIGMUND FREUD (alright, sports fans, ponder THAT for awhile, why dontcha?...)

“History records many well conceived and apparently logical grand plans for the betterment of mankind. Sadly such ideas almost always fail. Why is this? One possibility is that they fail precisely because they are logical. The dictates of logic require the existence of universally applicable laws. But humans, unlike atoms, are not consistent enough in their affinities for such laws to hold very broadly." – RORY SUTHERLAND

"Trust me. I work in advertising. Things don't have to be logical for people to like them. After all, try making a business case for the Eiffel Tower." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

“Logic is simply the architecture of human reason. If you try to base your life and hopes on logical absurdities you will go mad. People are going mad and talking balls to psychiatrists not because of accidents to the chamber-pot in the nursery, but because there is no logical structure to their beliefs.” – EVELYN WAUGH

“Nobody is intimidated by logic except logicians.” – PAUL VALERY (this sounds more clever than it is.)

“Logic has almost nothing to do with human behavior.” – PROF. JOHN GREENWAY (Sadly, this is true. From the late Gonzo Anthropologist of Colorado)

"A page of history is worth a volume of logic." --OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR. (US Supreme Court Justice, 1841-1935, and an ΑΔΦ fraternity brother of mine)

Logistics

“You overextend your supply line and it becomes a better target than you.” – EVERETT EHRLICH

“You will not find it difficult to prove that battles, campaigns, and even wars have been won or lost primarily because of logistics.” – DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER

"Amateurs discuss facts; professionals discuss logistics." -- NAPOLEON

London

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

“It is only when you leave London that you realise what a monumental pain in the arse it is to live there. Only rarely do people move back into London.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

“I was fascinated how, despite the apparent disappearance of white people from London, the capital keeps going, run by immigrants and the downtrodden. The rich are in their country cottages tweeting about social distancing and playing videos of cats playing violins – but my African brothers and sisters are running the supermarkets, fixing the roads and collecting the rubbish.” – AIDAN HARTLEY (the English farmer who lives in Kenya, when he got trapped in London, in April 2020)

“London is the great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.” – SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE (Actually, in the mouth of Watson....)

"As a means of shortening your life-span, but good, I heartily recommend London." -- KINGSLEY AMISµ

"Soho was Cinderella. Hampstead and Chelsea were and are the ugly sisters." -- JEFFREY BERNARD (in 1985. Actually, he was born in Hampstead in 1932, and died in Soho in 1997)

"London isn't a place at all. It's a million little places." -- BILL BRYSON

"The social status of boroughs and postal districts in London is clearly a matter of pathological concern." -- J. P. DONLEAVY

"London -- an abstract civic space imposed upon the fields." -- W. H. AUDEN

"There are really only three super-tribes in London: the ones who will never be able to get mortgages, the ones who live and die by the mortgage rate, and the ones who do not need mortgages. Those are the ranks of slavery and freedom, the rest is all just questions of degree." -- JAMES HAWES (in 1996)

Loneliness

“Loneliness is solitude continued further than intended.” – STUART JEFFRIES (An author and GUARDIAN journalist – and this sounds rather obvious... but only after the fact....)

“Loneliness is solitude with a problem.” - MAGGIE NELSON (the leftist American writer... and I wonder if she and Mr. Jeffries, above, know each other and compare notes....)

"Loneliness is a step towards death." -- J. P. DONLEAVY

"If you don't want to be lonely, don't get married." -- ANTON CHEKHOV

Looting

«Looters elect looters to loot from producers. That’s why Democrats keep winning.» – DR. GENE LINGERFELT (A good Christian doc, on the Twoot)

Louisiana

“Living in Louisiana is not unlike living in a falling-down, half-empty house with a violent but occasionally charming alcoholic. One day you get punched in the face and then out of nowhere you might get a really nice dinner. But mostly we take it in the face.” – JULIA REED (a post-Katrina resident of New Orleans, writing in Aug. 06)

