M

Machines

"Machines have no intuition, no mass of experience. Normal human illogic won't do for them. Nothing is obvious to them that isn't absolutely spelled out." -- JOHN UPDIKE

 

Mafia, the

“I liked Queens. My neighborhood was Mafia-controlled, so there was no crime. It was like Socialism, only an ideal version.” – ALEXANDER KALETSKI (A Soviet Emigré artiste, in the late '70s. Author of an amusing novel called “Metro”.)

"They were more like the Mounties than the FBI: unlike the Feds, the Mob always got its man." -- JOHN BUCKLEY (in his 1990 novel "Statute Of Limitations")


“You can say whatever you want about the Mafia. They’re not going to hold a press conference to denounce you.” – STEVE DUNLEAVY (the late, legendary Australian-born reporter at THE NEW YORK POST)

"The Mafia is intensely conservative; it hates the state and loves private enterprise, it reveres the family unit and the extended clan structure. While a man gets rich and gains a reputation for himself, his wife stays at home, looks after the children, spends his money and goes to church." -- ALEXANDER LUCIE-SMITH (Catholic priest and author)


 

Magic

“Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to cut roast beef.” – TOM ROBBINS

 

“Magic is just science that we don’t understand yet.” – ARTHUR C. CLARKE                    (otherwise known as: Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” )

“One man’s ‘magic' is another man’s engineering. ‘Supernatural’ is a null word.” – ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

 

"Those that don't believe in magic will never find it." -- ROALD DAHL

"Illusions are a strange brand of entertainment because they create the opposite of satisfaction. The more puzzling the trick, the more successful it is. Frustration is fulfilment." -- LLOYD EVANS


 “Do not let in daylight upon magic.” – WALTER BAGEHOT

“Magic is the only honest profession. A magician promises to deceive you and he does.” -- KARL GERMAIN (1878-1959, American magician and lawyer -- "Germain The Wizard")

“Magical Realism”

“I have this problem with the whole of magical realism: if anything can happen, who bloody cares?” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

 

Malta

"Malta was a wretched oppressive island that had not been colonialised (sic) into a civilized polity." -- ANTHONY BURGESS (He and his wife and kid lived there for a short while, and had a singularly unpleasant time there.)

Malthusianism

"It is not merely that every mouth comes with a pair of hands, but every mouth and pair of hands also comes with a brain." -- ROBERT ZUBRIN

 

"The Malthusian belief system, in my estimation, is the preeminent threat to human civilization today. If one accepts the idea that resources are limited, then all nations are fundamentally enemies, and the only issue is who is going to kill whom in order to claim what’s available. At bottom, this was the source of the major catastrophes of the 20th century. It could cause far worse in the 21st. This mindset, however, is false. We are not threatened by there being too many people. We are threatened by people who think there are too many people." -- ROBERT ZUBRIN (in 2021)

“In certain environmental circles, of course, soft Malthusianism is like a little black dress: It never goes out of style.” – HEATHER WILHELM

 

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

“For decades an ugly Malthusian compulsion has infected the Left, leading it to think we should measure the value of life by its impact on the environment or its productivity. The implication is stupefying, anti-humanist, and immoral.” – DAVID HARSANYI (In NR in October 2014)

"The future will be about finding a way to reduce the population. Of course we will not be able to execute people or build camps.We get rid of them by making them believe it is for their own good. We will find or cause something, a pandemic targeting certain people, a real economic crisis or not, a virus affecting the old or the elderly, it doesn't matter, the weak and the fearful will succumb to it. The stupid will believe in it and ask to be treated. We will have taken care of having panned the treatment, a treatment that will be the solution. The selection of idiots will therefore be done by itself: they will go to the slaughterhouse alone." -- JACQUES ATTALI ("Of course". Monsieur Attalli is a major Frogue egghead, and was a senior adviser to Socialist President Mitterand. And these chilling words appear in his 1996 collection, "Verbatim, 1981-1983".) 

Management

"The secret of management is to keep the five guys who hate you away from the five guys who are undecided." -- CASEY STENGEL

 

“You can't expect to go drinking with people and have them take orders from you the next morning.” – EWING KAUFFMAN (the long-time owner and franchise-builder of the Kansas City Royals baseball club)

"If you remember their names and what they do they'll think you're a god -- or a demi-god, at least." -- WILLIAM BOYD

Mandela, Nelson

“Mandela’s only achievement was not being the butcher you'd expect a leftist to be.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

 

Manilow, Barry

“Everybody I know despises Barry Manilow, but everyone I don’t know loves him.” – CLIVE JAMES

 

Mankind

"You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough." -- ALDOUS HUXLEY

 

“Man is not the only animal who labors; but he is the only one who improves his workmanship.” – ABRAHAM LINCOLN

 

"How hollow is the heart of man and how full of shit!" -- BLAISE PASCAL                                                          (in "Pensées", 350 years ago.)

 

Manners

“If you ever see a man hold a car door open for his wife, it’s either a new car or a new wife.” – PRINCE PHILIP, THE DUKE OF EDINBURGH

 

“Manners are of more importance than laws. They are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize and refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. they give their whole form and colour to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them.” – EDMUND BURKE

"Manners are designed, after all, to see one through awkward moments." -- CHARLES McCARRY 

“Politeness is the preserve of nations who allow their citizens to get on with their lives.” – MELISSA KITE (conservative English journalist, in 2008)

 

“Where there are no women there are no manners.” -- JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE (no wonder everybody just calls him “Goethe”)

 

"The point of manners is to make other people feel valued, respected, and considered. Which is to say, the point of manners is to keep the peace." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

"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

 

"Yes, let’s behave with manners. But let’s recognize that only a society that values truth can afford manners." -- BEN SHAPIRO

“The most beautiful manners I have ever met with are in countries where men carry knives.” –  R. G. COLLINGWOOD                                            (Early 20th century English philosopher, historian and archaelogist)

                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“Politeness gets funnier the more the rules of order disintegrate.” – SAUL BELLOW

                                                                                                                                                                                              "I don't mind if you don't like my manners, I don't like them myself." -- HUMPHREY BOGART

 

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

 

“I spend the first ten minutes of every day picking my nose and farting. I thought everyone did.” – GUY BELLAMY

 

“Had Martin Luther had better manners, we’d never have heard of him.” – MATTHEW PARRIS

"Basically; it (bad manners) comes down to a lack of shame as well as dignity." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS 

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

Manufacturing

“If Americans have stopped selling things to the world, it is not because they are not capable of it. They are simply bored with it. Like many other ingenious nations, they have been left high and dry by their own cunning. They sit among the driftwood, dreaming of something new.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS  

 

Mao Tse Tung (Maoism)

“Maoism has been a gigantic exercise in the organized cretinization of the most intelligent people on earth.” – SIMON LEYS (Belgian-born Australian big deal “Sinologist”)

 

“From Mao I learned how to fight and win a guerrilla war. I also learned how not to run a country.” – JONAS SAVIMBI (the charismatic anti-Communist leader of the Angolan UNITA movement.)

 

"Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy." – MAO TSE-TUNG

 

“In the frenzy and frivolity of the Sixties Revolution, the West heard little and cared less about the horrific Cultural Revolution in China, coming after the thirty million deaths of the ‘Great Leap Forward’. The man-made famine, followed by a more fearful orgy of persecution, torture, lynching, burning of books and smashing of works of beauty, then mass deportation to slave camps, were almost as bad as Stalin’s.

Partly because of the difficulty of access to Communist China, the West had no idea at the time of the scale of the horror of the ‘Great Leap Forward’, and how it should have affected our attitude to the Vietnam War. The South Vietnamese were very aware of the danger posed by Mao and his influence over the Hanoi Communists. The Cambodian Communists, nicknamed ‘Khmer Rouge’ by Prince Sihanouk, had modeled themselves on Mao and later would institute in their own ‘Killing Fields’ their local Cultural Revolution. But just as it took the West thirty years to grasp what Stalin had done in the 1930s, so it took another thirty years to grasp the evil of Mao in the 1960s.” – RICHARD WEST

 

Marijuana

"(Weed is) the ultimate Democrat drug. It makes you dumber and less interesting while also lazier." -- KURT SCHLICHTER

Market, The

“He (British Labor Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown) hates the free market because he cannot control it.” – MARTIN VANDER WEYER (British economic writer, and this illustrates the underlying hatred by socialists for “capitalism” is “a control thing”.)

 

“Financial markets are human nature in action.” – MARTIN VANDER WEYER (or as Jean-Francois Revel titled one of his books “Le Capitalisme – Mais C’Est La Vie!”)

 

“For many Democrats in politics, the market--the daily machinery of the private economy--is a semi-abstraction. It's a barely understood thing that mainly sends revenue to the government, without which the nation is incapable of achieving social good. Liberals happily concede the idea of salutary "market forces" to their opposition. For them, markets are for taming.” – DANIEL HENNINGER (of the “Wall Street Journal”)

 

“Finance is a human invention, set to serve human purposes and reflecting human nature. No wonder, too, that the four most dangerous words to be heard in a market are ‘This time it’s different’.” – CHRISTOPHER FILDES

 

“I do not understand why this long-running crisis is said to have been caused by ‘market fundamentalism’. The concept of being ‘too big to fail’, which dominates the crisis, is the biggest anti-market idea there is.”   -- CHARLES MOORE

 

“When a thing looks too good to be true, it is. If a sector is attracting frenzied investor attention and pundits say spectacular growth must continue, it is surely heading for trouble – not next week, perhaps, but soon enough. In markets, good ideas pursued to extremes mutate into disasters and, at any given moment, someone somewhere is concocting the next one.” – MARTIN VANDER WEYER (in the UK SPECTATOR, June 2011)

 

“You can always find a thief in financial markets. That is where the money is.” – MARTIN JACOMB (Chairman of something called The Canary Wharf Group in London)

 

“The question is which of two systems is better able to discard the failed and experiment to find the new; and the answer is the Free Market. It is not perfect; it is better than State Control; for the Free Market, to a greater extent, must respond quickly and effectively to dissatisfaction and to demand – if a produce or service does not please, to continue in its manufacture in the Free Market is pointless. (Compare Government persistence and expansion of programs proved to have failed decades ago – farm subsidies, aid to Africa, busing, urban renewal, etc.) On the other hand, in a Free Market, every man, woman, and child is scheming to find a better way to make a product or a service which will make a fortune.  The garage mechanic, the housewife, the tinkerer, the scientist, the artist, and their kids – everyone is always looking for a better way. (Compare the Government employee sitting at his desk. Why is he not looking for a better way to do his job? Why should he? A more efficient way might possibly eliminate his job, or that of the superior to whom he owes allegiance.)” – DAVID MAMET

 

“We must reestablish the primacy of politics over the markets.” – ANGELA MERKEL (In December 2011, and there you have it sports fans – the Problem of the Age in a Teutonic Nutshell)

 

“Market competition is cruel. There are winners and losers. But that is better than the alternative where there are only losers.” – JOHN STOSSEL (then of Fox News)

“An unalterable universal law: The hotter the market, the dumber the new entrant.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Democratic institutions have strong incentives to flatter the feelings of the ignorant and greedy among us, who are a large voting constituency. For this reason, Congress and the regulatory agencies treat the inevitable parting of fools and their money as a deficiency in the marketplace. When Granny puts all of her money into Baht-denominated commodity swaptions and then loses it, the fault cannot possibly be hers: Surely there is something wrong with the market, surely those marginally employed and penniless borrowers were tricked into thinking they could afford half-million-dollar suburban spreads, surely companies with no profits or assets would have been outstanding investments if only we'd had the right regulations, etc., and we have to figure out a way to give people their money back. But when JP Morgan makes a bone-headed sort-of-a-hedge-sort-of-not investment and takes a $5 billion (and counting) lump, obviously JP Morgan is at fault, and it's a national scandal.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“When somebody says that a market is not rational, what he really means is that people are making choices other than the ones he would make for them.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“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

 

"A price is a signal wrapped in an incentive." – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

"The market creates peace and freedom by allowing strangers to interact without resort to violence." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“The government doesn’t love you, because it can’t love you—and neither can the market. But at least the market doesn’t pretend that it can.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“The likelihood that the word 'market' is attached to any area of commercial activity is in direct proportion to the degree to which that category is seriously messed up.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“The free market is a system, not an outcome.” – CHARLES C. W. COOKE (Actually, it’s not so much a “system” as a “LACK of a system”)

 

“You don't research milk prices, you trust the market.” – CLIFFORD ASNESS  (Economic blogger)

 

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

 

“A market economy is one in which whoever makes a decision is the one who pays for that decision.” – THOMAS SOWELL

 

"Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism, and die on euphoria." - SIR JOHN TEMPLETON (The American-born Brit moneybags)

“He believed in markets because he could do math.” – YUVAL LEVIN (Talking about Texas Senator Phil Gramm, actually, but he could have been referring to anyone, really...)

 

“And yet people are prone to blaming the free market for the consequences of every quasi-socialistic form of intervention.” – JEFFREY TUCKER (the Editorial Director for something called The American Institute for Economic Research)

 

"We might think of dollars as being 'certificates of performance.' The better I serve my fellow man, and the higher the value he places on that service, the more certificates of performance he gives me. The more certificates I earn, the greater my claim on the goods my fellow man produces. That’s the morality of the market. In order for one to have a claim on what his fellow man produces, he must first serve him." – WALTER E. WILLIAMS

                                                                                                                                                                                               

"Property Law is what makes the market economy work." -- HERNANDO SE SOTO                                               (the great economist from Peru)

                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“Frankly there’s nothing worth saying during a stock-market crash. Forty-five years’ observation of markets has taught me to hold my breath and wait for the bounce.” – MARTIN VANDER WEYER

                                                                                                                                                                                               

"The media depiction of business is of nothing more than a vehicle for greed: yet free markets are also the greatesst problem-solving mechanism ever devised. Granted, a lot of business people seem stupid. That doesn't matter, because the system is clever. (In academia, the people are clever, but the system is stupid.)" -- RORY SUTHERLAND

                                                                                                                                                                                               

"The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit." – MILTON FRIEDMAN


"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." -- JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES    (It's not often that I quote this toxic anti-American -- and notably racist -- old English socialist poofter -- he also said, and I swear I am not making this up: “Americans are a breed of sub-dagos speaking no known language intelligently.The only really sympathetic and original thing in America is the niggers, who are charming.” -- because he has done more economic damage to the human race than any other so-called economist since Karl Marx, but this… is at least amusing.à

                                                                                                                                                                                               

“Carmaking is 100,000 rational decisions in search of one emotional decision.” – KUMAR GALHOTRA                (the Indian-American boss of Ford North America. And as Rory Sutherland commented, “You   spend 5 years and billions of dollars perfecting the drive train, the suspension and the onboard software only for people to choose a car based on the number of cupholders or the fact that the GPS is voiced by James Earl Jones”.)

 

Market, The “Black”

“A better phrase for ‘the black market’ is ‘the market’.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“The ‘black market’, old boy, is merely what its enemies call the free market.” – ALBERT E. JOLIS (my dad’s answer to me, as a 10-year old boy in Paris -- I’d heard my mom say that someone or other had gotten something “on the black market”, and I asked him what that was.)

 

Market, The Stock

"A rising stock market, when employment rates and economic growth are dismal, seems a reflection not of a sound economy, but of a desperate one, here and abroad, in which millions have nowhere else to put their money and retirement contributions — given near-zero interest rates, fears of banks, a discouraging business climate, and a still shaky real-estate market." -- VICTOR DAVIS HANSON 

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

 

Marriage

“In what other job but teaching can a man talk for 50 minutes straight without being interrupted by his wife?” – JOSEPH EPSTEIN

 

“Happy is the man with a wife to tell him what to do and a secretary to do it” – BENJAMIN LLOYD STORMONT (the 3rd Baron Mancroft, a young British conservative “milord” whose words are strangely reminiscent of my late kid brother Alan…)

 

“One can be a good husband and fool around just as one can be faithful and a bad one.” – GIANNI AGNELLI (the original “Comendatore”.  Actually, what he was, was “The Avocado” --  “Il Avocatto”)

 

“When you marry your mistress you create a vacancy.” – SIR JAMES GOLDSMITH

 

“On one cheery little wall in the hall there are three photographs of three ex-wives who I see every time I leave my flat and then again when I return to it. I sometimes think what incredibly unsuitable couples we made but it is also fractionally consoling to think that I didn’t put any one of them off getting married again. I wonder what on earth they thought they were getting on both occasions and even the one who once famously said, ‘I thought you’d change and settle down’, what on earth did she think I would change into?” – JEFFREY BERNARD

 

“Weddings are, by their very nature, all the same. We all know how they are going to finish. But there is still that sense of anticipation as you walk past the gravestones to the church, the young men at the door like hung-over cinema usherettes handing out programmes and showing you to your pew. ‘Bride or groom?’ Now the first dramatic decision of the day. I slept with the groom at school, and the bride last week. Better be on the groom’s side. There are fewer putrefying nannies and retired post-mistresses on his side.” – A.A. GILL (an effete Englishman, needless to say – references to “post-mistresses” and “sleeping with the groom at school” being the giveaways, don’t you know….)

 

“I recently read that love is entirely a matter of chemistry. That must be why my wife treats me like toxic waste.” --  DAVID BISSONETTE (American funny man)

           

“When a man steals your wife, there is no better revenge than to let him keep her.”  -- SACHA GUITRY (French singer of the 40s, 50s and, I suppose, 60s)

 

“After marriage, husband and wife become two sides of a coin; they just can't face each other, but still they stay together.” – HEMANT JOSHI (Indian – Toweled Indian -- journalist and sculptor)

 

“By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.” -- SOCRATES

 

“Woman inspires us to great things, and prevents us from achieving them.” – ALEXANDRE DUMAS (Sorry, but I don’t know if this is Dumas father or son. If you use this quote, just wing it….)

 

"Some people ask the secret of our long marriage.  We take time to go to a restaurant two times a week. A little candlelight, dinner, soft music and dancing. She goes Tuesdays, I go Fridays." --  HENNY YOUNGMAN

 

"I don't worry about terrorism. I was married for two years." – SAM KINISON

"Bad marriages are a marvel. They can make even homelessness feel homey." -- STEVE TESICH           

"There's a way of transferring funds that is even faster than electronic banking. It's called marriage." --JAMES HOLT MACGAVRAN (Literary critic. No kidding. That’s what it says….)

 

"I've had bad luck with both my wives. The first one left me, and the second one didn't." – PATRICK MURRAY (the English comic actor)

 

“Two secrets to keep your marriage brimming

1. Whenever you're wrong, admit it,

2. Whenever you're right, shut up.” – OGDEN NASH

 

“You know what I did before I married? Anything I wanted to.” – HENNY YOUNGMAN (the “Take my wife... Please.” guy.)

 

“My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met.” --  RODNEY DANGERFIELD

 

“A good wife always forgives her husband when she's wrong.” – MILTON BERLE

 

"Those who do not marry for desire will fear desire as an enemy. If that is not a Russian proverb, it ought to be." – CHARLES McCARRY

 

“I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.” – GROUCHO MARX

 

"How did people manage to be happily married? What was the trick of it? A dedication to a certain kind of insensitivity, presumably. Years and years and years of managing not to notice things that might annoy you." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS

"Why are people so curious about people who have been married a long time? Is it because they want to be them, or because they're glad they're not them?" -- NIGEL WILLIAMS (the very amusing English novelist)

"Some people get very excited about weddings. They're called 'women.' The only time men get excited about weddings is when they're marrying other men." -- CRAIG FERGUSON

 

“‘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

 

“It is a cruel fact, but unhappy marriages, unless they are your own, are always comic.” – A. N. WILSON

 

“One of the first truths any person should learn in life – really, somebody should write it on our birth certificates, or stamp it backwards on our foreheads in the maternity ward – is that you can never, ever know what goes on inside another person’s marriage and only mischief will result if you try.” – ANDREW FERGUSON                                                                                                                                                                                             (speaking of the Obama marriage, as it happens….)

 

“A marriage was as delicate as a pane of glass. A split down the middle could not be fixed, it was in there permanently, and the glass itself was now more fragile than ever. It could only be replaced, not repaired. Or you could stick tape over it, hold it together one day after another, learn to live with it, like learning to live with a deformity or a terminal disease.” – ROBERT DALEY

 

 “Marriage is not about endorsing a sexual attachment between adults. It is about creating the conditions in which children can come into the world fully protected and with a fair chance of being loved. Marriage does not exist for the benefit of the present generation but for the benefit of the next.” – ROGER SCRUTON

                                                                                                                                                                                 

“Marriage is not chess, it’s checkers. But the board is made of flowing water, and the pieces are made of smoke.” – JERRY SEINFELD

“Marriage is like a game of chess except the board is flowing water, the pieces are made of smoke and no move you make will have any effect on the outcome.” – JERRY SEINFELD

“Marriage and love are not about who's right and who's wrong. Love and marriage is about who's left.” – BEN STEIN

“Good husbands are harder to find than good jobs.” – YVONNE BRILL                                                              (A Flemish-Canadian-born lady who became a top-flight American rocket scientist)

“Marriage is like a hardwood floor, laid right you can walk on it forever.” – BRIAN MORAN                 (Some crotchety old guy from Boston, on the Twoot)

 

“Marriage is like a restaurant. No sooner are you served than you look at what's on your neighbor's plate.” – SACHA GUITRY

“And fellas, you get to use the phrase 'my so-called wife' only once in your life, so make it count!” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“The leaders of the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and suchlike are ensconced in households with multiple mates and that there is nothing SEAL Team Six can do them that is worse than what’s going on at home.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

"Husbands are supposed to burden sharers, not burdens." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“It is the privileged Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged;” ANDREW J. CHERLIN  (a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, in 2023)

 

“No married person has ever said, ‘gee, I wish we would have spent more on the wedding’." – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

 

"It isn't premarital sex if you have no intention of getting married."-- GEORGE BURNS

 

"Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same." -- OSCAR WILDE

 

“There is no human society without some form of marriage. This is because society has a stake in seeing couples pair off in an orderly fashion. Absent this pattern, the social peace created by monogamy is doomed.” – WILLIAM TUCKER (In the AMSPEC, March 2006)

 

“Marriage quiets the lunatic voices. It's that or become a serial killer, I'm afraid.” -- KYLE SMITH

 

“A marriage is a bit like a hurricane – a lot of sucking and blowing at first, but in the end you lose the house.” – STEPHEN FRY

 

“In deciding whom to marry, aiming for the best may be less important than avoiding the worst. 'Satisficing', as the polymath Herbert Simon named it, is the strategy where rather than trying to maximise an outcome, you seek a pretty good all-round solution with a low chance of disaster.” -- RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“When your marriage is failing, you walk.” -- JOHN LE CARRE

 

“Do not ask your husband if he loves you.  Ask him if he's put out the rubbish. 'I love you' means nothing. 'I've put out the rubbish' means the rubbish has been put out.” -- JON CANTER

 

“A man who loves women, by definition, cannot be monogamous.” -- JON CANTER

 

“What man ever said, to another man, 'And how is your marriage?' “ -- JON CANTER

 

“There is often a last word after the last word. It is usually spoken by the wife.” – JON CANTER

 

“...and truth be told, I was in secret agreement with my wife. I was arguing, then, for the sake of arguing – and important thing to do in a marriage when there's nothing much on TV?” – ROD LIDDLE

 

“Women will love you for you who are. They just won’t marry you for who you are.” – COSMO LANDESMAN  (a British-based American-born journalist and editor. With his then-wife Julie Burchill and friend Toby Young, he founded the magazine The Modern Review)

 

"One can be a faithful husband and a bad one, as one can be a faithless hubby but a very good one. My wife thinks I'm the latter, so yippee." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

“That was what was holy about holy matrimony; it was just another divine instrument for increasing entropy., like damp and coronary thrombosis and woodworm.” – MICHAEL FRAYN (in his very funny 1967 novel, “Towards The End Of The Morning”)

"Marry, and you will regret it. Do not marry, and you will also regret it." -- SOREN KIERKEGAARD 

“I was a fervent supporter of marriage, just not of my marriage.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

“It’s really not wise for married people (or lovers) to understand each other too well – communications, I fear, is hideously overrated.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

"Almost everybody is marriageable, the way Nature has set it up, with its usual tremendous margin for error." -- JOHN UPDIKE

 

"They entertained a lot, a sure sign of marital distress: they needed others to help them bear each other's company." -- JOHN UPDIKE

 

“Every marriage is a hedged bet.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

“Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

“In a marriage, as the flesh matters less, our opinions matter more.” – JOHN UPDIKE

"Wives are a recurring sickness, like malaria. One feels perfectly well, and then, suddenly, out of the blue, the temperature rises." -- BRYAN FORBES

"She knew, as women do, what he thought of her husband." -- NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE ("as women do") 

"Women think the perfect husband is all they need for a perfect life. Wrong. There are no perfect husbands. Not even many good ones." -- NELSON DEMILLE

“Very few relationships between a man and a woman are enhanced by marriage.” – GUY BELLAMY

 

"Never propose when you've got an erection." -- GUY BELLAMY

 

“Isn’t marriage something more like weakness? Isn’t it rather fear and exhaustion and inertia, gutlessness plain and simple, far far more than that ‘love’ that the marriage counselors and the songwriters and the psychotherapists are forever dreaming about? Please, let us not bullshit one another about ‘love’ and its duration.” – PHILIP ROTH

"Instead of getting married again, I'm going to find a woman I don't like and just give her a house." -- ROD STEWART
 

“Marriage is like abroad: no one would want to go there if they hadn’t been told it existed.” – EVELYN WAUGH (in “The Agony Of Captain Grimes”)

"American weddings are often grotesque affairs, a weird mix of lacy white princess dresses and neck tattoos, Pachelbel and Bon Jovi." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“With matrimony you lose your spare time and your spare money, which are the only two things you had in the first place.” – GUY BELLAMY

 

“Getting married for sex is like jumping in the river because you’re thirsty.” – GUY BELLAMY

 

“Marriages are to sex what tortoises are to hang-gliding.” – GUY BELLAMY

 

“You shouldn’t get married if you can’t take a joke.” – GUY BELLAMY

"But if you want comfort and convenience that's the solution, marry your butler." -- J. P. DONLEAVY

"Marriage, which is an epoch among Christians, an event among the Moslems, is with these (African) people an incident of frequent occurrence. Polygamy is unlimited, and the chiefs pride themselves upon the number of their wives, varying from twelve to three hundred." -- RICHARD BURTON (The great British explorer, in 1856) 

"Getting married kicks ass, being married sucks." – ROBERT JAMES RITCHIE (“KID ROCK”)

"Under 'hobbies' I meant to put 'wine' and 'life', but these coalesced into 'wife'." -- ANTHONY BURGESS

"They were married and divorced eleven months later. I've had pimples last longer than that." -- BILL BRYSON

"Marriages improve when wives don’t expect their husbands to think and act like women and husbands don’t expect their wives to think and act like men." -- MICHAEL FOSTER (the pastor of the East River Church of Batavia Ohio)

"The kidnappers might send the note to my wife and I've no doubt she could scrape a few bob together, here and there, under the circumstances, and certainly would. Almost certainly would." -- ALAN COREN

"If you don't want to be lonely, don't get married." -- ANTON CHEKHOV

Your first wife married you for better or for worse. Your second wife, particularly if you were sixty and she was a twenty-eight-year-old number -- why kid yourself? -- she married you for better." -- TOM WOLFE

“The ideal marriage is between a deaf man and a blind woman.” – SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (the “Romantic” English pote)

 

“The great thing about marriage is you don’t have to be cool. You always get a second chance, that’s all the Vows actually mean: I do solemnly swear to give muggins a second chance rather than immediately binning their toothbrush the first time they utterly fuck up.  The readiness to get hitched is just the readiness to give someone a second chance, whether from overwhelming love, growing tiredness, secret desperation, or, saving the best till last.” – JAMES HAWES

"Marriage is a great institution -- if you like living in institutions." -- PAULA ETTELBRICK (famous American lesbian lawyer)

"Watching most husbands with their wives reminds me of orangutans trying to play the violin." -- HONORE DE BALZAC

‘The only marriages that work are those where you say to hell with it, and hurt three to four dozen people, and tell fifty more to go to hell, and then move out to Nevada or Alaska, or Brazil. If you don’t do that, you’re not really married.” – MARK HELPRIN

"Make sure you marry someone who laughs at the same things you do." -- J .D. SALINGER


Marriage, homosexual

“There are reasons we have laws governing important institutions, such as marriage. As in landscaping, you don't remove a wall until you know why it was put there.” – ANN COULTER

                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“I'm against gay marriage, but that's no offense to gays. It is just in defense of a crucial linchpin of civilization that's already hanging by a thread.” – ANN COULTER

 

“The American civil-rights movement was a call to recognize moral reality; the call for gay marriage is a call to reinvent reality to fit an agenda of personal willfulness.” -- GEORGE WEIGEL                                                               (author and a big cheese at an outfit called The Ethics and Public Policy Center)

“Out-of-wedlock births are now the norm in Europe, and the only people who urgently seek to get married are homosexuals, anxious for a recognition that is rapidly losing its real significance.” – ROGER SCRUTON

                                                                                                                                                                                             

“I homosexual marriage becomes law, what will come next? I would guess polygamy. The only moral obstacle to polygamy in the eyes of the zealots for same-sex marriage is that it offends against their obsession with equality. Muslims, the most important believers in polygamy, hold that a man may have up to four wives, but not the other way round. Surely there is room for compromise here. If the marriage law  were amended so that women and men could take equal numbers of husbands or wives (and, of course, for we must be equal in all things, that gay people could also marry polygamously). Muslims would not like this permission to women, but they could safely ignore it. Their men could take their four wives, their women would not dare take four husbands and what the infidels got up to would be no concern of theirs. A very modern deal would have been struck between the ultra-liberals and the ethnic-minority reactionaries, with only stodgy old monogamists failing to 'move on'. The same-sexers express old-fashioned disgust at their opponents' suggestion that their arguments could justify incest, but I do not see why. The gay marriage case is that marriage is good if people love one another very much. Why, by their argument, should this not apply to siblings who feel that way about each other or parents and their (adult) children? Are they saying that certain sex acts are disgusting? If so, on what grounds? Besides, gay incestuous marriages could not possibly pose any genetic risk, since they can produce no offspring. What taboo from the dark ages is holding the reformers back?” – CHARLES MOORE

                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“A friend of mine speculates that, if gay marriage comes in, it would be a good idea for him to marry his son. He would do so not because he has any incestuous desires towards the young man, but because of the need for inheritance-tax planning. He rightly points out that there can be no logical reason, if homosexual marriage is permitted, why fathers and sons should not marry one another. After all, there is no chance of their giving birth to deformed children.” – CHARLES MOORE                                                                                   (logic and the thlippery thlope, people – what I've said from the very beginning....)

                                                                                                                                                                                               

"Speaking of same-sex marriage is like speaking of same-sex mixed-doubles tennis; it's more a lexical question than a political one" -- JOHN O'SULLIVAN                 (The English Editor of NR who came between Squire Fabuckley and the current one, Rich Lowry.)

                                                                                                                                                                                               

 “What's the compromise on gay marriage? GOP offer: Okay, two men can be called a married couple, but it has to be a traditional marriage, Fifties-style. One has to wear pearls and a dress around the house while vacuuming. Liberal response: That just reinforces heteronormative gender concepts. And pearls are gauche. GOP accommodation: Okay, you can get married, but you have to promise not to demand that James Bond go gay in a future movie. Liberal counteroffer: We'll promise not to complain if he just comes out as bi. GOP: deal.” – JAMES LILEKS


"The best answer to 'Would you attend a gay wedding?' is 'Sure, if my wife tells me I have to'." -- JAMES LILEKS (My favorite Minnesotan)

 

“No one should suppose that, once homosexual marriage is universally accepted, there will be an end to the reformist impulse that gives meaning to the lives of liberals. A letter in the Guardian from a bisexual jokingly demanded that bisexuals be allowed a wife and a husband, but what starts as a joke in our society becomes an unassailable doctrine within an ever-shortening lapse of time.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

“As the proponents of same-sex marriage would have it, I am 'on the wrong side of history' and 'out of touch’. With four adult children, I am hardly out of touch with the younger generation. And it remains to be seen whether I am on the wrong side of history. Insisting on marriage as a lifelong monogamous commitment between a man and a woman would have placed me on the wrong side of history in Mecca in the 630s, Toulouse in the 1130s, Munster in the 1530s, or Salt Lake City in the 1880s. The French and Russian revolutions came up with some barmy ideas. In Britain in the 1930s H. G. Wells, John Maynard Keynes and Bernard Shaw considered themselves in the vanguard of history with their views of eugenics. Most bien-pensant French intellectuals in the 1950s, and some British ones too, thought communism was the future and capitalism doomed. History has taken many wrong turnings, and what is considered progressive by one generation is often junked by the next – though, to give the Cathars, Anabaptists, Mormons, Jacobins, Bolsheviks, eugenicists and Stalinist fellow-travelers their due, none came up with anything as far-fetched as same-sex marriage.” – PIERS PAUL READ                                                                                                (the well-known author, most notably of “Alive!”)

 

“What’s happening now is that gay marriage advocates are attempting to use the state to change marriage. When they say Christians are trying to use the state to legistlate their version of marriage, they are full of crap. All Christians are doing is defending an institution that already exists from being changed to something it has never been. It is the gay marriage advocates who want to force, by the power of the state, a pre-existing in situation to change. If the state has the power to change the definition of an institution that it did not create, the state can force everyone to do so.” – ERICK ERICKSON

                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“Never has the passage from patent absurdity to unassailable orthodoxy been shorter than with homosexual marriage.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“The day may yet come when the only people who want to get married in Britain will be lesbian clergywomen.” – PETER HITCHENS

                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“Two years ago, maybe even 18-months ago, if you would have asked me about how I feel about homosexual marriage, I would have said, "I don't care. I'm completely indifferent to it". My natural default setting on most social issues (outside of abortion) is live and let live.                                                                BUT, the homosexual "community" can't take yes for an answer. Even though I had always been indifferent to homosexual marriage, my fear was always that it was some kind of Trojan Horse; not about marriage at all, but instead about coercion. My fears are proving to be accurate.                                                                          The very same people who rail against religious zealots forcing their beliefs down the public's throat themselves want to force their beliefs down the public's throat.                                                              So no, I'm happy to stand firmly against SSM because if there's one thing I can't stand, it's hypocrisy and no contemporary group is more hypocritical than are today's homosexuals.” – SCOTT WILSON                             (An ex-military officer who regularly commented on NRO, in August 2013, after a state court had ordered some photographers to work a homosexual wedding over their religious objections.)

 

“Gay marriage is a lie. Fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we’re going to do with marriage when we get there. It’s a no-brainer that we should have the right to marry, but I also think equally that it’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist. … ‘Marriage equality’ becomes ‘marriage elasticity,’ with the ultimate goal of ‘marriage extinction’.” – MARSHA GESSEN                          (a “militant” lesbian “activist”)

 

"Here's the problem: It's not a matter of 'Who cares?' anymore. It's a lurking fear that you should care, and you had better care the right way. Silence = Disapproval. Acceptance isn't enough. Endorsement is required." -- JAMES LILEKS

 

“'Eeeeuw!' is not sufficient as a response to the gay marriage debate – that as an argument against it does not quite win the day, or indeed come anywhere close.» – HUGO RIFKIND (I dunno, Hugo – «Eeeeuw!» is good enough for me....)

 

"The Supreme Court’s gay marriage ruling in Obergefell v Hodges really says anybody can marry anybody- and eventually it will be in any combination.  I had a strong, Christian lawyer tell me yesterday that, under this decision he has read, what it brings about is:  It only requires one human being in this relationship - that you could marry your lawnmower with this decision.  I think he is right.” -- STEVE KING (the ex-GOP Congressman from Iowa.)

 

«If he’s a man you can deceive, you’ll be very happy with him, forever and ever.» – DONALD WESTLAKE

“Where procreation is, in principle, impossible, marriage is irrelevant.” -- DR. ALAN KEYES 

Martial Arts

“We now see a totally phony sport like tae-kwon-do in the Olympics. These so-called martial artists wave their front foot in their opponent's face – a wave they learned from watching the Queen wave from her carriage.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS (who happens to be a black belt and Olympian in both judo and karate)

“In my opinion judo and jujitsu and karate area load of crap, no more use in a real fight than Mrs. Murphy's arse.” – JOHN GREENWAY (Prof of Anthropology at the University of Colorado)

 

Martial Law

“An unoccupied soldier is a threat to the police.” – SERGEI SHOIGU (Putin's Minister of Defense)

 

Martyrdom

“Martyrdom is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.” – GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (Man was he wrong. On two fronts: first, these days anybody can – and does – become famous for anything and nothing. And as for martyrs, fuggeddabahdid – you get a dozen ragheaded martyrs every day before breakfast, and not one of ‘em is famous…..)

 

Marx ( –ism)

“Marxism’s half-life is amazing. Outside of our finest universities, pretty much no one believes in the junk, and yet it hangs over the intellectual and political landscape like background radiation.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“Marxism, for all its theoretical falderal (sic) and philosophical jiggery-pokery, is nothing more than a polysyllabic rationalization for indulging our instinctual desire to have our lives run by an alpha ape.” --JONAH GOLDBERG

 

"Marxism is not a system of thinking but a romantic story (in all the different meanings of 'romantic') about the progress of humanity that ends with all contradictions being eradicated in the last chapter, titled 'The End of History'.” --JONAH GOLDBERG

 

"Marxism was, at its heart, a religious enterprise that used scientific jargon to draft its catechisms and incantations."-- JONAH GOLDBERG

 

"Marx’s theory of history had some new bells and whistles, but when applied in the real world, it was simply an updating of caste or class resentment." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"Karl Marx's vision for the end of history looked very much like Rousseau’s vision of the beginning of history." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“I have always felt that ‘Marxist historian’ is a contradiction in terms.” – PAUL JOHNSON

 

"Marx's explanation of what was wrong with the world was a combination of student-cafe anti-semitism and Rousseau." -- PAUL JOHNSON

 

“I have never read a word of Karl Marx.” – HAROLD WILSON (British Labour Prime Minister during the 60s and 70s, and if he had read the old fraud, perhaps he wouldn’t have been a Socialist…)

 

“I tried to be a Marxist, but common sense kept breaking in.” – A. J. P. TAYLOR (the old… what else? leftist… historian.)

 

“The greatest, perhaps the only, beneficiary of Marxism was the rat.” – PAUL JOHNSON (because of all the rotting food that’s been left lying around, un-transported, thanks to Marxist fuck-ups wherever it’s been applied….)

 

“Outside of college English departments, no sane person takes Marxism seriously.” – CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER (in May 2007)

 

“A Marxist is someone who loves humanity in groups of one million or more.” – JAY NORDLINGER

 

“—and kills them in groups of ten million or more.” – TERRY TEACHOUT (in response to Nordlinger’s above.)

 

“People are good, Marx argued, and money is bad. Wrong both times, as it turned out. People are both good and bad. And money is neither. Money is human appetite given flexible expression. And when the Marxists set up an anti-money society they didn't abolish money, they created a self-deception that eventually forced every citizen to become a cheat and a hypocrite.” – LLOYD EVANS

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

"Most people who read 'The communist Manifesto' probably probably have no idea that it was written by a couple of young men who had never worked a day in their lives, and who nevertheless spoke boldly in the name of the workers." -- THOMAS SOWELL 

“There has always been in Marxism a kind of disgust with humanity as it is and a perfect faith in humanity as it is to be. It is this simplistic faith in perfectibility which cultivates the domineering arrogance of the self-righteous reformer, and which forgives in advance inhumanity disguised as humanistic zeal. The present is only a transitional (almost illusory) epoch, and living men possess value in a potential and inferential sense, never in their own right.” – IRVING KRISTOL (He wrote this in 1944, so you can see that criticism of Marxism is as well-entrenched as the creed itself.)

 

“The only bit of Marxist dogma in which I see any practical value is to always travel without your chauffeur.” – PETER EVANS (in his novel “The Englishman's Daughter”.)

"Marxism has not only failed to promote human freedom, it has failed to produce food." -- JOHN DOS PASSOS      (the ex-Marxist novelist -- he was a HUGE success until he saw the light and became an anti-communist... and then, Pffft! -- gone with the wind!)

"Provincial inferiority complexes have played an enormous part in the spread of Marxist doctrine." -- VASSILY AKSYONOV 

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

 

“Marxism is undoubtedly a religion, in the lowest sense of the word.” -- SIMONE VEIL (among much else, this Holocaust Survivor was the Minister of Health in France under Pres. Valery Giscard d'Estaing)

 

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

 

“Most people simply assumed that the fall of the Soviet Union amounted to a refutation of Marx's theory, and yet there still seem to be plenty of Marxists around, at least on American and European university campuses.” -- JAMES BOWMAN (the Englishman who used to review movies for the AMERICAN SPECTATOR)

 

“If there is any ideology based completely on a misunderstanding of human behavior and the workings of men's psyche, their motivations, that iedology is without doubt Marxism.” -- ARMANDO VALLADARES

 

“My knowledge of Marxism is confined to knowing that Marx was a Jew with a long white beard.” -- MARC CHAGALL        (the early 20th Century painter who, in fact, was a Russian Jew – and he said this when he was criticized by his fellow Russkies for being insufficiently “Marxist” before moving definitively to Zurich.)

 

“Marxism: Beautiful theory – wrong species.” -- EDWARD O. WILSON (The American sociobiologist and evolutionary theorist who happens to be the world's foremost  authority on ants – who he thinks are rather better suited to the prescriptions of the old Monster of the British Museum Reading Room than we human beans.)