“The westernmost of the Levantine states.” – A. J. LIEBLING (for those of you about to look it up, I’ll do you a solid and tell you that “Levantine” means, not as I use it, i.e., “greasy, oily Lebanese-Arab-type”, but “of or pertaining to the eastern Mediterranean”)

“On Louisiana, unfortunately and all too often, the Latins learned Anglo-Saxon racial morality and the Americans learned Latin political morality. The fruit of such a mishmash is something to behold: Baptist governors and state legislators who loot the state with Catholic gaiety and Protestant industry.” – WALKER PERCY (the great Catholic American novelist)

“Half of Louisiana is underwater, and the other half in under indictment.” – BILLY TAUZIN (the ex-congressman, who, in typically Louisianan fashion, began as a Democrat and ended up a Republican)

“Louisiana often seems to be America's banana republic.” – MICHAEL BARONE (the author/editor of “The Almanac of American Politics”)

Los Angeles

“Even the hookers don't walk in Los Angeles.” – P. G. WODEHOUSE (you don’t often hear the word “hookers” trip from old Plum’s lips, but here it did — when he was reminiscing on his time as a Hollywood screenwriter)

“Los Angeles is seventy-two suburbs in search of a city.” – DOROTHY PARKER

“In L.A., even the pot-holes are shallow.” – RICH RATAY (some L.A. ad/film guy, on the Twoot)

"Most Americans are probably happy never to have set foot in L.A., but it is still an old friend because we know it from the small screen." -- BRADLEY ANDERSON (columnist for the American Conservative and the American Spectator)

“Los Angeles is an indescribable city that straggles all over the face of the earth. They wear the same kind of motor-car the year-around, here, winter as well as summer.” – EDGAR WALLACE (The English screen-writer of “King Kong”, in his posthumous “My Hollywood Diary”, 1932)

"Dislocated from the rest of the USA by desert, mountains and freeways, LA has no center. It can often be the loneliest and least romantic city in the world. That isolation seems to infect the residents." -- WILLIAM CASH (ex-US West Coast correspondent for the London Times and editor of the Catholic Herald)

Losing

“I hate to lose more than I love to win.” – JIMMY CONNORS

"When you lose, don't lose the lesson." -- DALAI LAMA, THE

“We didn't lose the game; we just ran out of time.” -- VINCE LOMBARDI

"Governments love picking winners, but losers are good at picking governments."-- DIETER HELM (a professor at Oxford University)

"The minute you start talking abut what you are going to do if you lose, you have lost." -- GEORGE SHULTZ (one of Reagan's Secretaries of State)

Lost Causes

“It's better to have lost and lost, than never to have lost at all” – CHICO MARX

“The thing that’s always worried me about being one of the few is the way we keep on getting fewer.” – CORNELIUS RYAN (The screenwriter who put these words in the mouth of RAF Flight Officer David Campbell, as played by Richard Burton, in the 1962 classic “The Longest Day”)

“Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for.” – SIDNEY BUCHMAN (The screenwriter who put these words in the mouth of Jefferson Smith, as played by Jimmy Stewart, in the 1939 film “Mr. Smith goes To Washington”)

“When nothing is politically possible, you don't need to trim sails. You can just tell the truth.” – JENNIFER ROBACK MORSE

"There are no lost causes, because there are no gained causes." -- RUSSELL KIRK

"There are no lost causes, because there are no gained causes." -- T. S. ELIOT (I’m guessing that Old Tom beat Squire Kirk to this one, but I’ve seen it attributed to both guys.)