 

“Marx, his popularizers, and his latter-day apostles, for their system to work, require that reality be ‘constructed’, that, in effect, there be no reality except that which one chooses—or which one can impose.” – IAN TUTTLE (in NR in Jan 2015)

 

“Every practical application of Marxist theory has led not merely to tyranny, but to social and economic collapse.” — SIR ROGER SCRUTON

 

“Marxism was a nonsense that bore no relation to observed reality.” -- JAMES DELINGPOLE

 

“Marxists believe the issue is never the issue; the issue is always revolution.” -- DAVID HOROWITZ

 

“Marxism-Leninism provides a highly intellectualised rationalisation of a discreditable but almost universal and ineradicable emotion: envy.” -- THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

“The chief demerit of the Marxist program was its point-by-point defiance of human nature.” -- MARTIN AMIS

 

“The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects - his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity.” -- HENRY HAZLITT

 

“For holders of a supposedly dialectical ideology, Marxists are surprisingly bad at incorporating the lessons of history.” -- SAMUEL HAMMOND (of the NISKANEN CENTER, in October 2018)

 

"A Marxist system is recognized by the fact that it spares the criminals and criminalizes political opponents." -- ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN

 

“Marxists know who their friends are.” -- PETER JONES (the “Ancient and Modern” columnist for the UK SPECTATOR)

 

"Marxism produces bad music, bad art, social stagnation and really unhappy people." -- FRANK ZAPPA

 

“Marxism has developed with the times: ‘The means of production’ has become ‘The means of persuasion’. But the results are more catastrophic than ever.” -- JACK JOLIS (in May 2021)

 

"When Global Marxism realized, about a generation ago, that their boring old 'Proletariat' & 'Means of Production' crap was obsolete, they had the singular stroke of genius to replace 'em w/

1/ anti-white race-war

&

2/ the 'man-made climate-change' hoax;

Been skating ever since!" -- JACK JOLIS

"Intellectuals like Marxism because Marx makes economics simple — the rich get their money from the poor. (How the rich manage this, since the poor by definition don’t have any money, is beyond me. But never mind.)" -- P. J. O'ROURKE

 

“Flirtations with Marxism among intellectuals (are) a sort of ‘highbrow populism’." -- P. J. O’ROURKE

"I think the predisposition towards misery was occasioned by Karl Marx's utopian vision of how the working class would live their lives under true communism -- toiling all morning and reading Plato in the afternoon." -- ROD LIDDLE

"Marxism may be dead and proletarians have proved to be hopeless -- they're all on sea cruises with their third wives. But we can find new proletariats whose ideological benefactors we can be -- women, non-whites, put-upon white ethnics, homosexuals, transsexuals, the polymorphously perverse, pornographers, prostitutes, hardwood trees -- which can be used to express our indignation." -- TOM WOLFE (in his 2000 "In The Land Of The Rococo Marxists")

"Marxism still hangs on, barely, acrobatically, in American Universities." -- TOM WOLFE (in 2000)

"The trouble with Marxists is that they're modern Calvinists, all sheep and goats." -- MALCOLM BRADBURY

"People who grow up indoctrinated as Marxists don't realize they're Marxists. They just go around thinking everything is normal until they become revolutionary fodder or starve to death." -- MIKE BELCHER (an ex-paramedic and a writer, on the Twoot)

Massachusetts

"This is Massachusetts. They probably live in places called Mooshacumquit and West Fishcake." -- MARK HELPRIN

"Boston is a city of libraries and darkness." -- MARK HELPRIN

Materialism

“The Bible tells us that man does not live by bread alone, but often you have to have bread to realize this.” – MICHAEL NOVAK

 

“Material progress is not everything in life, but the poor need it.” – V. S. NAIPAUL

 

“I’m rather tolerant of materialism. The poor need it.” – V. S. NAIPAUL

 

“Notice how those who impoverish their people are always bragging about liberating them from materialism.” – JIM GERAGHTY

 

Mathematics

“Math – the only form of intellection that is perfectly harmless.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

 

“I firmly believe that western civilisation will cease to count when our children can no longer count.” – NIALL FERGUSON

 

“When God sings to Himself, He sings in algebra.” –  GOTTFRIED WILHELM  VON LEIBNIZ (17th Century all-around egg-head and mathematician, and if he's right here, then this is as good an argument for atheism as I've ever seen....)

 

“Mathematics is a search for patterns.” – ELIZABETH STAMP (A retired English math teacher, in July 2015. And in England, of course, “math” is “maths”)

 

“In many domains, the only numbers that make sense are 0, 1 and infinity.” – CHRIS MCKAY (a “planetary scientist”)

 

“Mathematics itself operates as Whiteness. Who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as White. Math might as well be called 'whitemath', because curricula emphasizing terms like Pythagorean theorem and pi perpetuate a perception that mathematics was largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans.”-- ROCHELLE GUTIERREZ                                                                                                                   (a “professor” of something called "Math Education" at the University of Illinois, in June 2018, and, well, … words fail me.)

                                                                                                                                                                                      

“Years ago I got off the mathematics train at Quadratic Equations – a neat, airy little station with trellis, ivy, roses, a sunlit platform. There was just a hint of weirdness now and then – the stationmaster made clicking noises in his throat, there was an occasional far-off harmonious humming in the sky, strange bells rang; one knew the frontier was not far away, where the line crosses into the vast country of Incomprehensibility, the jagged peaks of the Calculus Mountains standing up, a day’s journey over its illimitable plains. The train thundered off into those no doubt exhilarating spaces, but without me.” – PAUL JENNINGS                         (The English humorist)

                                                                                                                                                                                               

 “Calculus is an algebraic way of handling (well, fudging) the continuity of the number line. It handles vectors and curves and smooth changes – the sorts of phenomena you can measure only if you’re prepared to stop counting.” – SIMON INGS (this is utter gibberish to me, but I have a notion that it might be memorable... to someone.)

 

"The only math I was good at was addition" -- SAMUEL M'CHEYNE GLASSER

"Maths (sic), being the only subject you can if necessary do in your head, without benefit of books or even of glasses, come to that." -- DENNIS GUNNING (in his quite amusing, if extremely obscure, novel "Good Stuff")

“Cancel culture needs to start canceling numbers. I suggest beginning with the number 9. Personally, it's the number that I dislike the most. This is because, in 4th grade, it was the ‘9-times’ part of the multiplication table that tripped me up. I was fine all the way through 8 X 10 = 80. But when I got to the 9s I fell apart. To this day when I see 9 X 9 I want the result to be 99, and I suffer a feeling of exclusion and powerlessness and a need to go to a safe place when I'm told by the people who hold power in our society that the answer is otherwise. As any woke person will tell you, ‘The personal is the political’. And this is true 9 times out of 10, so to speak. Therefore, with righteous indignation, I demand that 9s be banned.” – P. J. O’ROURKE                  (in April 2021)

                                                                                                                                                                                                    

“In mathematics there is nothing unknowable.” – DAVID HILBERT                                                                  (1862-1943, a very big German cheese in math circles, and I, who got hopelessly lost midway through Algebra I, can only laff at this statement of his.)

"There are two types of mathematician: 90 percent see in figures, 10 percent see in pictures. The most brilliant, the most profound, come from that 10 percent." -- WILLIAM BOYD


"Is math something we invented or something we discovered? And if it is something we discovered, who created it? I don't know... God?" — WILLIAM BOYD (in his 1987 novel "The New Confessions") 

“Math is the only place where truth and beauty mean the same thing”. -  DANICA MCKELLAR  (an American actress, writer and "math advocate")

"The only thing I find interesting about math is mathematicians." --JACK JOLIS

"Puns are the pornography of mathematicians." -- DONALD WESTLAKE (No, me neither. But it sounds good.)

"Mathematics is the only thing that can be truly infinite." -- DAVID WHITEHOUSE      (the former BBC "science correspondent")

Mattis, Gen. James                                                                                                   

“General Mattis has a bear rug in his home but it is not dead, it is just afraid to move.” – ROB O'NEILL         (the Navy SEAL who shot Osama Bin Laden)

       

                                                                                                                              

McCain, John

“McCain is an ‘angry white male’. He has no discernible interest in ‘soccer moms’ or their piffling concerns about how to make their boomer lifestyles even more pampered. He has a yawning gender gap that makes Bob dole look like Julio Iglesias.” – MARK STEYN (during the 2008 campaign)

 

“McCarthyism”

“There is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing.” – IRVING KRISTOL (in 1952)

 

“McCarthy may have exaggerated the scope of the problem, but not by much.” – NICHOLAS VON HOFFMAN (an old liberal Washington Post journalist. He died in 2018 and although a lib, he was relatively hard-nosed and honest. Relatively.)

 

“‘McCarthyism’ is a term used to dismiss the threat of internal subversion and espionage.” – THOMAS SOWELL

 

“The McCarthy era is usually cast as a morality tale of right-wing excesses and paranoia, but what is often overlooked is that it got so ugly because mainstream liberals just couldn't bring themselves to condemn Communists in their ranks. Instead they elevated their 'anti-anti-communism' into some kind of high principle.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

McDonald's

"The McRib is the Holy Roman Empire of food. The HRE was neither holy, Roman or an empire. And the McRib isn't Irish and it ain't rib." -- JONAH GOLDBERG                                                                                      (My sainted Unca Frankie used to say the same thing about the "Holy Roman Empire". From "McRibs", he mercifully didn't know....)

 

“Lots of people are very snotty about McDonald's but, possibly because I am convinced it is full of drugs, I quite like it.” – TANYA GOLD                                                                                                                                                (the sort of punkish food columnist for the UK SPECTATOR)

 

“Crucially, Albania fails the McDonald’s test. If even McDonald’s sees no point in opening up in a place, you can be sure it’s in a sorry state.” – JAMES BARTHOLOMEW                                                                                               (on 12 Dec. 2020)

 

Meaning/Meaninglessness

“And because it means nothing every opinion about it is correct. That's the secret of success: tell the audience they're infallible.” – LLOYD EVANS

 

"Meaning in life? There's chaos to confront, order to establish and revivify, and evil to constrain. Get the hell at it and quit whining." -- JORDAN PETERSON

"The only absolute knowledge attained by man is that life is meaningless." -- LEO TOLSTOY 

"A roller coaster has nothing to say, either. You're in it for the ride." -- DEBORAH ROSS   (the movie reviewer)

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

"An expression doesn't have to mean anything as long as it means something." -- BILL BRYSON     (I'm not sure this would be included if it were by anyone other than my {liberal} man Bill Bryson)

"That says it all... though, I am not quite sure what exactly it says." -- ROY CAMERON (my X pal, commenting on something or other... el clasico....)

Media, The

“People believe what they read in the papers until it’s about something they know.” – SIMON HOGGART

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the 'wet streets cause rain' stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” -- MICHAEL CRICHTON 

“Enoch Powell said that a politician complaining about the media is like a sailor complaining about the sea. But perhaps it is allowable even for sailors to get seasick from time to time.” -- WILLIAM WALDEGRAVE (A senior British Conservative government minister in the Thatcher years)

 

«Media is the plural for mediocrity.» – JIMMY BRESLIN

"People in the media can never understand that the rest of the world doesn't have the same priorities as themselves." -- DAVID LODGE 

“Every story is a media story.” -- ANDREW BREITBART

 

“I have no obligation to be truthful to the media.” – COREY LEWANDOWSKI (on 17 Sept. 2019)

 

"The media hates you and is shocked that you hate it back"-- KURT SCHLICHTER (to his fellow Americans, on 18 May 2021)

"In the American media, a tree can fall in the forest in front of twenty million people - and it still doesn't make a sound." --MARK STEYN      (in August 2024)


 

Media (left-wing) Bias

“The liberals, because they controlled the television networks and the news media in general, along with the universities, concluded that they were in a position to dictate terms to their fellow citizens, and did not need to persuade anyone with facts, evidence, and argument. Thus the typical liberal approach to any situation was to issue demands or to file a lawsuit -- approaches that dispensed with the need to persuade anyone that their ideas were best for the nation. The rise of alternative television networks and newspapers has now rendered these tactics hopelessly ineffective. Now no one (except unfortunate college students) is required to pay any attention at all to the liberals. And most do not.” – JAMES PIERESEN (writing in THE NEW CRITERION, in August 2005)

 

“Of course there’s a liberal  bias in the news. All the networks tilt left… If you repeat any of this, I’ll deny it.” – ANDREW HEYWARD (CBS News president to Bernard Goldberg, in 1993)

 

“Whatever you want to call it, mainstream media, presents itself as unbiased, when in fact, there are built into it, many biases, and they are overwhelmingly to the left.” – THOMAS EDSALL (of  THE WASHINGTON POST, spoken in a radio interview with Hugh Hewitt in Sept. 2006)

 

“One of the marvels of left-liberalism is to watch its willingness to kick around Catholics over progressivism’s must-have list of social issues while taking a quite hands-off attitude toward Muslim atrocities.” – KENNETH ANDERSON

 

"When it appears in a news story, the word some is a first-person pronoun." -- JIM TARANTO

 

“It's true that most people in the news and entertainment industries aren't motivated by liberalism, anymore than fish are motivated by water.” – JEFF POOR (in “The Daily Caller”)

“Communism has murdered several times as many people as Nazism, but how many of us have ever seen a photo of the Gulag?” – JOSEPH SOBRAN

“The liberal bias in the media is not a conspiracy, it's a consensus.” – ANDREW FERGUSON

“Mammals use their excretory functions to express unhappiness. That's basic. Just watch MSNBC.” – BEN STEIN

“Extracts from the essential BBC phrasebook: politicians always 'embrace' the left, 'tak to' the centre, but 'lurch' to the right.” – CHARLES MOORE

“Media bias consists not so much in the exact words of a report, but in how it is framed.” – CHARLES MOORE

“The TV-land world thinks that outside of Brooklyn, America is basically fascist Klan country.” – BEN STEIN

“One watches television news these days not to know what's happening in the world, but to goggle in disbelief at both the subtlety and the insulting lack of subtlety of the leftist propaganda being pushed out.” –  JEREMY CLARKE

“The fact is this. You know, Andrew Breitbart used to say that the media is everything. The media is everything. The media is the only thing that matters in this country. It’s worth ten points to Democrats in every election cycle. It’s worth ten points to the hard left in every election cycle.” --  BEN SHAPIRO

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

“Every single day Joe Biden says something that would end my career if I said it once." – BOBBY JINDAL

 

“Modern journalism is all about deciding which facts the public shouldn't know because they might reflect badly on Democrats.” – JIM TREACHER (of  THE DAILY CALLER, in Dec. '15)

 

“Democrats have their own SuperPAC. It’s called the mainstream media.” – MARCO RUBIO

 

"The people believe what the media (press) tells them they believe." -- GEORGE ORWELL

 

“People say Putin's the most popular guy in Russia. I say 'Yeah, I'd be popular too if I owned NBC'.” – GEORGE W. BUSH

 

"Hell, I'd be popular, too, if I owned NBC news." – GEORGE W. BUSH (In April 2015, 7 years after he left office)

 

"Media bias aids Democratic candidates by eight to 10 percentage points in a typical election.” – TIM GROSECLOSE,                                                              (a professor of political science at UCLA and author of  “Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind”)

“Break the media and you break the Democrats.” – MICHAEL WALSH

 

“You can cover the circus, you just can't fuck the elephants.” – A. M. “ABE” ROSENTHAL (Abe was the  long-time NY Times Managing Editor, and, although also a lib, he was a decent, fair guy – unique at the NY Times. My late brother Alsie's girlfriend worked for him in the 80s and I met him once at a cocktail party and he was a most engaging fellow. I asked him why the bloody NYT didn't even address the issue of liberal media bias, and he answered “I've tried to get them to address that myself – but, sadly, their liberal bias is the one thing that they will never, never, never even address – never mind do anything about. It's a verboten subject. Forget it. Yes, I'll have another, thanks...”)

 

“The media is an arm of the Democratic Party.” – BEN STEIN

 

“We couldn't help Hillary any more than we have.” -- CHRIS CUOMO (the lefty CNN reporter – and brother of Democrat NYS Gov. Andrew Cuomo – in August 2016)

 

“There is, after all, no greater cause in a newsroom than saving the republic from a Republican.” –  DAVID HARSANYI (the senior editor a THE FEDERALIST, in NR, June 2017)

 

“Media mostly creates bias not through quality of argument but by quantity of coverage.” – ROBERT CIALDINI (professor of marketing, business and psychology at Stanford)

 

"I agree that media bias in the national media is a real issue." -- NICHOLAS KRISTOF (no shit, Sherlock. In Dec. 2017)

 

"Our (the media's) job is to control exactly what people think" -- MIKA BRZEZINSKI (of MSNBC, on July 6, 2017)

" 'Journalists' do this thing where they hype Party propaganda when needed, and then when the story is no longer relevant they quietly publish the truth about how they were totally lying. This way they can say 'we DID report the facts!' Truly bad people." -- DAVID ANGELO (a blogger, on the Twoot -- 9 Jan 2023) 

"Anytime anyone criticizes the media, the media shrieks 'You're just like Trump!' Why do you think he got elected in the first place? Because no one believes you anymore. You lost your credibility a long time ago." – ELON MUSK (in May 2018)

 

"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old... They literally know nothing... We created an echo chamber... They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say." – BEN RHODES (Obama’s young and anti-American foreign policy/Iran hit-man)

 

"The MSM is the world’s most pompous Democrat transcription service." -- NICK SHORT

"The reason populist candidates do well electorally is they don't play by media rules. When the rules are stacked against you, that's the only way to play." -- RORY SUTHERLAND


 "When journalists make all their mistakes in only one direction, they're not really mistakes and they're not really journalists." -- DR. MILTON WOLF, MD        (an excellent fellow on the Twoot)

 

“It is not an accident that all of the press’s mistakes go in one political or narrative direction. Journalists treat Democrats as normal and Republicans as abnormal and proceed accordingly in their coverage.” – CHARLES C. W. COOKE

 

 "Is any group of people more self-important and self-satisfied than the sermonizers of the 4th Estate? What threatens them is not Donald Trump but the noxious gas of their self-infatuation." -- ROGER KIMBALL

 

"My plan to cut the BBC out of my life entirely is working well. I find that not watching or listening to anything the BBC does is making me calmer, happier and better informed." -- JAMES DELINGPOLE

 

"Lying barely counts as lying when you've got the Mainstream Media in your pocket." -- JACK JOLIS

 

"The news is fake, but the leaks are real." -- DAWSON S. FIELD (a conservative blogger)

 

"The media hates you and is shocked that you hate it back"-- KURT SCHLICHTER (to his fellow Americans, on 18 May 2021)

"We owned the news. We were the gatekeepers, and we very much owned the facts as well." -- EMMA TUCKER (WALL STREET JOURNAL Editirix, Davos '23) 

 

"There has been a big shift in the information eco-system. Conservatives, normies, and independents are no longer trying to argue with mainstream 'journalists' as if they are good-faith actors in need of correction. We are just calling them liars and mocking them. Progress." -- KYLE BECKER     (ex-Fox CEO of "Becker News", in March 2024)

"I greatly underestimated the awesome power of the Democratic Medusa, whose snakes writhe into, wrap around and infest nearly every American institution, particularly the press. It has been amazing to watch but also chilling. The US no longer enjoys an independent press. The American fourth estate is almost entirely an arm of the Democratic party." -- LIONEL SHRIVER      (in August 2024)

"In the American media, a tree can fall in the forest in front of twenty million people - and it still doesn't make a sound." --MARK STEYN      (in August 2024)

"The mainstream media’s coverage of American politics is so often so indistinguishable from cheerleading for the Democratic Party that Democrats never actually have a good, reliable, realistic sense of how they’re doing." -- JIM GERAGHTY

Medicare

"'Medicare For All' is a fantasy, given that we'll need stalwart efforts and exceptional good luck to preserve Medicare for anyone." – WILLIAM VOEGELI (in March, 2018)

 

Medicine (see also “Doctors”)

“Any organ that can be removed without shortening your lifespan is not pulling its weight.” – JAMES LILEKS

 

“Every surgeon carries about him a little cemetery, in which from time to time he goes to pray.” – RENE LERICHE (A v. famous French surgeon of the first half of the 20th century.)

 

“People working on their own get out of touch and it corrupts you... it's hubris isn't it? The funny thing about medical hubris is that nemesis is visited on the patients rather than the surgeon.” – DR. HENRY MARSH (the celebrated English neurosurgeon, and author of the two successful books “Do No Harm” and “Admissions”, in May, 2017)

 

“A blood pressure cuff on my arm, that great Velcro engagement ring that announces you and mortality are an item.” – JAMES LILEKS

 

 "I learned a long time ago that 'minor surgery' is when they do the operation on someone else, not you." -- BILL WALTON (basketball star for the Portland Trail Blazers)

 

"If many remedies are prescribed for an illness, you may be certain that the illness has no cure." – ANTON CHEKHOV

                                                                                                                                                                                               

 “The art of medicine consists in distracting the patient while nature cures the disease.” -- VOLTAIRE

 "When many remedies are proposed for a disease, it means the disease is incurable." -- LEO TOLSTOY

                                                                                                                                                                                 

"Medical history is the best sort." -- JUSTIN WEBB                                                                                                    (of the BBC)                                                                                                                                                         

                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“There’s really not much to modern medicine. Once upon a time, maybe --  what with all the leeching and cupping and tiresome fresh air cures. But no more. Nowadays, all diseases are divided into two types: fatal and nonfatal. There’s nothing you can do about fatal diseases, so anything you do will be fine with everyone concerned, since there’s nothing to be done. Penicillin cures everything else. And penicillin is nothing but bread mold. That’s pretty much all you need to know. As for the rest anybody can slap a Band-Aid on, and babies plop right out of their own accord.” -- P. J. O’ROURKE                                                                              (for the old NATIONAL LAMPOON, believe it or not – in the early ‘70s, sometime....)

 

“You can’t tell a wound from its scab.” -- DONALD WESTLAKE

                                                                                                                                                               

Mediocrity                                                                                                                        

"Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance? We can't have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos." -- ROMAN HRUSKA                                                                                                                                                (then-Republican Senator from Nebraska, in 1970)

“Talent instantly recognizes genius. Only mediocrity knows nothing greater than itself.” – ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

 

“I have nothing against mediocre people, provided I don’t have to teach them anything.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

“What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones." – JOSE ORTEGA Y GASSET

 

"Anyone in any walk of life who is content with mediocrity is untrue to himself and to American tradition." -- GEN. GEORGE S. PATTON JR

Mediterranean, The

"The Mediterranean is the human norm. When men leave that exquisite lake, they approach the monstrous and extraordinary." -- E.M. FORSTER (actually, a character of his -- Cyril Fielding -- said this, in his "A Passage To India")

Meetings

“Sometimes I spend whole meetings wondering how they got the big meeting table through the door.” – BILL MURRAY

 

"Meetings of more than two people are thieves of time in which nothing important is ever accomplished." – CHARLES McCARRY

 

"Excellent. The president directed his Nobel Prize-winning Head of Meetings to assemble a meeting to tackle the challenge of mobilizing the assembling of the tackling of the challenge mobilization, at the end of which they directed BP to order up some new tackle and connect it to the thingummy next to the whachamacallit. Thank you, Mr. President. That and $4.95 will get you a venti oleaginato at Starbucks." -- MARK STEYN

 

“People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.” – THOMAS SOWELL

 

“In any board meeting the amount of time devoted to an item on the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the difficulty of the issue. Whether to build a vast nuclear reactor might detain the board for a few minutes but they'd spend half an hour on the design and cost of the bicycle sheds. They knew what a bicycle shed was.” – C. NORTHCOTE PARKINSON (1909-1993, British naval historian and author of some 50 books)

 

"He always thought it advisable to be ten minutes late – meetings tended to go better, he found, if they started with apologies." – WILLIAM BOYD (in his excellent 1998 novel "Armadillo")

 

“Whenever you hear them swanking about hard they work you have to remember they’re not really working, they’re just going to meetings. And when they’re not having meetings, they’re having a ‘working breakfast’ or ‘working lunch’ – which is just a meeting with your mouth full.” – MARTYN HARRIS

" 'It is vital that we see a return to face-to-face meetings to foster the dynamic collaboration that creates breakthrough ideas.' All true, I'm sure. But what you're describing here isn't an office: it's a pub." -- RORY SUTHERLAND 

 "A well-run organisation has no need of meetings. Meetings are simply full of people talking a lot of rubbish. Nobody tells the truth in meetings, they only try to impress the other people in the meeting. The only truth you get out of anybody is by forcing some alcohol down their throat and getting them into a quiet corner where they think they can't be heard." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS

“He insisted on having no regular meetings at all: he felt a meeting should be held only for a specific reason, such as lunch.” – CHARLES MOORE

 

Megalomania

“Wouldn’t it be great for the world if I were president?” – BARACK OBAMA (When he was still a Senator, speaking to a friend of Brit Hume’s)

 

Memory

“Ali hits you on the head. Frazier hits you on the head. How many names you gonna remember?” – GEORGE FOREMAN (on why he named all 5 of his sons “George”.)

 

“The trouble was, once you had forgotten something it was pretty hard to remember whether you had ever known it.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS (the amusing Brit novelist)

 

“In memory, everything seems to happen to music" – TENNESSEE WILLIAMS (the less amusing American playwright and poofter)

 

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” – MILOS KUNDERA

 

“Don't cry because its over, smile because it happened.” – THEODOR GEISEL (“DR. SEUSS”) (I like this, even though even as a kid I never liked the cloying unfunniness of this pedantic old     Lefty. Now the Left has decided to erase him. Go know....)

 

“Everyone needs his memories.  They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.” – SAUL BELLOW

 

“Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.” -- CYRIL CONNOLLY (critic and editor 1903-1974)

 

«Never memorise anything you can look up.» – ALBERT EINSTEIN

 

"What's the use of remembering anything?  If it was unpleasant, it was unpleasant and if it was pleasant it's over" -- ELAINE DUNDY  (Author.)

 

"Memories about the past are always about the present." -- NELSON DEMILLE

 

“Nobody belongs to us, except in memory.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

“Let’s not forget that forgetfulness is the safeguard of sanity. If we remembered everything all the time, our brains would be clogged and clamorous.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

“If we can’t take our memories with us, why go?” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

"To a large extent we are our memories: without them we exist in a kind of no man's land, neither in possession of our own identity, not entirely denuded of it. This is very sad to behold; but it's hard to say, really, how sad it is to experience." -- CRESSIDA CONNOLLY

 

“A liar needs a good memory.” – GUY BELLAMY

"We play tricks on others, memory plays tricks on us." -- STEVE TESICH

"You learn to enjoy not what you have, but what you remember." -- ALBERTO MANGUEL (the Argentine-Canadian literary wallah)

“My memory is not at all hazy, just sharp, detailed and dead wrong.” – EVELYN WAUGH

"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

“We are only really at home in our memory.” — ALAN JOLIS (my late kid brother, in his celebrated 1996 memoir “Speak Sunlight”)

"Peoples' memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive." -- HARUKI MURAKAMI (The big-deal Japanese novelist)

"A person is just a collection of misremembered things." -- JULIA SHAW     (the author of "The Memory Illusion") 

Men

“Men are what women marry. They have two arms and sometimes two wives but never more than one dollar or one idea at a time. Like Turkish cigarettes they are all made of the same material. Husbands are of three types – prizes, surprises and consolation prizes. Making a husband out of a man is one of the highest forms of plastic art know to civilisation. It requires science, sculpture, common sense, faith, hope and charity – mostly charity. If you flatter a man, you frighten him to death. If you don’t, you bore him to death. If you permit him to make love to you, he gets tired of you in the end. If you don’t, he gets tired of you in the beginning.” – ANNA GOLDBERG (a real mover and shaker in Jewish Momma circles. And I got tired of her at BOTH the beginning AND the end…)

 

“To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo”. – VALERIE SOLANAS (hey… thanks a lot, lady…)

 

"There's very little advice in men's magazines, because men think, 'I know what I'm doing. Just show me somebody naked!'"  – JERRY SEINFELD

 

“There’s a point in a man’s life when the joy leaves it. Up until their mid-twenties, boys are up for anything. They’re full of confidence. They’ll take risks and they’ll experiment with things that are new. But at some point the shutters come down. The concept of fun leaves them. It’s as if once a man has a marriage and a mortgage he doesn’t dare let the concept of fun enter his life for fear that it will tell him there’s a better way of living. That doesn’t seem to happen to women in quite the same way.” – DAVID THOMAS (author of “Not Guilty: A Defense Of Men”. He was still a man when he wrote this, but last time I looked, 2019, he was in the middle of the process of “becoming a woman”. Strewth. Go know....)

 

“The cultural values are male; for a woman to say a man is funny is the equivalent of a man saying that a woman is pretty. Also, humor is largely aggressive and pre-emptive, and what’s more male than that?” – FRAN LEBOWITZ

                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“Men are broadly hardwired to say yest to most things, even if they have as much chance of succeeding as they have of jogging across the Sahara.” – ROGER ALTON                                                                                                                (when he was the sports columnist for the UK SPECTATOR)

                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“Going to bed with a man is the best way to get his undivided attention.” – MRS. PATRICK CAMPBELL                       (the stage name of Beatrice Stella Tanner, a good-looking English actress of the late 19th - early 20th centuries, George Bernard Shaw’s girlfriend, and the author of the famous quote, also when referring to “illicit sex”, that "My dear, I don't care what they do, so long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses.")

                                                                                                                                                                                 

“Good husbands are harder to find than good jobs.” – YVONNE BRILL                                                      (A Flemish-Canadian-born lady who became a top-flight American rocket scientist)

“My wife talks to everybody. She has many, many friends, and when they call, she can talk with them for hours, even if they already talked earlier that day. I have maybe one percent as many close friends as my wife, and, being males, they never call.  This is fine with me because if they did call, even if we hadn’t talked in fifteen years, we would quickly run out of things to talk about. Within seconds we would be discussing the Dolphins’ situation at offensive tackle. By the end of a minute we would be down to awkward silence, and that would be that for another fifteen years. Some of my close friends could easily be deceased; this would not have a serious effect on our relationship.” – DAVE BARRY

 

“You should also consider the fact that men, compared to women, don’t have all that many innermost thoughts and feelings, and the ones we do have we are not necessarily proud of.” – DAVE BARRY

"Friendship isn't always about exchanging deep and meaningful confidences. If it were, there are a whole lot of lifelong old-school male relationships that would not even earn the name of friendship." -- SAM LEITH (echoing brother Dave Barry, see above)

"Men want only one thing -- but it's not what mothers tell their daughters. What men really want is baseball stardom. Thwarted by circumstances, they may settle grudgingly for that other." – JAY D. HOMNICK                                   (in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, 2004)

 

“At some point in my late twenties I discovered: whatever else we may have going for us, all guys are subject to immediate disqualification by reason of footwear.” – KYLE SMITH

"Never ask a man if he wants a bulletproof vest or a pair of mittens. Just make him put it on." -- NELSON DEMILLE

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

 

"A man who can avoid alcohol and women can live very cheaply." -- JACK LONDON (g'luck with that, as they say)

"See, the problem is that God gives men a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time." – ROBIN WILLIAMS

 

“Stage parties are so often, in my experience, the best reason for wishing you had been born a woman: all that pressure to show yourself the alpha male, among painfully mismatched, pumped-up lads you often barely know, having to drink more than you'd like, watching skanky whores that do the opposite of arouse you. Can't tell you how glad I am to have got past that stage of my life.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

 

“What man ever said, to another man, 'And how is your marriage?' “ -- JON CANTER

 

"Owning a penis 20 years from now will be considered as criminal as drinking a large Coke or driving your own car." -- MATT LABASH (in January 2017)

 

“Of all the kinds of masculinity, I have to say 'toxic' is my favorite.” -- KURT SCHLICHTER

 

“The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason they want woman, as the most dangerous plaything.” -- FRIEDRICH NIETSCHE

 

“The problem traditionally associated with being male, which is that our sex finds it difficult to understand human feelings.” -- CHARLES MOORE

 

“Between members of the sex I would describe as male, it is not necessary to talk over questions that could well be described as I would say 'emotional'.” -- NIGEL WILLIAMSON   (in his 1980 novel “Jack Be Nimble”)

 

"Manhood is always hard to define, but easy to flunk." -- SEBASTIAN JUNGER

 

"The definition of a man is someone you can count on when  the enemy comes." -- JOYCE BENENSON (anthropologist, author and professor of psychology at Emmanuel College, in Boston)

 

"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

 

"One can be a faithful husband and a bad one, as one can be a faithless hubby but a very good one. My wife thinks I'm the latter, so yippee." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

“It is the one thing men want. Not knowledge, not virtue, but power.” – ANTHONY BURGESS

 

“The more I see of men, the more I like dogs.” – (MADAME) ANNE LOUISE GERMAINE DE STAEL

"The curious blend of irony and sentiment that passes for conversation among men." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS
 

“I have a certain sympathy with lesbians because men are, after all, pretty horrible.” – GUY BELLAMY (in his comic novel “The Comedy Hotel)

 

"All men have an instinct for conflict: at least all healthy men." -- HILAIRE BELLOC

 

“We want different things. Men want to have sex with a woman. Then they want to have sex with another woman. And then another. Then they want to eat cornflakes and sleep for a while, and then they want to have sex with another woman, and another, until they die.

Women want a relationship. They may not get it, or they may sleep with a lot of men before they do get it, but ultimately that’s what they want. That’s the goal.

Men don’t have goals. Natural ones. So they invent them, and put them at either end of a football pitch. And then they invent football. Or they pick fights, or try and get rich, or start wars, or come up with any number of daft bloody things.” – HUGH LAURIE (the comic English actor)

 

“Inhabiting a male body is like having a bank account; as long as it’s healthy, you don’t think much about it.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

“A man and his body are like a boy and the buddy who has a driver’s license and the use of his father’s car for the evening; you go along, gratefully, for the ride.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

“Men don’t much like other men – all organic things intrinsically hate one another, except as food – but they’re used to them.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

"Men don't think beyond their next piece of ass." -- JOHN UPDIKE

 

“Old men can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

“A defect in me, I fear, if not all male animals, is an inability to take serious business quite seriously.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

“Masculinity is aggressive, unstable, combustible. It is also the most creative cultural force in history.” – CAMILLE PAGLIA

 

"What’s the difference between boys & men? The price of their toys!" -- SEBASTIAN GORKA 

“Men don’t look at clothes like a treasure map that carries the secrets of a woman’s personality. Men are blind to to colour, fabric, texture, cut and finish. The only quality they notice is tightness. Clingy garments are appreciated because they offer reliable data about their contents.” – LLOYD EVANS

"The term 'toxic masculinity' is one of the many charming phrases that our age has come up with to pathologize ordinary people." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY 

“If there is fighting to be done, almost every society on Earth recognizes that it is men who are going to have to do it.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY

«Funny thing about men – as soon as they turn fifty they start eating the weirdest parts of the animal.» –  CHRISTOPHER DOUGLAS (The author and star of the very funny English radio comedy «Ed Reardon’s Week»)

"All men love going back to their childhood days and having the chance to say 'Over and out' and 'Roger'." -- MARY KILLEN (the Speccie's "Dear Mary". And may I take this opportunity to point out that no military man ever says "Over and out" -- you say "Over" until the conversation is finished, at which point you say "Out".) 

"Most male sexuality is designed by evolution to be an unscratchable itch; a desperate, unsatisfiable urge. It is like hunger:  just as you aren't meant to wake up one day and say, 'Oh, I've had 6,000 meals, I think I'll stop eating now', so men aren't meant to wake up one day and think, 'Oh, I've ogled.500 girls, I think I'll stop staring at them now." -- SEAN THOMAS       (English journalist, author and recovering porn addict)

«Driving and sex are the only two things a chap will never admit to being bad at. » – JOSEPH CONNOLLY (in his rather appalling 1995 novel «Poor Souls»)  

Men and Women (“Men and Women”)

“Women are successful in the business world because the business world was created by men.  Men are babies.  And women are … good with kids.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

 

“The trouble with so many women (not all, I hasten to add, but probably a majority) is that they think the function of government is to ‘help’ whole classes of people.  They tend to lack the civic virtue of impartiality.” – TOM BETHELL

 

“Women want to discover something about themselves, which in my experience is a mistake. I would as soon find a scorpion in my sleeping bag as a dark secret at my psychological core.” – SIMON HOGGART (The English author, journalist and essayist)

"Tragic ladies just litter the world. So do broken men. Even so. At the end of the day. And boy I've had some long days. I'm sure still glad I'm not a woman." -- J. P. DONLEAVY

“It is only rarely that one can see in a little boy the promise of a man, but one can almost always see in a little girl the threat of a woman.” – ALEXANDRE DUMAS (SON) (I like that “threat”…. Heh…)

 

“Men would rather vacate the arena altogether than share it with women.” – AMELIA EARHART (Actually, she’s not entirely wrong, here. Poor thing, in the end it was she who ‘vacated the arena’.)

 

“There are certain facts of life that remain unchanged, despite the rolling on of history and the attendant shifts in social mores. One of these facts is that most women instinctively seek out marriage. Another is that most men instinctively eschew an institution which restricts them to a single partner.” – JESSICA DAVIES

 

“We know all about men who say they love women. So many women, so much of the time. But they can’t help upsetting some one woman in particular.” – CHRISSY ILEY (a British lady columnist and, hey Chrissie, nobody “can help upsetting some one woman in particular” – I’ve tried it and it’s genetically impossible…)

 

“Men fight and make money; women talk and make babies.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE (right…. next case….)

 

“Women tend to be less disposed than men to treat everything as a laugh.” – MATTHEW PARRIS (You don’t say, Matt. Matt is the urbane – poof, actually – ex-English Conservative MP. He’s a left-conservative; what they call over there a “wet”.)

 

“Somehow, the all-powerful patriarchy appears to have had a bit of an oversight when it comes to the protection of patriarchy itself. As the law currently stands, a woman can leave her husband, sue him for divorce, kick him out of his house, take his children and, best of all, make him foot the bill for everything. Now where, I wonder, had the patriarchy popped off to when that little lot got passed?” – DAVID THOMAS (A chap who should, heh, know what he’s talking about. This British author who was a man when he wrote this but who, last time I heard, in 2019, was in the process of becoming a woman. For real. Well, for what passes for “real” these days....)

 

“My own 83-year study of the other sex, which still occupies a good deal of my time, has led me to the deep-seated conviction that the essential disparity between the sexes has little to do with intellectuality. The distinguishing characteristic is woman’s claim to, indeed assumption of, infallibility.” – HUGH CUDLIPP

 

“Men learn, and learn again, that women appear when they’re good and ready – though they’re still not ready.” – PAUL BESTON (an editor at the New York CITY JOURNAL, in 2010)

 

“It is easier to make a man laugh at a bad joke, but more worthwhile to get a woman to laugh at a good joke.” – G. K. CHESTERTON

 

“Men need humor to attract women; women do not need humor to attract men.” – JAMES BOWMAN

"Women want to be where men are, and men want to be where women aren't. And you can quote me." -- IVO DAWNAY    (the somewhat Leftist and roué husband of the fetching and somewhat leftist sister of Boris Johnson, Rachel Johnson -- who quoted him, here)

“If you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman.” – MARGARET THATCHER (I'll forgive this woman anything -- even this bit of tosh.)

 

“No wonder liberal women think men are pigs: Their men are pigs.” – PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY (the stalwart veteran conservative American dragon lady. And boy, have I gotten a lot of mileage out of this quote....)

 

“Traditionally women dealt with the home and men dealt with the World. Men and women are both parents, but only one of them is created to be a mother. That there is no difference can be asserted only by those who have not raised children.” – DAVID MAMET

 

“I've worked for women and they're all crap. Unlike men, they always put their personal lives first. It's no surprise to me there aren't more women in the top jobs. I'm staggered any women have jobs at all.” -- LIZ JONES (Columnist for the London DAILY MAIL, in Jan. 2011)

"Laws against 'hate speech' are simply female-driven ways to control maleness. Men speak 'hatefully' to each other all the time, even when they're just horsing around. Women speak nicely and then backstab. Admit it -- you know I'm right." -- MICHAEL WALSH 

"Women will always defect to the enemy when they feel their own men cannot or will not protect them. Which is to say the very qualities they regard as "toxic" in their own men they subconsciously regard as protective and seek out in others." -- MICHAEL WALSH

“When women are bottled up they raise the selflessness bar and get more bottled up. When men are bottled up they either engineer a self-immolation scenario worthy of a Wagner opera, or else they simply curl up and die.” – FLORENCE KING (in 2006)

 

“Today's America contains millions of women who hate men in general because they have never met men in general.” -- FLORENCE KING (in 2012)

“If there is fighting to be done, almost every society on Earth recognizes that it is men who are going to have to do it.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY 

“Men don't understand anything about women and women don't understand anything about men. And it's better that way.” – VITTORIO GASSMAN                                                                                                                                           (the great – and my favorite – actorico Italiano, whose “Il Sorpasso” is in my personal Top Ten All-Time Movies list and whose nickname, incidentally, was “Il Mattatore” (“The Showman”). And he knew about women, because he was once married to the awful Shelley Winters... for about ten minutes.... )

“Men and women will never get along because they want different things.  Men want women and women want men." -- OSCAR WILDE

“A man’s face is his autobiography.  A woman’s face is her work of fiction.” -- OSCAR WILDE                                                                                                                                                                                                  

“No one will ever win the battle of the sexes. Too much fraternizing with the enemy.” -- HENRY KISSINGER

"Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition." — TIMOTHY LEARY

"She knew, as women do, what he thought of her husband." -- NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE ("as women do")                                                                                                                                                                                                

“The thoughts inside a woman’s head are one tangled mass of cooked spaghetti. The noodles wrap all around one another, and it’s tricky to pull one long strand from the bowl without getting lumps of marinara on the place-mat. Everything connects to something else. It’s hard to set boundaries, boxes, or even perforated lines around the things we think and feel, because most of us don’t usually think and feel in a linear, organized fashion.” – TRICIA LOTT WILLIFORD (An American author, here in the PJM in June ’15. And I believe she’s right—women think differently than men, and have difficulty with mental “compartmentalizing”.)