Love

“Love is, essentially, only for the very stupid or the very poor.” – W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

“Speaking of love, the correct ration of woman to man is five to one.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

“The opposite of love is indifference.” – ELIE WIESEL

“Churches are built from and for love. The government is not. It cannot love you and should not try. To believe that it can is to commit one of the gravest category errors in political thought.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“What free love is free of is love.” – TOM STOPPARD

"No one falls so deeply, madly, truly in love as a whore." – CHARLES McCARRY (the great American spy novelist)

“Love is just a mental hard-on” – RICHARD McKENNA (the American author of the splendid “The Sand Pebbles”)

“There is no reciprocity. Men love women – women love children – children love hamsters.” – ALICE THOMAS ELLIS (the British novelist)

“Marriage and love are not about who's right and who's wrong. Love and marriage is about who's left.” – BEN STEIN

“High School crushes are really what life is all about. We can talk about investing and budgets and wars, but it's really all about high school crushes.” – BEN STEIN

“Sport is like love: it can only really hurt you if you care. Or, for that matter, bring joy.” – SIMON BARNES

“At parting, it is the one who is not in love who makes tender speeches.” – MICHAEL OAKESHOTT (the great, conservative, British philosopher)

“It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.” – AGATHA CHRISTIE

"I'm not loving anybody I'm not legally required to." – DAVE SCHIFF (The writer of the particular episode of “That 70s Show” in which Red Forman, played by the great Kurtwood Smith, utters this classic.)

"Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another." – H. L. MENCKEN

"He was too inexperienced to know how we tell people we love them before we mean it." -- NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE

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

“We never love anyone. Not really. We only love our idea of another person. It is some conception of our won that we love. We love ourselves, in fact.” – WILLIAM BOYD (In his 1995 short story “Cork”)

“Infatuation is a weakness one readily attributes to other people.” – FLANN O’BRIEN

“It’s one of the most chilling, but also enchanting things about a woman, they way they will discard their previous lives for love.” – MARTYN HARRIS

"The trouble with saying 'I love you', was that you had to go on saying it. Once you had said 'I love you', nothing less would do." -- GUY BELLAMY

“Love was like a bus driven by a child: the more passangers, the more fatalities.” – DAVID LODGE

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

"The tragic thing about people in love is that they say things that they think they mean." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS (the very amusing English novelist)

“In love, to be serious is to be grotesque.” – PAUL MEURICE (the 19th century Frog novelist, and pal of Victor Hugo.)

“This love business is the most beautiful creation of man, but it is too socially disruptive to be a cultural universal. Among the most primitive of people, all contention is controlled and disruptive appetites are channeled into less dangerous satisfactions.” – PROF. JOHN GREENWAY (The late Gonzo Anthropologist from Colorado who, rather perversely, seemed to think that the Bushmen of Australia didn’t have much of a sex drive....)

“Love is a certain inborn suffering derived from the sight of an excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex.” – ANDREAS CAPELLANUS (The “personal chaplain” of Princess Marie, the daughter of Queen Eleanor d’Aquitaine of France, writing in circa 1190)

“ ‘Love’ is an old whore of a word.” – JOHN UPDIKE

"What is love, except thinking you're in it?" -- DAVID LODGE (clever man, Squire Lodge...)

"Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end love will come back in another form." -- FRANZ KAFKA (Awww. Should be useful for an epigraph, somewhere)

“You cannot love if you cannot hate.” – TANYA GOLD (seems self-evident, but also seems worth repeating... in these parlous “hate speech” times....)

"Fucking on its own does not equal love any more than tenderness on its own does: the world is full of people fucking and people calling each other piggywig and babykitten, and good luck to them all, but they have to remember they could all be doing the same to someone else tomorrow, because all that sort of thing is no one, it is anyone, you can buy T-shirts saying Love You Kittenface and stuff, which proves it, and we should not lie about that. It is not love." -- JAMES HAWES (an unpleasant bit of prose from an unpleasant novelist)

Lowest Common Denominator

“All convoys, to remain in convoy, must go at the speed of the slowest.” – CHARLES MOORE

Loyalty

“Anyone can support me when I am right. What I need are people who will support me when I am wrong.” – BENJAMIN DISRAELI

“I don't need you when I'm right. I need you when I'm wrong.” – EARL LONG (the “Kingfish”, longtime corrupt Democrat politico-generalissimo of Louisiana, and obviously a Disraeli plagiarist....)