 

“When a man says 'We've got to talk', the woman hears 'We're going to have a nice conversation'. When a woman says 'We've got to talk', the man hears 'Will the defendant please rise?' ” -- PETER SASSO                    (the American juggler and comic)

                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“Women marry men with the hope they will change.” – CHARLES SAATCHI                                                          (The 3-times married, lastly to Nigella Lawson, Iraqi-Jewish-descended advertising tycoon and conservative supporter)

 

"All men are pigs and all women are insane." -- MICHAEL GRAHAM (One of my favorite radio guys.)

"The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man." -- GERMAINE DE STAEL      ("Madame de Staël", 1766-1817)

"A man who correctly guesses a woman's age may be smart, but he's not very bright." -- LUCILLE BALL

“I would gladly admit that women are our superiors, if only they would stop pretending to be our equals.” – SACHA GUITRY (the French actor/director of the 30s to the 50s)

 

“(My wife) talks to everybody. She has many, many friends, and when they call, she can talk with them for hours, even if they already talked earlier that day. I have maybe one percent as many close friends as (my wife), and, being males, they never call.  This is fine with me because if they did call, even if we hadn’t talked in fifteen years, we would quickly run out of things to talk about. Within seconds we would be discussing the Dolphins’ situation at offensive tackle. By the end of a minute we would be down to awkward silence, and that would be that for another fifteen years. Some of my close friends could easily be deceased; this would not have a serious effect on our relationship.” – DAVE BARRY

 

“You should also consider the fact that men, compared to women, don’t have all that many innermost thoughts and feelings, and the ones we do have we are not necessarily proud of.” – DAVE BARRY

 

"I dress for women, and undress for men" – ANGIE DICKINSON

 

“The feminisation of men always leads to the masculinisation of women.”  - JOSEPH GOEBBELS (in 1933)

"According to a new survey, women say they feel more comfortable undressing in front of men than they do undressing in front of other women. They say that women are too judgmental, where, of course, men are just grateful." – ROBERT DE NIRO (Bob should, er, compare notes with Angie, above....)

 

"Women can fake orgasms, but only men can fake relationships." -- SHARON STONE

 

“A (male) chum doesn't forgive, he just forgets – women forgive everything but never forget.” – TOVE JANSSON      (Famous mid-2O century Finnish artist and author – created the “Moomins”, whatever the hell    they were....)

 

"Women have choices. Men have responsibilities." – STEVE MARTIN (in “Parenthood”)

"She wanted what the ladies call commitment, and then she'd be loyal. But men want loyalty first, then they might consider commitment. These were opposing concepts and not likely to be resolved unless one or the other party had a sex change operation." -- NELSON DEMILLE


"Men talk to women so they can have sex with them, and women have sex with men so that men will talk to them." -- NELSON DEMILLE

"The only time a woman really succeeds in changing a man is when he is a baby.” - NATALIE WOOD                          (Birth name Natalia Nikolaevna  Zacharenko,in 1960.)

 

“Although the word 'fellowship' itself is gender neutral, it has a distinctly masculine vibe – men creates fellowships (Jesus and His apostles; the Bee Gees); women create covens.” -- CHRISTINE ROSEN (author and Senior Editor at THE NEW ATLANTIS)

 

“On the one hand, we'll never experience childbirth. On the other hand, we can open our own jars.” – BRUCE WILLIS (yes, him.)

 

“Look at the gym, where, by using the exact same equipment, women hope to become smaller and men hope to become larger.” – KYLE SMITH

 

"Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place" – BILLY CRYSTAL

 

"There has never been a first-rank woman artist. Only men are capable of aesthetic greatness. Women make up 50 per cent or more of classes at art school. Yet they fade away in their late twenties or thirities. Maybe it's something to do with bearing children." -- BRIAN SEWELL (the late English poofter art critic who fellow columnist and art critic Sarah Vine called a "misogynist queer")

 

"It's easy enough to get along with women if you don't care for them." -- E.B. WHITE

 

"Behind every successful man stands a surprised woman." -- MARYON PEARSON (wife of Liberal Canadian PM Lester Pearson)

 

"People (mostly women) pray to make life better; people (mostly men) bought newspapers to see what life was that day." -- RICHARD BROOKHISER

"Men have authority over women because Allah has made the one superior to the other, and because men spend their wealth to maintain women. good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because Allah has guarded them. As for those women from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart, and beat them. Then, if they obey you, do nothing further against them." -- THE KORAN -- SURAH 4 VERSE 34 

«If you want a feminist culture that abolishes the 'patriarchy' and denies all canonical male roles ; that banishes carbon fuels, new chemicals, and the manufacturing they enable ;  that represses disruptive entrepreneurial behavior ; and that enforces preferential represantion of women throughout the commanding heights of the economy, you cannot at the same time have most men eagerly supporting the plan.  Without most men on board, the nation will not be able to defend itself or produce new technology and enterprise. Without women bearing children and raising them in families, the nation will not be able to reproduce itself. » – GEORGE GILDER (in January 2017)

 

“The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason they want woman, as the most dangerous plaything.” -- FRIEDRICH NIETSCHE

 

"They want to exercise power over men, exercising power over men being the classical means to the end of exercising power over women, which is of course what this, and nine-tenths of everything else in human affairs, is about." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“And remember, for all our faults, it wasn't us who bought 125 million copies of Fifty Shades of Grey” -- RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“We went to Bed, Bath and Beyond and he was bored after the first hour.” -- JAMES LILEKS

 

"Girls don't have what boys have, which is a goat-like capacity to bang with the head against heavy objects that will not move." -- MARK HELPRIN

 

“At least women didn't leave packets of chips on the landing or puke over the banisters at four in the morning.” -- NIGEL WILLIAMSON                (in his 1980 novel “Jack Be Nimble”)

 

“When men are stressed they become aggressive. They lash out and feel better. Women hurt themselves.” -- MARY WAKEFIELD

 

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

 

“There is an earnings gap between men and women, but not a pay gap.” -- ROD LIDDLE

 

“The gap between male and female ability at sport is immense (and not noticeably narrowing): to take an extreme example, both the Australia and and USA football (soccer) teams – among the best in the world – have been beaten by sides composed of 15-year old boys. An average pub team would hammer the England women’s team.” – ROD LIDDLE

"The apparent problem which left-wing men have with women -- which may well stem from  an inability to identify a woman in the first place." -- ROD LIDDLE       (in Oct. 2024) 

“As a man, you need to discipline your wife. You need to touch her a bit, tackle her, you beat her somehow to really streamline her.” -- ONESIMUS TWINAMASIKO (A member of the Ugandan Parliament, on television, in March 2018, and you’ve gotta love the name “Onesimus'“…)

 

"There are two sorts of people: Those who can't wait to grow up, and those who wish they never had to. It's fair to say that women figure predominantly in the first group and men in the second." -- JULIE BURCHILL

 

“Women get bored much faster than men. It’s a well-known medical fact.” – WILLIAM BOYD (in his 2005 short story, “The Persistence Of Vision”)

 

“This was one of the things that he liked about men: their relational minimalism, their gender-based realization that the cupboard of life, emotionally speaking, was pretty near bare. There wasn’t that tireless, irksome, bright-eyed hope women kept fluttering at you.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

“Nearsightedness in women is favored by evolution; men are charmed by it, a vision that focuses on the cooking pot, the sewing needle, and immediate male needs. It would be fatal to hunting prowess, however, and in men it must persist in the genes of social parasites.” – JOHN UPDIKE (I hasten to add that this is spoken by a character in his novel “Memories Of The Ford Administration”)

 

“Women make everything personal. They’re so wrapped up in self-preservation, self-presentation, self-dramatization. With men you don’t have to keep maneuvering, you just punch.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

«From the standpoint of reproduction, the male body is a delivery system, as the female is a mazy device for retention. Once the delivery is made, men feel a faint but distinct falling-off of interest.» – JOHN UPDIKE

 

«The male sense of space must differ from that of the female, who has such interesting, active, and significant inner space. The space that interests men is outer. The ideal male body is taut with lines of potential force, a diagram extending outward ; the ideal female body curves around centers of repose. Relatively, though, men’s bodies, however elegant, are designed for covering territory, for moving on.» – JOHN UPDIKE

 

“The only bulwark against women is a woman, and a wife is convenient, especially for spoiled and preoccupied men of middling years.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

"Men understood men, mechanisms with very few levers -- a few earthy appetites, an atavistic warrior pride and stoicism. Women are shining moon-creatures, who hurt us when they withhold themselves, and again when they don't." -- JOHN UPDIKE

 

“Ferocious female nagging is the price men pay for our much-lamented prerogatives, the power and the mobility and the penis.” – JOHN UPDIKE (in 1996)

 

“Through the bodies of women men conduct what tortured dealings they can with the un!iverse, producing serial murder and morganatic marriages and a Morgan Library’s worth of love letters, novels, and death threats. Women don’t ask for this, true. But what do women ask for? as a maligned sage at the far end of the last century infamously inquired in all innocence.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

“Females carry the burden of the world, I think, but men the magic. If not magical, men are not much.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

"You can go to the dark side of the moon and back and see nothing more wonderful and strange than the way men and women manage to get together." -- JOHN UPDIKE

 

“Men always marry women they don’t quite love, and love the women they can never marry.” – MARTYN HARRIS (in his novel “The Mother-In-Law Joke”)

 

“Any woman, however insane, can make any man, however reasonable, feel guilty if she gets angry enough.” – MARTYN HARRIS

 

“All men think that women are better than they are: more sensible, more grown up, more hygienic. Women change their underwear, remember birthdays, clean lavatories, remember children’s music lessons, and face up bravely to illness and death. It is we men who are the nose-pickers and spot-squeezers and masturbators. We are the ones who are furtive, lazy, unreliable and reckless, pushed to and from by secret lusts and suppressed fantasies that are merely come in the breezy air of feminine common sense.” – MARTYN HARRIS

 

“There is a crucial difference between the male and the female definition of ‘dirty’ when it comes to clothes. I think I am a fairly typical woman in believing dirty sock means a sock that has been worn once, irrespective of whether there is actual dirt on it.” – MELISSA KITE

"The female sex has begun doing some very strange things due to their dependency on mobile technology. A generation of women are going completely gaga because of their phones. They are simply unable to put down their i-phones. My theory as to why the mobile phone has affected the female sex more than the male, for what it's worth, is that women think laterally -- and to do more than one thing at once. Men can only do one thing at a time, famously, and it is turning out to be their saving grace." -- MELISSA KITE (in May 2022) 

"Women cannot resist men who obviously like women." -- RACHEL JOHNSON (Boris' lefty sister.)

 

“We’ve had a glorious past and men have played the greater part in it because that is how God meant it to be. Today’s clowns are against nature and they will not, cannot, win. Real women will not allow it. #MeToo should join the circus.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

"When a man conclusively exalts one woman, and one woman only, 'above all others', you can be pretty sure you are dealing with a misogynist. It frees him up for thinking the rest are shit." -- MARTIN AMIS

 

"Women can die gently. Men always die in torment. Why? Toward the end, men break the habit of a lifetime, and start blaming themselves, with full male severity. Women break a habit too, and start blaming themselves no longer. They forgive. We men can't do that." -- MARTIN AMIS

 

“Sexiness wears thin after awhile and beauty fades, but a man who makes you laugh every day, ah, now that is a treat.” -- JOANNE WOODWARD (The actress -- Paul Newman's wife.) 

“Women bond by telling each other everything in prurient detail. Men do it by avoiding the subject – just hanging out together companionably and trying to top one another’s quips.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

 

"You can’t clean everything all the time, so you have to assume a certain amount of dirt at home. And if you live with others, negotiation becomes necessary. Generally, the amount of dirt women will tolerate is no more than 3 percent, while for men it’s 98 percent. Most guys, after conferring long and hard with their female counterparts, feel thoroughly satisfied with their negotiation of the middle ground, which normally ends up being 4 percent. Take it or leave it. “4 percent take it or leave it” is a scientific measure that even rocket scientists at NASA accept when they have no other choice." -- ITXU DIAZ        (Spanish journalist, political satirist, and author.)

 

“Women have menstruation to tell them they are women. Men must do or risk something to be men.” – CAMILLE PAGLIA

 

“Power is neither male nor female.” – KATHARINE GRAHAM               (the old Generalissima of THE WASHINGTON POST)

 

“Men have motives; women have schemes.” – BENNY “THE KING” ROLLINS (A guy who describes himself on the Twoot as “the Australian Jim Morrison”)

 

“Once, the world had been full of his elucidations; now it was full of her generalisations. Dick wondered how this had come about. After all, she hadn’t exactly sat around reading encyclopaedias.” – JULIAN BARNES (1981)

"A man sitting with a fire has got to have a stick. No-one can sit in front of a fire without wanting to poke it, to rearrange it, to help it. A fire is every man's oldest friend; fires belong to us. You watch a woman before a fire: she'll stand back and look and hug herself. She looks at it the way she looks at a naked man: she's fascinated but frightened. But a man, now, he'll kick it and prod it. Men and fire, they know each other." -- A. A. GILL


"Girls always put a sense of humor at the top of the list of things they find attractive in men. Girls don't particularly like jokes; they really don't want to know the one about the Essex girl and the blind chimney-sweep. But they know, or they sense, or they are born with an instinct that tells them that men are at their most defenseless, men are puppies, men will do anything, face any danger or indignity, spend the rent, risk the job, hock the future --simply to make girls laugh." -- A. A. GILL

“No man minds the mice; it’s the women they don’t want.” – LAURA FREEMAN (English journalist quoting a duffer in the all-male Garrick Club in London.)

 

“All talk of a male militia, of men’s spontaneously uniting in defence of their interests against the encroaching female, misrepresents the situation. Men operate something like a confused, poorly armed guerrilla-type rabble; women in comparison, run a highly trained, superbly equipped SS panzer corps complete with parachute brigade and grenadier back-up.” – SIR KINGSLEY AMIS (in 1994, the year before he died)

 

“Woman as symbol of nation looks good on a coin – there hasn’t been a decent male profile since Caesar.” – FAY WELDON

"Masculine republics give way to feminine democracies and feminine democracies give way to tyranny." -- ARISTOTLE                                                                                (astonishing, but it seems to be genuine) 

“To say that a man never knows what a woman is going to do next isn’t to say very much, because neither does another woman.” – PETER DEVRIES

 

“Why did girls always want to change you when how you were was fine?” – CHRIS MILLER (my ΑΔΦ brother, albeit at Dartmouth, in his 2006 memoir “The Real Animal House”)

 

“I believe there to be no essential differences between men and women except that women tend to believe new slipcovers are needed in the spring and men have, deep in the chomosomes, an absolute compulsion to take out the garbage.” – CALVIN TRILLIN

"The battle of the sexes ended decades ago when women asked for equality in the office and at home, thereby doubling their work-load, and men instantly agreed to this anti-women bargain." -- LLOYD EVANS


“Women are stronger. They shop longer than us.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS

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

“There is something more voluminous about women than men. It is to do with their bottles and a tendency to put up clothes lines.” – HUGO WILLIAMS  (the English poet and travel writer) 

"Pretty men feel differently about their beauty from pretty women, are less proud of it and protective toward it and prepared to display it. Their attitude toward their looks is rather like the attitude of the old rich toward their money: they're pleased to have it but consider mentioning it vulgar, even in their thoughts." -- DONALD WESTLAKE

 

"I honestly think that the reason men have hobbies is mostly to get away from women, while women don't have hobbies so much as compulsive, reflexive habits -- like knitting, gossiping and just generally... emoting." -- JACK JOLIS

"Women are picky when it comes to sex, men are picky when it comes to commitment."-- THERON A. BASSETT II      (a black American veteran and owner of "Improve Or Death" LLC.) 

"If you please the men you will not please the women."  -- RACHEL KUSHNER       (American novelist)

“Mercenaries”

“You may call them ‘mercenaries’, but I’ve met more ‘mercenaries’ than most people have, and I never ran into one who’d fight for the other side for even ten times whatever money he’s currently getting.” – JACK JOLIS

 

Mercy

“Justice without mercy is cruelty. Mercy without justice goes to waste" – ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

 

"Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent." --ADAM SMITH (A ti-ti rectification to St. Thomas, see above.)

 

Merit (“Meritocracy”)

“America is a country where just about anyone can grow up to become just about anything – and that's just the problem.” – GEORGE WILL

 

"In the early 21st century – largely because of a hyper-litigious society, in which everyone and anyone might sue you for discrimination – we’re faced with the inability to judge merit or competency." -- SARAH HOYT (a teacher and novelist living in Colorado – in April 2020)

 

“‘Meritocracy’ is inadequate. Most of us, sensing our own lack of merit, feel left out. And life is better understood as a predicament, not a race.” – CHARLES MOORE

 

“Me Too”

“We’ve had a glorious past and men have played the greater part in it because that is how God meant it to be. Today’s clowns are against nature and they will not, cannot, win. Real women will not allow it. #MeToo should join the circus.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

Mexico

“The problem in Mexico for the last seven decades has been not military dictatorship or rightist landowners but a one-party corporatist state that fits in somewhere between a U.S. municipal employees union and Italian fascism.” – CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL (in May 1995)

 

“Mexicans have lots to worry about but don’t.” – WILLIAM GRIMES

 

“Mexico has a safety valve – the United States – which most other countries don’t have. Most countries either collapse or they do the necessary things. Mexico has never been in the position of being forced to do the necessary thing.” – NORMAN BAILEY (a former special assistant to Ronald Reagan for international economic affairs)

 

"Russia is basically Mexico with thousands of nukes." -- JOHN SCHINDLER (In 2014)

"The Mexicans have an intense, macabre engrossment with death.” — GEORGE COURTAULD (in his 1995 "The Travels Of A Fat Bulldog")

“Tijuana – a good stream a piss’d knock down the whole neighborhood.” -- JOSEPH WAMBAUGH (in his novel FINNEGAN’S WEEK)

"In Mexico an air conditioner is called a politician because it makes a lot of noise and doesn't work very well." -- LEN DEIGHTON (the English spy thriller writer -- most notably the author of "The Ipcress File" that was made into that absolutely splendid 1965 movie with Michael Caine)
 

"Mexicans tend to be polite, short of stature, barrel-chested, and sentimental. They dote on children but kick dogs and cats. They don't understand the concept of pets." -- ROBERT PLUNKET

 

Miami

“Miami is the capital of South America.” -- DANIEL SCHWOB (our rich young Jewish Venezuelan lawyer, in the early 1980’s;splendid fella – he’s probably proving this quote right now, having de-assed Caracas once the commies took over.)

 

“Visiting Miami is not like entering a different State or country; it’s like being plunged headlong into a giant McDonald’s carton of warm saliva, fruit cakes, frazzle brains, deadhead goofs, dumb zombies, crack crazy teeny boppers and other perhaps less obvious forms of jail bait, all loading it on coke, popcorn and anything that’s high on crythorbic acid to combat the tendency of nitrites to become nitrosamines. Or is it the other way round? Here they have syringes the size of the Statue of Liberty and enough white powder to make the himalayas look like the foothills of the Andes.” -- PETER BIDDLECOMBE (in 1994)

 

"The one major city in the United States where you can usually leave the past behind -- Miami." -- E. HOWARD HUNT

"Miami is the Hong Kong of the Western world. Not even the guilty feel safe in Miami." -- HUNTER S. THOMPSON (one can only wonder at the Hong Kong the good doctor saw -- his recollection doesn't jibe with mine at all....)

"Miami is the cash capital of the United States. It's also the nation's murder capital, with a boom-town economy based on the smuggling of everything from drugs and gold bullion to guns and human beings. What Havana was to the A950s, Marseilles to the 60s, and Bangkok to the 70s, Miami is to the 80s." -- HUNTER S. THOMPSON (in 1980) 

Middle Ages, The

"I was today years old when I found out during a castle tour that the boiling oil castle defense is a complete myth, because oil was too expensive. What they used was boiling cauldrons of diarrhea. Wtf, if they told me that in history class maybe I would’ve paid more attention" -- DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE


Middle Class

“The British are like their own beer, froth on top, dregs at bottom, the middle excellent.” – VOLTAIRE (It’s funny – when the Brits say “middle class”, what they mean is what we Yanks understand as “upper class”. Their “upper class” is the aristocracy, wot we Yanks don’t have.)

Middle East (The)

“Home to morose despotisms, political violence and a thoroughly ruined natural environment, the Middle East now sends us its refugees, headscarves and, most notably since 11 September 2001, violence.” – JAMES BUCHAN (Brit journalist writing in the UK SPECTATOR, April 2005)

 

“Having looked at the Mideast, I realize how the Arabs came up with the concept of zero.” – P. J. O’ROURKE (Actually, The Great One was quoting a “Public Affairs” officer in Kuwait, a “Major Bob”, in his essay “The Backside of War” in Dec. 2003)

 

“The rulers of a nation endowed with great natural wealth simply have less need of their people, or of their people’s approval, as the history of the modern Middle East illustrates.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

 

“I fully expect to leave this world, at a ripe old age (DV), with newspaper headlines saying the same thing they were saying when I came in: FIGHTING FLARES UP IN MIDEAST.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE (I never took Latin but I believe “DV” is Latin for God Willing…)

 

“Here's a sound rule in analyzing problems anywhere between Cairo and Karachi: Never ascribe to a calculated strategy what can be blamed on passionate incompetence.” – RALPH PETERS (in the NY POST, July ’06. He’s an ex-LTC. Of U.S. Army Military Intelligence. Author of “Never Quit The Fight”. Sadly, the advent of Trump caused him to half-lose his mind.)

 

“The greater Middle East just may be the most troubled civilization in recorded history.” – RALPH PETERS (in the NY POST, Sept. ’06)

 

“Once more, the pathetic obsession of the Middle East with lost manhood is explicable by a society immersed in gender apartheid, patriarchy, and tribalism. It is as if the Middle East fundamentalist and dysfunctional family has been elevated to the national government, and then its resulting adolescent insecurities are aired for the long-suffering world.” – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

 

“We live in a dangerous neighbourhood.” – PRINCE HASSAN BIN TALAL (brother of the late King Hussein of Jordan, and uncle of King Abdullah – in Feb. 2001)

 

“We have always said that in our war with the Arabs we had a secret weapon – no alternative.” – GOLDA MEIR

 

“Is it just me, or is the Middle East a lot like 7th Grade with RPGs?” – GLENN REYNOLDS (the Internet’s “INSTAPUNDIT”. His day job is Law Professor at the U. of Tennessee.)

 

“If you're a perfectionist, don't work in the Middle East.” – DOMINIC ASQUITH (a recent British ambassador to Egypt.)

 

“I would be happy if Saudi Arabia became like Libya or Egypt. And I would be happy if Libya or Egypt became like Turkey. They can't all be Ireland. There aren't enough Lucky Charms to go around.” – TIM JOLIS

 

“Middle East moderate: someone who only wants to kill half the Jews.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

 

“It's a sad and vexing fact that almost no one outside the Middle East gives a damn about how Arab and other regimes treat the people under their control.” – JAY NORDLINGER

 

“The only thing I have against Moses was that he took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil.” – GOLDA MEIR

“The roots of ISIS do not lie in the actions America took in 2003. Bush made mistakes in Iraq, and left a ramshackle state that functioned less badly than any of its neighbors. Obama walked away, pulled out a cigarette, tossed the match over his shoulder, and ignited a fuse that, from Damascus to Baghdad to Amman and beyond, will blow up the entire Middle East.” – MARK STEYN

                                                                                                                                                                                        

"The Middle East is no longer terribly important to American interests." -- BARACK OBAMA (to Bernard Goldberg of THE ATLANTIC)

                                                                                                                                                                                        

“No Soviet leader ever thought really well of Arabs (or of Jews either, for that matter) – and no Arab leader ever thought well of the Soviets.” – DAVID PRYCE-JONES

"Whenever Leonid Brezhnev brought up the Middle East, I'd fake being a bit drunk, and warn him not to even think about it. We'll end up nuking each other over that place..." -- RICHARD M. NIXON (as told to Taki Theodoracopulos, from Tricky's New Jersey post-presidency home)                                                                                                                                                                                      

"Being consistently wrong is a prerequisite to becoming a quotable expert on the Middle East." -- TIM CAVANAUGH                                           (In NRO)

 

“American policy toward the region (the Middle East) has vacillated between support for the ideal of democracy, dismay upon discovering that democracy brings Islamists to power, and drone warfare. No one really understands our policy toward the region, and it is not clear that we actually have one.” – CLAIRE BERLINSKI (American writer and journalist, who's lived in Paris, Bangkok, Laos and Istanbul. Author of a book about Europe called “Brave Old World” which I daresay she filched from my own Russian saga of same name. I shall have to speak to her about this.)

 

“Trying to live in peace in the Middle East was like trying to sleep in the middle of a crossroad.” – NELSON DEMILLE

"They play a different game in the Mideast. There's no clock on the field, ever." -- NELSON DEMILLE (for example, I know for a fact that the CIA doesn't use polygraphs in the Middle East. Except on Israelis...)

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

"The Middle East is a place wired to obscure the truth." -- ROBERT BAER

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

       

Middle Of The Road                                                                                                        

“The middle of the road is where the white line is, and that's the worst  place to drive.” – ROBERT FROST

                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“Nowhere is as dangerous as halfway.” – WILLIAM SAFIRE

"To sit on the fence is to be on the wrong side of it." -- BRYAN FORBES 

"You don't need politicians in the center...you need politicians that move the center toward them..." – MARK STEYN

"You know what 'the middle' merits?  The middle finger." -- MARK LEVIN 

"That the truth must always lie 'somewhere in between' was disproved by Solomon himself. Sometimes it does and sometimes it does not." -- DAVID MAMET

“Oftentimes when a leader tries to take the middle path because he’s trying to achieve contradictory goals, he achieves neither.” – JIM GERAGHTY

Midwest, The American                                                                                              

“Driving through the Midwest by freeway is like listening to a dial tone for eight hours.” – JAMES LILEKS

 

“Militants”

“'Militant' usually means one of two things: (a) willing to use force to make others comply, or (b) chaining oneself to the dairy case at the supermarket and shouting MURDERER! At old ladies who came to buy some eggs.” – JAMES LILEKS

 

“2% of the passionate will control 98 % of the indifferent 100 % of the time if we don’t wake up.” – GEN. MICHAEL FLYNN (on the Twoot, 11 July 2020)

 

Military, The

“We (America) really do not wish to go to war with people, but, by God, we will have the strongest military around and that’s not a bad thing to have.  It encourages and champions our friends that are weak, and it chills the ambitions of the evil”. – COLIN POWELL (Even when he didn’t always walk the walk, Colin talked a pretty good talk.)

 

"The nation's keenest cultural anthropologists, most hands-on social scientists, and best foreign-aid society (are) the United States Army and Marine Corps. A counterinsurgency requires understanding human motivation and the particularities of a situation and culture; abstractions are useless." -- RICH LOWRY

 

“From the long perspective of military history, it appears there is but one unvarying lesson of war:  there is never enough infantry.” – ALLAN MALLINSON (He wrote this in 2005, with Iraq in mind. He is the Brit author of “An Act of Courage”, a novel ofThe Peninsular War, against Napoleon)

 

“Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.” – DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON (it’s good to remember that in the days when he said this, being in the Navy actually meant something military… I jest, I jest....)

 

“A soldier’s time is passed in distress and danger, or in idleness and corruption.” – DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON (and he’s not wrong, you know…)

"(US) Marines think a hammer is high tech." -- BING WEST      (In his excellent book about the Battle for Fallujah, "No True Glory")

"A sniper is any (US) Marine with a rifle." -- LTG JAMES T. CONWAY     (at the Battle for Fallujah, Iraq, 2004)

“Soldiers and Marines complain all the time – but that doesn’t mean morale is bad.  I’d be suspicious if they didn’t complain.  Bad morale is when troops have lost their spirit to fight.” – EDWARD LUTTWAK (an American writer who’s usually described as “a military expert”.)

 

“The Royal Navy is a service for which the Archangel Gabriel is only just good enough” – ADMIRAL JACKIE FISHER (1841-1920. 1st Baron Fisher, Admiral Of The fleet, and, amongst other things, inventor of the “dreadnought”)

 

“I am convinced that there would be nothing so intelligent, so valuable, as English soldiers of that rank (NCOs), if you could get them sober, which is impossible.” – THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON.

 

“I don't know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me.” – THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON (real name: Arthur Wellesley — anc the italics were his)

“The essential point of an army or a navy is for when things get really bad. So it is for matters of life and death, not as social therapy, that soldiers and sailors must be trained. If that training can be effective only if health and safety rules are waived, then they should be. If the presence of women in the front line makes the fighting less effective, then women must not be in the front line. If a soldier's right of free speech undermines the morale of his comrades, then he should be forced to shut up. Yet 'human rights' refuses to see the point. And so the main enemy ceases to be the hostile power seeking to kill our citizens or take our territory, but the threat of litigation.” – CHARLES MOORE                                                                                                                (in April 2007, following the royal Navy’s infamous “Chicken Of The Seas” incident in Iraqi waters and then, later, in Tehran.)

"The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools." – WILLIAM F. BUTLER          (British 19th century general and author ofa1889 biography of General Charles “Chinese” Gordon. This quote is often mis-attributed to old THUCYDIDES)

"The true Soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him" -- G.K. CHESTERTON 

"The US Navy remains the best Delivery System that the Marine Corps invented." -- JACK PLATT (the late-legendary CIA case officer – both as a paramilitary in Laos and then later where he further distinguished himself on the Soviet Desk, and a good pal of mine.)

 

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

 

“When soldiers use understatement it's generally worth paying attention.” – SEBASTIAN JUNGER

 

“The army consists of the first infantry division and eight million replacements.” – SEBASTIAN JUNGER

 

“Civilians understand soldiers to have a kind of baseline duty, and that everything above that is considered 'bravery'. Soldiers see it the other way around: either you're doing your duty or you're a coward. There's no other place to go.” – SEBASTIAN JUNGER

 

“The American military remains the greatest defender of human rights that the world has ever seen.” – WILLIAM SHAWCROSS

 

“Those who favor huge cuts in military spending seem not to understand that our military exists not simply to win wars, but to present such overwhelming superiority to potential enemies as to prevent having to fight a war in the first place.” – THOMAS SOWELL

"Nothing is more immoral than sending men to risk their lives winning victories that are later lost by politicians.” -- THOMAS SOWELL      (and if that doesn't describe Vietnam, nothing does) 

“They tell you when you're hurt and when you're not.” – CHRIS KYLE (The AMERICAN SNIPER, on going through SEAL training with a broken toe.)

 

“Some people wonder all their lives if they made a difference. Marines don't have that problem.” – RONALD REAGAN

 

“It’s the soldier, not the poet, who has given us the freedom of speech.” – TED CRUZ

 

"When you men get home and face an anti-war protester, look him in the yes and shake his hand. Then wink at his girlfriend, because she knows she's dating a pussy." -- GEN. JAMES MATTIS

"The best Marine officers, no matter their rank, are second lieutenants at heart, ready to storm any beach, charge any hill, take out any pillbox." -- CHUCK KRULAK   (USMC General, Commandant of Marines, in 1995) 

"The Marine Corp is a disciplined organization full of unregimented thinkers." -- GEN. JAMES MATTIS

 

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

 

“Never tell a soldier he doesn't know the cost of war.” – GUY HIBBERT (the screenwriter, through the mouth of the late Alan Rickman playing LT Gen Bennson, in  the    excellent film “Eye In The Sky”)

 

"In the civilian world, we say that life is about choices. In the military, we use the word 'decisions', which seem to have more weight, and more consequences, than choices. In the case of choices, the right ones will eventually make you healthy, wealthy and happy. With decisions, the wrong ones have a way of being instantly unforgiving." -- NELSON DEMILLE

 

“The usual Army barber is a kind of half-tamed sheep-shearer.” – DAVID LODGE

 

“I was constantly surprised by the wit and intelligence which obscenity seemed to reveal in the lower ranks of the Army who otherwise seem scarcely literate.” – DAVID LODGE

 

“On of the' things I shall always associate with Basic Training is the exertion and indignity of carrying large, heavy objects.” – DAVID LODGE

 

"America without her Soldiers would be like God without His angels." – CLAUDIA PEMBERTON (An American teacher and novelist, living in West Virginia)

 

"In the army, there is often no obvious task for an officer's hands." -- ALAN JUDD

 

“The essentials of a good officer are a cool manner, a reliable wristwatch, a steady blow on the whistle and an exemplary death on the parapet. It’s all a matter of setting the tone. The men will do the rest themselves.” – ALAN JUDD

 

“The United States military is the greatest force for justice, peace and freedom in all of human history.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

 

"The Military has one job: Winning War. Anything else is a distraction and a liability." -- TREY GOWDY

 

"No one who had failed to gain his majority by the age of forty-five could be called a successful soldier." -- KINGSLEY AMIS (for those in Rush Limbaugh’s “Rio Linda”, when the Old Grouch says “gain their majority” he    means “makes major”.)

 

“Do you know what a soldier is, young man? He's the chap who makes it possible for civilized folk to despise war.” – ALLAN MASSIE (Scottish journalist and novelist)

 

"In the Military you learn the essence of people. You see so many examples of self-sacrifice and moral courage.  In the rest of your life, you don't get that many opportunities to be sure of your friends" -- ADAM DRIVER                                                                                                                                     (The actor who was a US Marine before becoming an actor.)

 

“People sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” --  GEORGE ORWELL

 

“I think the Army is much more connected to society than the Marines are. The Marines are extremists.” – SARA LISTER (Assistant Secretary of the Army in the Clinton Administration, 26 October 1997)

 

“Grunts have a perverse love for misery.” – DANIEL J. DANELO (author of “Blood Stripes”)

 

“Aviators had laid-back attitudes, cool call signs, and a reputation for drinking.” – DANIEL J. DANELO (referring to USMC pilots during the Iraq War)

 

“Son, when the Marine Corps wants you to have a wife, you will be issued one." ~ LEWIS "CHESTY" PULLER

 

"Our forces will likely get slammed by the North Koreans, but luckily our troops will go down loudly affirming that some men menstruate." -- KURT SCHLICHTER (on 17 June 2020, reflecting frustration at the pussification of the military in recent years)

 

“I’m not cut out to be a noncom, that’s for sure. I don’t care about things enough to make other people do them.” – WILLIAM WHARTON

 

"I know military glory is all nonsense, it consists of knocking off a lot of other human beings. But it is glorious not to run away, and fortitude is a virtue, and so is not letting one's side down." -- KINGSLEY AMIS (Who served as an officer in the Signal Corps, hated the military when he was in it, and saw no   combat.)

 

“At the age of four, with paper hats and wooden swords, we’re all Generals. Some of us never grow out of it.” – PETER USTINOV

"You know when a guy knows what he's doing." -- ERNIE TUTEN   (A machine-gunner in Oliver North's Marine infantry platoon in Vietnam) 

“The Pentagon is now the Yale faculty lounge but with cruise missiles.” – TUCKER CARLSON (On 26 March 2021)

 

“That few (CIA) case officers today have had any military leadership experience is a serious limitation.” – DUANE “DEWEY” CLARRIDGE (in 1997.)

 

“Risking one’s life to save one’s country is not only the least honored of employments, it is also the least rewarded.” – PROF. JOHN GREENWAY (the late Gonzo Anthropologist also, at one time, taught unarmed combat in the US Army.)

 

"We don't need a military that's women-friendly, we don't need a military that's gay-friendly, we need Type A men who want to sit on a throne of Chinese skulls." – JESSE KELLY (In Dec. 2021. Kelly was a mortarman with Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines in the initial invasion of Iraq. His unit was the tip of the spear entering Baghdad and he received a battle field promotion to Sergeant. He was an infantry Squad Leader.)

 

“We were as fair a mix as you are likely to find in any conscript army. There were the hard-ass Hell’s Angels and Texans and truck drivers, the fuck-up law school dropouts and Mo-Town and Harlem brothers – walking that walk – John Waynes and Boone County Courthouse loafers and one-eyed Khe Sanh marines – who had read the JOIN posters and believed them – the Chicanos and clerks and dumb-ass lifers, the village idiots and backwoods farmers, the housecats and walking wounded, and young buck sergeants like me. The winners, the losers, the also-rans and every notch between. Altogether a hundred and fifty dudes.” – LARRY HEINEMANN

"In almost all conflicts since The Napoleonic Wars, it has been heavy artillery that has caused two-thirds of battlefield casualties. Heavy artillery is thus a prerequisite for a modern army to be taken seriously on the world stage." -- ANDREW ROBERTS 

"You've got to be a pretty adventurous kind of guy to join the military, but take it from me -- you've definitely got to be a scaredy-cat to make a successful career out of it. You don't become a general, these days, without kissing a lot of ass." -- GREG KELLY   (The ex-USMC LTC said this on his radio program, on 14 Feb 2022)

"The military -- if you're not actually at war, you're probably attending some school." -- GREG KELLY (The 14-years USMC pilot, and conservative radio and TV show host. Oh, and son of the best  NYPD commissioner ever.)

"Fuck 'em. Just fuck 'em. Fuck everybody who doesn't come out here and do this." -- JAMES WEBB (actually spoken by Lt. Hodges, in Webb's seminal 1978 Vietnam War novel, "Fields Of Fire")

" 'Orders' is an antonym for 'common sense'." -- JOHN P. McAFEE

“Traveling the length and breadth of this great country, invariably I meet two types of men – those who are so proud to have at one time worn the uniform of their country, and those who regret not having done so.” – RAYMOND J. BROWN (a retired US Coast Guard captain, channeling Dr. Johnson… in 2006)

"Today's 'Pentagon Brass' is distinguishable from any woke American college faculty only by their unironically-flaunted fancy-dress." -- JACK JOLIS (In Sept. 2022)

"America is running a military establishment that is now the province of pregnant females, transsexuals, and born-male admirals in skirts. No wonder it can't fight. Indeed, it's been so long since the United States has won a war that hardly any living American knows what 'victory' means any more." -- MICHAEL WALSH                   (in May 2022)

Military, Homosexuals in the

“Armies don’t really need homosexuals, or women, or any particular minority, and to turn them into playgrounds for social justice can only ruin them.” – KENNETH MINOGUE (In fact, if any social engineering should be done in the military it should be for single men….)

 

"If a decree to impose open homosexuality in the military is so vital to the defense of the Republic, why did it take us 237 years to bring it about? I'm not trying to stir anything up here, understand -- I'm just wondering." -- RUSH LIMBAUGH (we may well wonder....)

 

“Soldiers, sailors and Marines living in close quarters who are having sex with one another, used to have sex with one another or would like to have sex with one another simply cannot function as a well-oiled fighting machine. A battalion of married couples facing a small unit of heterosexual men would be slaughtered.” – ANN COULTER

 

“Thanks to the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (which followed the long-standing policy of no homosexuals in the military – period), everyone in the military is obliged to share showers, sleeping quarters, and all the other intimate spaces of military life with people who consider them sex objects. Before this Great Experiment, the surrender of all privacy on entering military service was at least lightened by the fact that the forced intimacy would not include sexual tension. No more.” – LARRY THORNBERRY (A writer for both THE WASHINGTON TIMES and THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR)

 

“In the Army, as in life, sometimes you had to create a crisis in order to get people's attention.” -- TERRY HAYES

 

“Everyone gets along great when there’s no possibility of sex.” – CAROL LEIFER (who wrote the teleplay of the Seinfeld episode “The Beard”, which occurred in Season 6, and from which this is taken)

 

«The key to cohesion is what the Greeks called philia – friendship, comradeship, or brotherly love. Philia is the bond among disparate individuals who have nothing in common but facing death and misery together. The presence of open homosexuals (and women) in the close confines of ships or military units opens the possibility that eros will be unleashed into an environment based on philia, creating fiction and corroding the very source of military excellence itself. It does so by undermining the non-sexual bonding essential to unit cohesion. Unlike philia, eros is sexual, and therefore individual and exclusive. Eros manifests itself as sexual competition, protectiveness, and favoritism, all of which undermine order, disciple and morale. These are issues of life and death, and help to explain why open homosexuality and homosexual behavior traditionally have been considered incompatible with military service.» – MACKUBIN THOMAS OWENS

 

"When I joined the military it was illegal to be homosexual, then it became optional, and now it's legal. I'm getting the hell out before the Democrats make it mandatory!" – SGT HARRY BERRES (USMC Drill Instructor – and he reflects what the great Michael Caine said about 54 years previous – see “Homosexuality”)

 

"We don't need a military that's women-friendly, we don't need a military that's gay-friendly, we need Type A men who want to sit on a throne of Chinese skulls." – JESSE KELLY (in Dec. 2021)

"You fill your platoons with 'diversity'. I'll fill mine with killers. We'll see how it turns out." -- JESSE KELLY (in Sept. 2022)

"The stories of those who volunteered, compared with those who were drafted, are rarely told." -- JEFFREY BLEHAR (writing about the movie-maker John Milius -- who tried to volunteer for Vietnam but was turned down because of asthma -- in NR, in Nov. 2023. And although I'm not sure he's entirely right, I get what he's trying to say, here.)

"America is running a military establishment that is now the province of pregnant females, transsexuals, and born-male admirals in skirts. No wonder it can't fight. Indeed, it's been so long since the United States has won a war that hardly any living American knows what 'victory' means any more." -- MICHAEL WALSH                   (in May 2022)

Military, Women in the

“ ‘Female soldier’ ought to be an oxymoron. The difficulty arises when prosperity and easy living detaches a society from the realities of life in its armed forces.” – BRUCE ANDERSON (British political writer in May 2004)

 

“Armies don’t really need homosexuals, or women, or any particular minority, and to turn them into playgrounds for social justice can only ruin them.” – KENNETH MINOGUE (In fact, if any social engineering should be done in the military it should be for single men….)