“We never oppose hiring men of dual loyalties; it’s dual results we abhor.” – RICH LOWRY (in his spy novel “Banquo’s Ghosts”)

“Loyalty is the free person's virtue.” – FRED SCHWARZ (then of NR)

“Sports loyalty is not about winning; it's about losing. You earn a share in the team's victories by remaining steadfast through its defeats; diehards hate nothing worse than a fair-weather fan. And since in every case, there will be more losing than winning (only one team can win the championship), being a sports fan is the purest (i.e. the least rational or calculated) form of loyalty there is.” – FRED SCHWARZ

“I know whom to flee, but not whom to follow.” – CICERO (about who to side with in the famous Caesar-Pompey kerfuffle....)

“I prefer my family to my friends, my friends to my neighbors, my neighbors to my compatriots, and my compatriots to Europeans.” – JEAN-MARIE LE PEN ("Je préfère ma famille à mes amis, mes amis à mes voisins, mes voisins à mes compatriotes, et mes compatriotes aux Européens." And I suspect this is pretty universal, the Kumbaya-crowd notwithstanding....)

"Someday I'd like to maybe lose everything for a period of time to see who's loyal and who's not loyal." – DONALD TRUMP (in a 1992 PBS interview, with Charley Rose)

"I could stand in the middle of 5th avenue and shoot people and I wouldn’t lose voters. It's, like, incredible." -- DONALD TRUMP (23 January 2016)

“Count your friends when you're down.” – RICHARD NIXON

"Loyalty is the elixir that makes death easy, but it's also the quality that gives life purpose." -- MARK HELPRIN

"Loyalty is like magic. It makes suffering immaterial." -- MARK HELPRIN

“A man may be a thief or a murderer and yet shine in the great virtue of loyalty.” – ANTHONY BURGESS

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

Luck

“My luck is so bad that if I bought a cemetery, people would stop dying.” – RODNEY DANGERFIELD

"You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from." -- CORMAC McCARTHY

"Luck is the fate of the unbeliever." -- CHARLES McCARRY (this sounds better than it actually is)

“The sun don't shine on the same dog's ass all the time.” – JIM “CATFISH” HUNTER (The great Yankee starting pitcher. From Hertford, North Carolina. He came up with the Oakland A’s, and at the time, their eccentric owner Charley Finley said to him ”Your name’s boring – what’s you nickname?” “I don’t have one.” “Well, you do now – from now on you’re ‘Catfish Hunter’ ”. Strewth.)

“All I want is one break. Which is not my neck.” – J. P. DONLEAVY (this used to be my mantra when I was a young chap.)

“It’s strange: the harder I practice the luckier I get.” – GARY PLAYER (The South African golfist.)

"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)

“He had the honest man’s profound fear of extreme good fortune.” – WILLIAM BOYD

Lunch

“For me, western civilisation came to an end when a lunch companion said, 'No wine for me, I have to be back to the office by two.” – KEITH WATERHOUSE

"Lunch is that symptom of decadence and dalliance for which there is no longer room in today's functional world. These days, a rare civilized lunch has one tzo purposes: the seduction of a lady or the exchange of serious ideas." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

“We sat down at 1 p.m. And sort of finished at 8 p.m. That's what's called a successful lunch.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

"The woeful lack of anything passing for analysis (probably a colonial tool of oppression, like brunch) on the SJW side..." -- JULIE BURCHILL

Lust

“Lust has taught me more wisdom than literature ever has.” – FRIEDRICH NIETSCHE

"What is wrong with lust? Are we not all -- well, some of us -- the product of it?" -- ANTHONY BURGESS

“The Mother of All Living (is) the ancient power of fright and lust.” – ROBERT GRAVES (the pote.)

Luxembourg

“Luxembourg: somewhat questionable people.” – ROD LIDDLE

“Luxembourg is kind of like Rutland, with postage stamps.” – ROD LIDDLE (Rutland is the smallest English county, it’s in their “East Midlands”, and one suspects that the estimable Squire Liddle has it in for the Gand Duchy....)