 

“We cannot win this war (in Afghanistan) for an important cultural reason: ours is an increasingly feminized culture, so we cannot take the casualties. Every death is published, broadcast, made the occasion for an honor guard and a hometown page-one story. If the (masculine British and Soviet empires of the 19th and 20th centuries could not handle Afghanistan the, I don’t see how our feminized culture can do so now.” — TOM BETHELL

 

“When you put men and women together in a confined environment and shake vigorously, don't be surprised if sex occurs. When the military says there can be no sex between a superior and a subordinate, that just flies in the face of reality. You can't make a principle-based on a falsehood.” – CHARLES MOSKOS (the great military socioligist and prof at Northwestern)

 

“But all the social engineering in the world cannot change the fact that men treat women differently than they treat other men.” – MACKUBIN THOMAS OWENS (editor of ORBIS, the Journal of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and an ex-USMC infantry platoon leader in Vietnam)

 

“There are other questions we sometimes hear, the only response to which is: ‘If you can even ask that question, there is no answer I can give you that would satisfy or enlighten you.’ One of these, and one that always pole-axes me that any sentient adult could ask, is: ‘Why shouldn’t women serve in combat roles in the military?’ The why on this one, at least to anyone with more awareness than that of a cucumber, should be too obvious to detain us, even for a moment. It would take a highly-trained social scientist or a febrile, leftist geek not to understand this one.” – LARRY THORNBERRY

 

“The wisdom of the centuries has been that warriors are men, and women who serve in the military services do so properly in such auxiliary positions as in medical and administrative jobs. No longer. Hormone-besotted young people of both sexes in all military services are now shoved into each other’s laps and then told not to react in the way young people have always reacted to these, ahem, opportunities. A way, in fact, that has made possible the continuation of the human race. Time previously spend on military training in the sensible old days is now devoted to sensitivity training.” – LARRY THORNBERRY

 

“Only a dedicated social engineer would consider putting women in combat roles.” – LARRY THORNBERRY (A writer in Tampa)

 

“It's artificial to constrain the debate about women in the infantry to physical capabilities. In the direct-ground-combat environment, you do not fight for an ideal, a just cause, America, or Mom and apple pie. You endure the inhumanity and sacrifices of direct ground combat because 'greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.' This selflessness is derived from bonding, and bonding from shared events and the unquestioning subordination of self for the good of the team. But what destroys this alchemy – and, therefore, combat effectiveness – are pettiness, rumor-mongering, suspicion, and jealousy. And when fighting spirit is lessened, death is the outcome.” – GREGORY NEWBOLD (Retired US Army Lieutenant-General, in 2015)

 

"In an army at war, there is inequality in nature that makes it impossible to send girls to fighting units." – DAVID BEN-GURION  (The first Prime Minister of Israel)

 

“There's probably a few women who could qualify for the military academies but they'd be freaks and we're not running the military academies for freaks.” – GEN. WILLIAM WESTMORELAND (in 1976)

 

"We don't need a military that's women-friendly, we don't need a military that's gay-friendly, we need Type A men who want to sit on a throne of Chinese skulls." – JESSE KELLY (in Dec. 2021)

"You fill your platoons with 'diversity'. I'll fill mine with killers. We'll see how it turns out." -- JESSE KELLY (in Sept. 2022)

 

"America is running a military establishment that is now the province of pregnant females, transsexuals, and born-male admirals in skirts. No wonder it can't fight. Indeed, it's been so long since the United States has won a war that hardly any living American knows what 'victory' means any more." -- MICHAEL WALSH             (in May 2022)

"Of course women can't cut it physically, but that's not the biggest reason to keep them out of combat.  All-important 'unit cohesion' is the main reason.  And anyone who's ever been in combat knows that, (even if stars of rank make some forget it.)" -- JACK JOLIS

"We killed and bled and suffered and died in a war that Washington society, which seems to view service in the combat arms as something akin to a commute to the Pentagon, will never comprehend." -- JAMES WEBB   (The Vietnam USMC Vietnam platoon leader, author, & ex-senator -- in a 1979 article in THE WASHINGTONIAN against women in combat)

"You might not pick this up in K Street law offices or in the halls of Congress, but once you enter areas of this country where more typical Americans dwell, the areas that provide the men who make up our combat units, it becomes obvious. Inside the truck stops and in the honky tonks, down on the street and in the coal towns, American men are tough and violent. When they are lured or drafted from their homes and put through the dehumanization of boot camp, then thrown into an operating combat unit, they don't get any nicer, either. And I have never met a woman, including the dozens of female midshipmen at the Naval Academy, whom I trust to provide those men with combat leadership." -- JAMES WEBB   (in that same WASHINGTONIAN article)

“The new standards are pathetic — they are absolutely pathetic.  Soldiers qualifying for the infantry will have to do only 10 push-ups instead of 35. This is going to get people killed." -- SEN. TOM COTTON (the  ex-Ranger Army Captain and Iraq war veteran, on the new "gender-neutral"  standards in infantry training, May 2022)

“Millennials”

“Never before in history have people been able to grow up and reach age 23 so dominated by peers. To develop intellectually you've got to relate to older people, older things: 17 year-olds never grow up if they're just hanging around other 17-year-olds.” – MARK BAUERLEIN (author of the book “The Dumbest Generation”, in an interview in December 2016)

 

Milwaukee

“Three things define Milwaukee: beer, motorcycles and patriotism.” – DANIEL J. DANELO (author of “Blood Stripes”)

 

Mind, The

"What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind." -- BERTRAND RUSSELL (Actually, this was apparently spoken by his grandmother, only identified as "Lady Russell", quoted by her grandson.)

 

“The value of speaking one’s mind depends heavily on the mind in question.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"His mind degenerating into that buzzing screen of scrambled signals usually defined as blank." -- KEITH WATERHOUSE (in his 1984 novel "Thinks") 

 

"The mind is its own place,  and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." -- JOHN MILTON    (1608-1674)

"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." -- ELEANOR ROOSEVELT      (I hate to quote this hideous and obnoxious old leftist bat, and I'm not even sure that this snobbish bit of claptrap isn't utter balls -- but I have to admit it sounds sort of cool, and could conceivably be used usefully at the right occasion....)                                                                   

 

“Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people.” -- ARISTOTLE (it says, in the place I read it, that it's "attributed" to Aristotle, as though that differentiates it from everything else Aristotle is supposed to have said.)

 

“When something evokes in me such strong emotion for no clear reason, I like to know why. I have an abiding respect for my mind’s functioning, but I do not want it knowing more than I do.” – PROF. JOHN GREENWAY                                                                                                                                                                   (the late “Gonzo Anthropoloagist” from the U. of Colorado)

“Minimalism”

"Since it is almost impossible to combine a minimalist aesthetic with having children, modern design also acts as a form of qesthetic contraception." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

Minimum Wage

“The minimum wage is clearly wrong. I discriminates in favor of big employers, who can better afford it, helping them squeeze out new entrants (which they love doing) and making them seem virtuous as they do so. It destroys or prevents jobs, particularly in a time of low growth. It is disreputable to apply the same rate to all. Young people with no family responsibilities need far less than young parents, for example. They can afford to earn little – or even nothing – in the short term if by doing so they advance their employability. This is a statement of the obvious, yet it has been suffocated by the pillow of righteousness.” – CHARLES MOORE                (by the way, ever notice how the most vociferous defenders of the minimum wage are perfectly fine with unpaid internships?)

 

“Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws.” – THOMAS SOWELL

 

“Some have said that the real minimum wage is zero. I, rather, would suggest that the real minimum wage is also the same as the real maximum wage -- i.e., whatever someone (or some body) is willing to give you.” – JACK JOLIS

 

Minorities (“Minorities”)

«Under Communism, all minorities dance». – ANTHONY DANIELS

 

"With so many oppressed groups, who's left to do the oppressing?" -- GLENN REYNOLDS (A law professor who moonlights as the Interweb’s "INSTAPUNDIT". And he happens to be statistically right -- in America, if you add up all the "at risk" minority groups you'll find they constitute a comfortable majority of the country. Especially if you include women -- as the Department of Justice most emphatically does -- who alone make up 52% of the population.)

 

«Minorities are always right.» -- SYDNEY SMITH (have no idea what he might have been referring to, as this English wit and writer would have been doing it in the early part of the 19th century, but it's a useful quote.…)

 

"Radiating rapidly from campuses into the larger polity, the noble defence of an infinitely multiplying list of 'marginalised groups'." -- LIONEL SHRIVER

 

“Democrats take an especial interest in eliminating Republicans who are black, female, gay, etc., because of those qualities, which challenge their self-declared monopoly on speaking for those groups.” – KEVIN WILLIAMSON

 

“Today for some democratic reason minorities seem to think they should be treated as more equal than the majorities. Try asking for a beer in a Montreal bar in English and you’ll very soon see how minorities impose their will on the majority, even though a minority is still a minority and not a majority in spite of the majority pretending it is in the minority and the minority, the majority just for the sake of peace and quiet.” – PETER BIDDLECOMBE

 

"For a minority anywhere to succeed, they have to respect the ethos and values of the country they live in." -- NITIN MEHTA (an Indian living in Croydon, London, in July 2020)

Minnesota

«Did you ever try to tell a joke in Minneapolis?» -- RAYMOND MOLEY (historian-journalist, 1886-1975)

 

«God invented Minnesota so that teetolaers would know what a hangover feels like.» -- GARRISON KEILLOR

 

"Sweden is Minnesota writ large. Not writ all that large, actually." -- DEIRDRE NANSEN McCLOSKEY

"Minnesota, a state whose liberalism I’ve never figured out." -- PAUL KENGOR (Editor of the American Spectator, in Nov. 2022) 

"After being in Florida for a day it really highlights that politically Minnesota is a shithole ruled by a shithead puppet of oligarchs." -- NATHAN M. HANSEN (An American attorney and blogger, on 8 October 2021)

 

Miracles

«Miracles do happen, but it is presumptuous to anticipate them.» -- EVELYN WAUGH

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as if nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." -- ALBERT EINSTEIN


 

Misanthropy

«Misanthropes love humanity neither in particular nor in general, and are far from supposing that an aggregate of vices, weaknesses and follies composes something noble and admirable. What a piece of work is a man, indeed: only those who know nothing of life can even pretend to love mankind.» -- THEODORE DALRYMPLE (a proud misanthrope. In addition to being an M.D.)

 

«Man is human to about the same extent that chickens can fly.» -- CELINE (real name: Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, and he was a noted misanthrope, although, apparently, not a terribly clever or imaginative one, to judge from this stupid quote. David Pryce-Jones says  that he «reworked versions of that sentence», and I can well believe it.)

 

“If at our social table we could see what passes in each bosom around, we would seek dens and caverns and shun human society.” – SIR WALTER SCOTT

 

“Everywhere the trace of man was visible you wish it weren’t”. – P. J. O’ROURKE (describing driving through Nevada)

 

“During the last 50 years, we have seen something that is directly opposed to the faith in progress – actual disparagement of the human race. Misanthropy became fashionable. We repeatedly deplore our supposed 'hubris'. Few have noticed that our modern misanthropy is at odds with the evolutionist faith. And for that reason, that secular faith, which the intelligentsia is so eager for us to embrace, is going to be harder and harder to instill.” – TOM BETHELL

 

“Misanthropy, properly considered, is an accurate view of human nature with the residue of decency and the possibility of grace left out. A misanthrope will therefore be right most of the time but wrong on most of the occasions when it really counts.” – JOHN O'SULLIVAN

 

''I carry things to read so that I will not have to look at the people.'' – CHARLES BUKOWSKI

 

"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

 

 

Misery

«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.

 

“Misery is the natural and inescapable condition of man.” -- THEODORE DALRYMPLE, M.D.

"Misery is in some way as sacred as happiness; one doesn't intrude -- not, at any rate, if there is a risk that one might merely add to the misery." -- GEOFFREY HOUSEHOLD
 

“One might say that the politician, the doctor, and the dramatist make their living from human misery; the doctor in attempting to alleviate it, the politician to capitalize it, and the dramatist, to describe it.” – DAVID MAMET

 

Misogyny

"Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another." – H. L. MENCKEN

 

Missionaries

"First God finds us. And then God saves us. And then God sends us." -- (PASTOR) DAVID CASSIDY (on the Twoot, in 2018)

Missouri

«Missouri calls itself the ‘Show Me State’, which is a bit rich coming from somewhere that nobody seems to want to visit.» -- JONATHAN RAY (a disgruntled Brit visitor, in Jan 2001)

 

"The State of Misery ain’t all bad but it is, lemme tell you, the most racist place I ever was. Everybody hates everybody, ‘cept their dogs. Which is just fine by me. Keeps relationships to a minimum." -- SAMUEL M'CHEYNE GLASSER (my grate old Alpha  Delta Phi fratty brother.… Originally a Mainline Philadelphian, then a Park Avenue Noo Yawkuh, and then to elegant retirement in St. Louis, Misery.)

"Missouri is a place where, I don't know, people shoot animals and then knit sweaters out of the fur. They go to church."  -- KYLE SMITH     (a character in his 2006 novel "A Christmas Caroline")

Mistakes

«Deplore your mistakes.  Regret them as much as you like. But don’t really expect to learn anything from them.” – CARY GRANT

 

“In the long run, freedom to make mistakes is the only way to avoid them.” – ROGER SCRUTON

 

“There are more ways of going wrong than of going right.” – HERBERT SPENCER (the 19th. Century British philosopher)

 

"If I was going to be proved wrong, it would be nice if I did it myself."– HENRIK SVENSMARK                    (a Danish physicist whose work proved that the AGW nutcases were wrong in matters relating to sun-caused global warming, reacting indignantly to the flack which he subsequently took. This quote came from a Sept. 2011 interview in the WSJ with the great inquiring reporter Anne Jolis)

"To be wrong, and to be carefully wrong, that is the definition of decadence."
-- G.K. CHESTERTON

 

“That’s what children are for, isn’t it: avoiding all the mistakes you’ve made so that they can make different ones instead?” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong." -- THOMAS SOWELL  

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

 

“We make our worst mistakes when we make them together.” – DAVID FRENCH

 

“Mistakes made facing the enemy should always be forgiven.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

"He has bungled it for sure. He has bungled it so much that he doesn't know whether he has bungled it or not." -- KEITH WATERHOUSE (in his 1984 novel "Thinks") 

"Science is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth." -- JULES VERNE

"In a democracy, people should be free to be wrong." -- OWEN MATTHEWS    (British writer-- author of "Stalin's Children") 

"Mistakes are supposed to be hit." -- MARIANO RIVERA     (On the YES tv channel, 17 August 2019)                                                                                    

"It is necessary for us to learn from other's mistakes. You will not live long enough to make them all yourself." -- ADMIRAL HYMAN G. RICKOVER

"Politics, as opposed to science, does not reward the correction of mistakes, given that correcting a mistake also entails admitting to have made one. Worse, the bigger the mistake, the greater the political urgency of defending it it at all costs." -- LIONEL SHRIVER

“ ‘I was right’ is somehow easier to say than ‘I’d do it again’.” – MATTHEW PARRIS

                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“I have made two mistakes, and they are both sitting on the Supreme Court.” -- DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER                                                                      (And they were called Warren and Brennan)

"Before I make that mistake, I don't make that mistake." -- JOHAN CRUYFF                                                (the celebrated Dutch soccer player and manager)

Mobs                                                                                                                             

“Turkeys go in groups, the lion is alone.” – ALFRED DE VIGNY                                                (Frogue pote, 1797 - 1863)

 

“Mobs should never be trusted, let alone joined.” – WILLIAM SHAWCROSS

 

“If you're part of the mob, you're doing it wrong.” – JOHN NOLTE

 

"There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob." - AYN RAND

 

“The mob, after all, is just another word for us.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

 

"Everyone should fear mob rule, even the mob." -- JAY NORDLINGER

 

“The problem is not the mob, no matter how fascistic and undemocratic its mindset might be. The problem is solely the respect given to it.” – ROD LIDDLE

 

“Historians of the future will have a hard time figuring out how so many organized groups of strident jackasses succeeded in leading us around by the nose and morally intimidating the majority into silence.” – THOMAS SOWELL

 

“Groups do not think in any meaningful sense. People think — one at a time.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“Moderates/Moderation)”

“Sometimes (in an argument), one of the extremes may be correct; and there is no link between moderation and accuracy.” – MADSEN PIRIE (the author of “How to Win Every Argument”, and a pretty clever Brit.)

 

“What would a ‘centrist stance’ be on, say, the Second World War?” – MARK STEYN

 

“You can’t cross a chasm with two small jumps.” – DAVID LLOYD GEORGE (British Prime Minister during WWI)

 

“Remember, all liberals are "moderates" according to the MSM. (MainStream Media)” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“The commonplace critic is like the chap who believes that truth lies in the middle, between the extremes of right and wrong”. – WILLIAM HAZLITT

 

“If you think the extreme Right is crazy and the extreme Left is crazy, why should it follow that splitting the difference between the two is wise?” – JONAH GOLDBERG

                                                                                                                                                                                           

"'I'm a moderate' is a social signal for 'don't argue with me'." -- JIM GERAGHTY

                                                                                                                                                                                            

"To win the center, you don't have to go to the center." – SCOTT WALKER (the ex-GOP governor of Wisconsin)

 

“Everything in moderation, including moderation.” -- ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI (the ex-Trumpian press-guy, turned anti-Trumper, in September 2017)

 

"What in the world is a moderate interpretation of a constitutional text? Halfway between what it says and what we'd like it to say?” — ANTONIN SCALIA

 

"The 'moderate' is just the Democrat candidate that you don't yet know anything about." -- MARK STEYN

"In war, moderation is imbecility." -- LLOYD EVANS

                                                                                                                                                                                                

“Let us not congratulate ourselves on the reasonable mind that sees both sides of every question. Civilized flexibility is a fine thing, and in a sense the aim of education, but there is a point here where the law of diminishing returns sets in. Tepid liberalism that never lashes out at anything, intellects too stocked with information to draw a conclusion, educations that dawdle in the green bowers of non-commitment – these lack something possessed by an honest bigot. That there is a time to throw stones is a principle I try to follow in my daily life, occasionally to my peril.” – PETER DEVRIES

 

Modernity

«You must push as hard against the age as the age pushes against you” – FLANNERY O’CONNOR

 

“In my lifetime, two gigantic confidence tricks had been perpetrated on the public, namely psychoanalysis and modern art.” – DORNFORD YATES (an English novelist, whose “lifetime” roughly spanned 1880-1960)

 

“A characteristic of the modern world is that its intellectual life consists largely of the solemn enunciation either of the obvious or the obviously wrong.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

“Modernity has been created by two groups, Jews and homosexuals.” – GEORGE STEINER (“a Franco-American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist, and educator.” 1929-2020 )

 

“Everything changes but the avant-garde.” – PAUL VALERY (the Frog writer)

 

"We are living in the Salamian Age. The classic salami was made of pork and donkey meat. Our age is a supreme mixture of asinine stupidity and absymal swinishness." -- ERIK VON KUEHNELT-LEDDIHN (A 20th century Austrian pro-monarchist "socio-political theorist", an author of both fiction and non-fiction books, a frequent contributor to NATIONAL REVIEW, and an early   propagator of the {accurate, as it happens} theory that NAZISM and other forms of fascism are in fact varieties of Leftism, rather than of the "Right" -- an idea which would be more thoroughly updated and expounded by Jonah Goldberg in his 2008 best-seller "Liberal Fascism". Good Squire von Kuehnelt-Leddihn uttered the above in 1986, but if he hadn't died in 1999 I've no doubt he'd enthusiastically agree that things have not become noticeably more uplifting since then....)

 

“Speed is the only really modern sensation.” – ALDOUS HUXLEY

"Crap is now our lifeline. As bureaucrats have always known, dealing in overcomplicated matters makes people feel important and powerful." -- FLORENCE KING (in 2006) 

«Christianity didn't adapt to modernity: it inadvertently made modernity, by trying to be more purely itslef.» – THEO HOBSON (the British theologian and author, in 2015)

 

«It would appear that modern life is just the down time between apologies.» -- DENNIS MILLER

"We are probably destined to live out our lives in something less than a totally harmonious relationship with our times." -- WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR. 