"Up until I was 20, I thought Luxembourg was a radio station. I didn't even know it was a country, and now he's running my country, and he doesn't seem to like us." -- MICHAEL CAINE (during the Brexit talks)

Luxury

“My tastes are simple: I am easily satisfied with the very best.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

“Luxury stains everyone it touches.” – CHARLES RITZ (The eponymous owner of the Ritz Hotel in Paris)

"The best things in life are free. The second best are very expensive." – COCO CHANEL

"Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity." -- COCO CHANEL

”My accountants can't understand how it costs so much to look so cheap." – DOLLY PARTON

“Luxury is a form of waste designed to confer status on an essentially useless class of people.” – THORSTEIN VEBLEN (Old Thorstein was just another ho-hum lefty Scandinavian sociologist and this is not a very original bon mot, but I include it anyway because it makes, I suppose, a nice epigram)

“When you’ve never had any money you don’t develop the tastes that only money can satisfy: Luxury remains a mystery.” – GUY BELLAMY

Lying (lies)

“Lying is the most useful crime, as at least it is on behalf of good.” – SAUL BELLOW (well…as an ex-military intelligence and CIA officer, I can but agree… heh…)

“Better liars are better survivors, surely?” – MATTHEW PARRIS

“Generally, it is a good political rule never to say anything that the average 6-year-old knows isn’t true.” – DICK MORRIS (speaking of his ex-client, Bill Clinton)

“’There’s a cheque in the post’ is one of the three great lies in business, and in many ways the most useful. It continues to develop variant forms, which now tend to pass the blame to the computer. Good old stand-bys include ‘Our cheques have to be signed by two directors’ (one of whom has bolted with the cash to Costa Rica) and ‘Any more nonsense from you and your invoice won’t even go into the hat’. I am proud to report what I think is a new one: ‘I’m sorry, but the accounts clerk has gone on a pilgrimage to Mecca’.” – CHRISTOPHER FILDES

“A lie travels around the world, while the truth is putting on its boots.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

“There are lies, sir, and there are lives.” – LTC. OLIVER NORTH

“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 obligator 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….)

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

“He had a liar’s memory; he stored every word he spoke because he could not afford to forget it.” – CHARLES McCARRY

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

"Please do not exercise your audacity to doubt our veracity," – ULYSSES H. “MALICK” SMITH (My sometime business partner. And this is inadvertently straight out of J. P. Donleavy.)

“Everybody lies all the time, but it doesn't matter because nobody listens.” – NICK DIAMOS (“Nick Diamos” – in my opinion a clear play on the name “Nicodemos” – seems to be some sort of generic pseudonym for clever-dick sayings.)

“Ninety percent of human thought is, I sometimes think, devoted to rationalizing why things which are obviously true are not true. And we reward people who give us the best, most plausible falsehoods denying the obvious truth.” – “ACE OF SPADES” (blogger)

“You can only exaggerate the truth, you cannot exaggerate a lie. An exaggerated lie is simply an even bigger lie.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“If you can only be good at one thing, be good at lying... because if you're good at lying, you're good at everything.” – GOLDMAN SACHS ELEVATOR (the blog of the Eponymous Wall St. company)

“When the going gets tough, you have to lie.” – JEAN-CLAUDE JUNCKER (Prime Minister of Luxembourg and big time Euroguy.)

“Liberals are telling us they are lying to us – proudly. Listen to them.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

"Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”
― ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN

“Human beings are happier with lies.” – FRANCIS O'GORMAN (in his book “Worrying”)

"So if we lie to the government it's a felony, but if they lie to us it's politics." – BILL MURRAY

“The greatest enemy of truth is very often not the lie - deliberate, contrived and dishonest - but the myth - persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.” --JOHN F. KENNEDY (June 11, 1962)

“You know I am a juggler, and I never let my right hand know what my left hand does. I'm perfectly willing to mislead and tell untruths” – FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT (May, 1941)

“Ultimate power is to be able to insist people recount a lie, that they know to be a lie and that they know you know is a lie.” – ANGELO CODEVILLA

“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)

“Spying, which people associated with lying, was relatively straightforward and clear: you lied for truth; you deceived in order to discover hidden truth. It was in his personal life that the distinction became blurred, too deeply embedded to disentangle.” – ALAN JUDD

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

“The most important rule of cyberspace – computers don't lie but liars can compute.” – TERRY HAYES

“Good people lie. I think I’m a good person, where I have lied." -- JAMES COMEY (words fail me...)

"It's good to be specific when you lie – that's the crux of a great lie." -- LARRY DAVID

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

"Lies never came singly." -- ALAN JUDD

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

"What was clear was that Mrs. Clinton couldn’t be bothered to make it appear as if she were telling the truth," - KEN STARR (In his 2018 book "Contempt: A Memoir Of The Clinton Investigation")

“Why do people lie? Because people are perverse – to assert themselves over against totalitarian fate. Lying is a kind of vote; it’s democracy in action.” – JOHN UPDIKE (in his 1992 novel, “Memories Of The Ford Administration”)

"Women lie the way blacks lie. If you're a slave race telling the truth gets you very little. They forget how." -- JOHN UPDIKE (In "Rabbit Remembered, 2000)

“I don’t generally lie. It’s too confusing, it makes another world.” – JOHN UPDIKE (in 1996)

“A liar needs a good memory.” – GUY BELLAMY

"A liar never believes anyone." -- GUY BELLAMY

“I have no obligation to be truthful to the media.” – COREY LEWANDOWSKI (on 17 Sept. 2019)

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.” – MARK TWAIN

"The best security is a lie." -- NELSON DEMILLE

"Dying people, suffering people, don't lie. They tell the truth. Death makes honest men of all of us. Everyone else lies." -- WALKER PERCY

"I'll tell you a peculiar thing: It makes people happy to tell the truth after a lifetime of lying." -- WALKER PERCY

"Lying barely counts as lying when you've got the Mainstream Media in your pocket." -- JACK JOLIS

"I prefer to tell the truth not for any particularly moral reason, but because I'm naturally lazy -- and lying (at least if you do it properly) is too much like work." -- JACK JOLIS

"Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art." --OSCAR WILDE

“Lying is, I suppose, essential if one wants to live graciously.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

"There was always a melody to the sound of lies, which I recognized as a tune I sang myself." -- STEVE TESICH (the screenwriter, who won an Oscar in 1987 for the great "Breaking Away")

"Lies were my my last link to my fellow men. In lies, at least, all men were brothers." -- STEVE TESICH

"A bad evasion is tantamount to telling the truth." -- WILLIAM BOYD

“Mendacity is a tenacious beast. If it’s not nipped in the bud it’s soon indistinguishable from the truth.” – WILLIAM BOYD (in his short story “Bizarre Situations”)

"We discovered that there were some East Europeans who could defeat the polygraph at any time. Americans are not very good at it because we are raised to tell the truth and when we lie it is easy to tell we are lying. But we find a lot of Europeans can handle the polygraph without a blip." -- RICHARD HELMS (my old Agency boss. And funny he should mention East Europeans -- because when I first started with the Agency, in the early 70s, our Middle East Division didn't bother polygraphing Muslims AT ALL -- on the grounds that "lying" wasn't even a useful concept with them. Strewth. And, for what it's worth, I was twice polygraphed by the Agency: onex I told the truth and failed, and the other time I lied and passed. So... go know....)

"The truth does not mind being questioned. A lie does not like being challenged." -- PATRICK BET-DAVID (an Assyrian/Armenian Jew, author of "Your Next Five Moves")

"There are never so many lies as after a hunt, after fishing, during a war, and before an election." - OTTO VON BISMARCK

"What certain progressives are seeking and are dangerously close to possessing is unfettered epistemological dominance — the right to lie with impunity and have attempts to correct those lies be deplatformed as hate speech."~ WESLEY YANG (The author of "The Souls of Yellow Folk")