"There is ground for declaring that modern man has become a moral idiot." – RICHARD M. WEAVER (from his “Ideas Have Consequences”)

 

“Cellphones distract us from the fact that the subways are 100 years old.” – PETER THIEL (the poofter black sheep of the Silicon Valley gazillionaires, who wa a big Trump backer)

 

"We're underemployed and over-opinionated." -- DAMIAN THOMPSON                                              (specifically referring to internet enthusiasts, in January 2018)

 

"Civilization is as much about forgetting, and attendant helplessness, as it is about learning. In my own lifetime, handwriting and mental arithmetic have gone to the wall, and the art of everyday literary nuance is being ousted by the application of quick, characterful emoji." -- SIMON INGS (in THE SPECTATOR, Feb. 2018)

 

"Men no longer wear shoes.  Just sneakers.  Nobody really has a sense of humor.  And most women I run into haven’t a clue, about anything." – SAMUEL M'CHEYNE GLASSER (on 26 April 2018)

 

“The modern primitive is no less primitive for having a smartphone.” -- KEVIN T. WILLIAMSON

 

"What is modern is not necessarily good. The past is really the only storehouse of ideas we have and so, if we care about the future, we ought to make the best possible inventory of it. The Renaissance was based on that thought." -- CHARLES MOORE

 

“When I was young, everyone wanted to buy cheap bread so they could spend their money on an expensive television. Now everyone wants a cheap television so they can spend their money on expensive bread.” -- RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“Modern, Post-”

«Post-modernism is defined as an uneasy alliance between nihilism and the politics of the Left.» -- ROBERT BORK

 

«Ingeniously-created complexity, which goes under the name of post-modernism, the academic equivalent of over-engineering.» -- PAUL JOHNSON

 

“Post-modern, which is the son of camp” – JAMES BOWMAN

“And arguing with self-described post-modernists is one of the most joyless shortcuts to an intellectual ass-ache I can think of.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

"The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose." – CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

 

"Isn't post-modernism really one big cover-up for the failure of the French to write a truly interesting novel ever since a sports car ate Albert Camus?" – JOHN LEONARD

“Postmodernism – the gradual erosion of universal truth – is the scientific method taken to its logical conclusion. Searching for the rationality in everything is the path to destruction.” – ALEX KASCHUTA (of “The Subversive Podcast”, quoted by Angus Colwell in the SPECCIE, October 2022)

"For those who believe that knowledge and truth are mere social constructs there is no point in debate." -- JONATHAN SUMPTION (this fellow is a "Lord" and is a former Chief Judge of the UK Supreme Court)

"Post-modernism was the worst thing that could have happened to our democracy." -- EMMANUEL MACRON (President of France, in  October 2017)

 "Post-modernism -- We wake up and now have nothing." -- DAIN EHRING  (an impressive polymath on “X”)

Modesty

"Many women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes." -- HOJATOLESLAM KAZEM SEDIGHI (This genius -- whose scientific aptitude would seem to make him a good candidate for honorable membership in the Congressional Black Caucus -- was personally appointed to be "Official Leader of Friday Prayers" throughout Tehran, by Iranian "Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Khamenei. Me, I think it's fine -- at least he doesn't blame any earthquakes on fracking.…)

 

“Content thyself to be obscurely good. When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway, the post of honor is a private station.” -- JOSEPH ADDISON        (essayist and poet 1672-1719)

 

"No great man was ever modest." -- JOHN HAY (McKinley's and Teddy Roosevelt's Secretary of State)

 

"Modest people are modest because they know something other people don't." -- KURT SCHLICHTER (on Larry O’Donnor’s WMAL radio show, 19 March 2021)

 

“I recognize my limits, but when I look around I realize I’m not exactly living in a world of giants” - GIULIO ANDREOTTI                                      (Italian statesman)

 

Mohammed

“In the seventh century of the Christian era a wandering Arab, of the lineage of Hagar, the Egyptian, combing the powers of transcendent genius with the preternatural energy of a fanatic and the fraudulent spirit of an impostor, proclaimed himself as a messenger from heaven, and spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth. … Adopting from the new revelation of Jesus, the faith and hope of immortal life, and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion. He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war as part of his religion against all the rest of mankind. The essence of his doctrine was violence and lust; to exalt the brutal over the spiritual part of human nature.” – JOHN QUINCY ADAMS                                                       (in 1830)

“We might all agree that the history of Christianity has hardly been un-bloody. But is it not worth asking whether the history of Christianity would have been more bloody or less bloody if, instead of telling his followers to 'turn the other cheek', Jesus had called (even once) for his disciples to 'slay' non-believers and chop off their heads?” – DOUGLAS MURRAY

 

“No wise men, men trained in things divine and human, believed in him (Mohammed) from the beginning. Instead, those who believed in him were brutal men and desert wanderers, utterly ignorant of all divine teaching, through whose numbers Muhammad forced others to become his followers by the violence of his arms. Mohammad said that he was sent in the power of his arms, which are signs not lacking even to robbers and tyrants.” – ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

"Muslims construct their lives around the not very reliably reported table talk of a man whose chief claim to fame would seem to be his talent for carving up his immediate neighbors in some God-forsaken chunk of desert." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS (in his 1993 novel "East of Wimbledon")                                                                                                                                                                                

Monaco                                                                                                                        

“Monaco is a sunny place, full of shady people.” – W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

                                                                                                                                                                                               

 “The less than square mile that constituted the Principality of Monaco, with its four thousand CCTV cameras – was the most closely-monitored postage stamp on earth.” – TERRY HAYES

"Monaco itself is a notable anomaly, entirely artificial, just as real as a pavilion at an International Exhibition." -- PAUL FUSSELL (paraphrasing Evelyn Waugh) 

Monarchy

“Republics are always more vindictive than monarchies.” – MONTESQUIEU

 

“Monarchy, you see, is a hereditary disease that can only be cured by fresh outbreaks of itself.” – CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

“Monarchs have to be a focus of unity or they aren't worth the trouble.” – CHARLES MOORE

“No monarch since the 17th century has shown an inclination to read serious books.” – CHARLES MOORE

Money

“While money cannot buy you happiness, it can at least buy you misery in comfort.” – C.E.M. JOAD (apparently this chap at some time was a professor of philosophy at London University…)

 

“Money is like water down the side of the mountain.  It will find a way to get around the trees.” – RALPH REED (the conservative American lobbyist and “strategist”, here opining confidently on the uselessness of liberal-sponsored “campaign-reform” legislation)

 

“It has always been hard to imagine what the problem must be to which the answer is the Euro.” – SIMON NIXON (A columnist at the London Times.)

 

“Money troubles always start the same way, when judgment is fuddled by greed, ambition and overweening self-confidence; then when problems arise, there follows an obstinate refusal to admit mistakes or the imminence of disaster.” – MARTIN VENDER WEYER

 

“Those who hate capitalism think that wealth is finite and that anyone who accumulates more than he needs is robbing somebody else. They do not understand that wealth is not a lump, but a process, and that money is the means of exchange which speeds the process. Money is not a thing, though people still think of it that way because of gold and coins and notes. Money rather resembles language – endlessly chaning in the light of the meaning and value which people impart to it. It is the vocabulary of trade, and without a vocabulary there can be no exchange.” – CHARLES MOORE

 

“Men are seldom more unreasonable than when they lose their money. They do not seek to apportion blame by any rational process but, like a wounded snake, strike out against what is most prominent in their lineof vision.” – THEODORE ROOSEVELT

 

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

 

“Money is just a way of  keeping score.” – H. L. HUNT (the quintessential Texas billionaire… I once ran into a very rich young man from Texas called Randy on, of all places, the Greek island of Hydra, and when, over a couple of Fix beers I asked him where he got his money, he told me “I got H.L. Hunt to give me $5 million if I divorced his daughter — sounds easy, but it’s trickier than it sounds.”)

“There are two kinds of money in the world: your money and my money.” -- MILTRON FRIEDMAN 

“A famous economist once said there are two types of money: mine and yours. The EU constantly reminds us that there is a third type: theirs.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY

 

“The U.S. Dollar is a promissory note from the Federal Reserve Bank, and it's not a promissory note that promises much.” – P. J. O'ROURKE

 

“Money is human appetite given flexible expression.” – LLOYD EVANS

 

“Money is good.” – JANE JOLIS

 

“Money can't buy you friends, but it does get you a better class of enemy.” – SPIKE MILLIGAN (Peter Sellers' nutso partner in “The Goon show”.)

 

"Let me issue and control a Nation's money and I care not who makes its laws." – AMSEL BAUER MAYER ROTHSCHILD

 

"Money does not make me happy. Today I have $50 million. But I was just as happy when I had $48 million” – ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER

 

“Money makes women horny.” -- ROBERT STRAUSS                                                                                                             (Almost certainly the long-time 20th century Democrat “power broker”, rather than the American movie actor who starred in “Stalag 17”)

                                                                                                                                                                                   

“Money and women are the most sought after and the least known about of any two things we have.” – WILL ROGERS

 

"If devaluing your currency were a key to a strong economy, Argentina would have the world's leading economy today, followed by Zimbabwe. And Switzerland would be a basket case." -- LARRY KUDLOW (I don't always agree with the pollyannish Squire Kudlow {a fellow patron of Hazelden Bespoke Resorts, by the way}, most particularly regarding his lunatic notions about limitless immigration, but here he's spot on – and he got religion on immigration once he went to work for Pres. Trump.)

 

“Foreign exchange trading is a zero sum game, like poker. If you don't know who the sap is, it's you.” – JEFFREY DORFMAN (an economic columnist, from Georgia USA)

"Currencies are not national virility symbols but economic shock-absorbers." -- JAMES FORSYTH

 

“He was convinced there was more to life than money and – luckily – had the money to find out what that might be.” – JON CANTER

 

"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)

 

“Money is like ice. It starts to melt as soon as you touch it.” – SAMUEL M’CHEYNE GLASSER  (My pal and brother of Alpha Delta Phi, 777 Stewart Avenue, Ithaca, N.Y.)

"Paper (money) is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, ‘Account overdrawn'.” - AYN RAND  

“What passes for money must be accounted money.” – ANTHONY BURGESS

 

"The value of money is in the mind. A strip of paper the exact size of a hundred-dollar bill is worth nothing in itself, but smear it with green ink and the portrait of a dead president and presto, it's worth two tennis shoes." -- CHARLES McCARRY

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

"Staying solvent was merely a question of shuffling debts." -- GUY BELLAMY

 

«Once you get money you find that you no longer need it.» – GUY BELLAMY

 

«Money was the salt of human activity, its refrigeration. It retarded the spoilage of your day’s efforts. The history of humanity was the history of higher and higher orders of convertability.» – RICHARD POWERS      (the American novelist)

“There’s nothing like lending somebody some money for waking you up to the bloke’s moral shortcomings.” – KINGSLEY AMIS

"Normal people really and truly don't trust cash." -- DONALD WESTLAKE (Tragically, he's right -- when by rights, it should be exactly the opposite.) 

“I don’t believe in fairy tales, sermons, or stories about money.” -- CHARLES PORTIS                                     (Through the mouth of his deathless creation, MARSHALL ROOSTER COGBURN in "True Grit")

 

"Money is fruit of all evil." -- ALAN COREN (the Sage Of Cricklewood, England)

 

"Because all value is subjective, money is worth what people feel it's worth. They accept it in exchange for goods and services because they have faith in it. Economics is closer to religion than science. Without millions of individual citizens believing in a currency, money is colored paper. Likewise, creditors have to believe that if they extend a loan to the US government they'll get their money back or they don't make the loan in the first place. So confidence isn4t a side issue. It's the only issue." -- LIONEL SHRIVER

 

Mongolia

“In suburbs of felt tents and whaling station-style shacks, the men are often so drunk on fermented mare’s milk that they remind me of sailors on deck in a typhoon. The women, meanwhile, are handsome dominatrixes in high riding boots. The Mongolian language sounds like Mr. Bean in full throttle.” – AIDAN HARTLEY

 

“Ulan-Bator did not sing sweetly to the soul. What I saw was a town of rectangular gray cement buildings – Soviet-style apartment blocks – with peeling, pockmarked façades, all of which appeared to be bleeding to death, the result, I saw on further inspection, of rusting fires escapes.” – TIM CAHILL (in 1997)

 

Montana          

"The great and free state of Montana where driving and drinking are regarded as inalienable rights." -- CARL HIAASEN (an inaccuracy which would surely come as news to my poor daughter Janie....)


Monopolies

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices”. – ADAM SMITH

 

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

 

"The great danger to the consumer is the monopoly -- whether private or governmental. His most effective protection is free competition at home and free trade throughout the world. The consumer is protected from being exploited by one seller by the existence of another seller from whom he can buy and who is eager to sell to him. Alternative sources of supply protect the consumer far more effectively than all the Ralph Naders of the world." -- MILTON FRIEDMAN

 

“A monopoly for a moment in time is not a monopoly in perpetuity. Monopolies, unprotected by the state, invite competition from other entrepreneurs who see an opportunity to provide the same (or better) service, product, or commodity more efficiently or in some other more profitable way. Monopolies or quasi-monopolies seem immortal right up until the moment they seem behind the times. As I keep writing, monopolies are only true threats to liberty or the public good when they are maintained and protected by the state.” --JONAH GOLDBERG

Morale

“Nothing is so good for the morale of the troops as to occasionally see a dead general.” -- FIELD MARSHALL WILLIAM SLIM, 1st VISCOUNT SLIM  (the British military legend, of two world wars.)

“Moral Equivalence”

“There is a difference between pushing an old lady into the way of an oncoming bus, and pushing an old lady out of the way of an oncoming bus. It simply will not do to say in both cases that you are pushing an old lady around.” – WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

 

Morality (+Ends/Means)

“A common complaint leveled at computer games is that their designers fail to programme (sic) a moral imperative into the action, but as God will tell you, moral imperatives are hard to programme from scratch.” – ANDREW SMITH (writing in the LONDON TIMES in 1998)

 

“Some worry that it is somehow undiplomatic or impolite to speak the language of right and wrong. I disagree. Different circumstances require different methods, but not different moralities. Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place. Targeting innocent civilians for murder is always and everywhere wrong.” – PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH (at West Point, 2002)

 

“Moral indignation is a standard strategy for endowing the idiot with dignity.” – MARSHALL McLUHAN (niiiice….)

 

“Rising prosperity brings moral laxity in its wake.” – TOM BETHELL                                                    (this, along with the seeds of auto-destruction inherent in democracy, go a long way towards explaining the Decline of the West.)

 

“When moral grandiosity meets lack of character, no good can result.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

"There's a lot to be said for losing one's looks -- one's morality improves immeasurably." -- JULIE BURCHILL


 “In reality, a politician, no less than a soldier, has a duty to do things for his country that no strict moralist can ever condone. That is why an air of self-righteousness so ill-befits a politician, even a failed one. It is a sign of either gross hypocrisy or extreme naivety.” – PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE

 

“Politics, in the age of the nation-state, has little to do with morality.” – NICOLO MACHIAVELLI

 

“The official who must behave badly for the good of the state is less compromised than the civilian who authorizes the role of a governing official but disclaims any responsibility for the action of government.” – NICOLO MACHIAVELLI

 

“While we all say it would be good if politicians were moral, we all get a little nervous when morality in politics is advocated.” – P. J. O'ROURKE

 

“The tragic view recognizes that between Good and Evil there is no choice, and thus a moral choice means a choice between two evils.” – DAVID MAMET

 

“The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave webs.” – JOHN DOS PASSOS (the 20th century novelist who, when he was a commie, was considered to be one of the greatest of his time. But as soon as he turned and became an anti-commie, he was suddenly considered rubbish and was totally and henceforth ignored – he became, in “critical” circles, an un-person.)

 

“Of course the end justifies the means. What else are means for? But the question is, what ends and what means? The end of supporting a totalitarian state is a very different end than supporting a democratic republic.” – PHILIP BOBBITT (LBJ's son-in-law – did he marry Linda Bird? – and a supposedly noted constitutional lawyer)

 

“But you try and base morality on the mating habits of alpha-male chimpanzees and you are not going to get very far.” – JONATHAN SACKS  (a one-time Chief Rabbi of the UK)

 

"There is ground for declaring that modern man has become a moral idiot." – RICHARD M. WEAVER (from his “Ideas Have Consequences”)

 

“Ethics you learn; morality you believe.” – A.A. GILL

"It isn't that there's no right or wrong here. There's no right." -- V. S. NAIPAUL    (speaking of a fictional un-named country in his 1979 "A Bend In The River" that was clearly the ex-Belgian Congo of Mobutu)

"When people want to ban simplistic moral judgments, it’s usually because simple morality is not on their side." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

 

«Moral progress, or the story of civilization, is a scavenger hunt for categorical imperatives, a search for truths that are — or should be — true everywhere.» – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.” -- REINHOLD NIEBUHR

 

“One becomes moral as soon as one becomes unhappy.” – MARCEL PROUST

 

“I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. . . . Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you’re not a good soldier.” – GEN CURTIS LeMAY (famous USAF knuckledragger.  Good man.)

 

"We used to ask ourselves whether something was right or wrong. Now we just ask whether it's legal." -- ALAN JUDD (The great English spook – and spook novelist.)

 

"Geography alters the moral compass as well as the magnetic." -- ALAN JUDD

"Nothing can of itself be labelled as 'wrong'." -- DR. JOHN ROBINSON (1919-1983 -- he was the Bishop of Woolwich, UK)

 

“Moral force without a man-of-war is moral farce.” – NIGEL BARLEY

"The ability to write a good book does not necessarily have anything to do with the author's morality." -- ANTHONY BURGESS


"Well, I asked the Reverend, and he said that if you haven't been told about God, Dud, you're laughing, If you don't know good from evil then you're away. You can do anything you bloody well like. There's these people in New Guinea for example. They wander about with nothing on and they commit adultery, steal, and covet their neighbour's wife, which everyone wants to do. this means all these nig-nogs are getting up to heaven, and perfectly decent blokes like you and me, who have never even committed adultery, we can't get up there. We're being kept out by the Guineans." -- PETER COOK (the great English comic, to his great mate Dudley Moore, in "The Dagenham Dialogues" of 1971) 

“I find it intensely annoying to be told how to be good by someone much richer than myself.” – CHARLES MOORE

 

“People don’t get their morality from their reading matter: they bring their morality to it.” – CLIVE JAMES

 

"Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right. " -- ISAAC ASIMOV

“There is no such thing as morality in moderation.” – DONALD WESTLAKE (I beg to differ – though to be fair to Westlake, he didn’t say this – it was a character in a 1965 short story of his that said it.)

 

"Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent." -- ADAM SMITH

 

“If you spend your life on a moral hill-top, you see nothing but the mud below. If you live in the mud itself, you get a damned good view of clear blue sky and clean green hills above.” – STEPHEN FRY

 

“There’s none so evil-minded as those with a moral mission.” – STEPHEN FRY

 
“When corruption becomes the norm, the legal system will be rigged to ignore it… and a moral code will evolve which glorifies it.” – SAMUEL M’CHEYNE GLASSER

"The phenomenon of morality, like the phenomenon of free market prosperity, evolves from individual self-interested actions, not from anyone's deliberate plan, design or system." -- PAUL JOLIS (in his excellent 2022 memoir "Going Mobile")

" 'Morally speaking' isn't a term that lawyers recognize. Nor do film producers." -- WILLIAM BOYD

Morocco

“Morocco. Even before they started decapitating western tourists the local men were in the main, utterly foul human beings, greedy, groping, smirking sexist scumbags.” – ROD LIDDLE

 

“The Moroccan police are an expression of the state. Picture the state as a larger bloke in a bar, and picture the populace as a small bloke in the same bar. The large bloke bares a tattoooed biceps, and says to the small bloke ‘did you spill my beer?’ ” – HUGH LAURIE

 

“Don’t go to Casablanca expecting it to be like the film. In fact, if you’re not too busy, and your schedule allows it, don’t to to Casablanca at all. Casablanca is fat, sprawling, and industrial; a city of concrete-dust and diesel fumes, where sunlight seems to bleach out colour, instead of pouring it in. It hasn’t a sight worth seeing, unless half a million poor people struggling to stay alive in a shanty-town warren of cardboard and corrugated iron is what makes you want to pack a bag and jump on a plane. As far as I know, it hadn’t even got a museum.” – HUGH LAURIE (in 1996)

 

Mormons (-ism)

“Bill Buckley once said he'd rather be governed by the first thousand names in the Boston phone book than the Harvard faculty. I'd rather be governed by Donny and Marie than the Washington establishment.” – PEGGY NOONAN (A Catholic)

 

“I found I could not continue to say I believed a religion that had been rash enough to make many historical claims, the testability of which was not safely back in the mists of time in the way that protects Christian belief and worldly reason from meeting up to implode like matter and antimatter.” – KENNETH ANDERSON (an ex-Mormon)

 

“Between the ages of 18 and 21, they had spent two years in some foreign slum, dressed in a white shirt and tie, knocking on doors and being told to get lost. It makes your average gap-year experience look lik a Saga cruise. The Mormons emerge from the experience fluent in a foreign language, fearless of rejection and empathetic to human suffering.” – PHILIP DELVES BROUGHTON (writing in the UK SPECTATOR in March 2011)

 

“The political problem with Mormonism is some conservatives think it's not Christian and some liberals think it's too Christian.” – RAMESH PONNURU

 

Moscow

“The (post-Communist) vibe, to the outsider, is the same: buildings and roads on a greater-than-human-scale, greyness, cold, nullity overhead. The principal innovation seems to be the traffic jam: eight lanes of gridlock everywhere you look – like Los Angeles with sleet and no ready access to anti-depressants.” – SAM LEITH (British author, in January 2012)

 

“All Moscow theme restaurants actually have the same theme. The theme is: you're not in Moscow.” – MICHALE IDOV (The Latvian-American journalist and author)

Mothers (Motherhood)

“Plus, of course, Whistler was the man who had the fourth most famous mother in history after Jesus Christ, Oedipus and Principle Skinner in The Simpsons. That, too, came into his theory of art: 'Yes', he said, 'one does like to make one's mummy just as nice as possible'.” – SAM LEITH (The English journalist reviewing “Whistler” by Daniel Sutherland)

 


“The term 'working mother' is ridiculously redundant.” – DONNA REED (US TV star, 1921-1986)

 

“Never trust a man who hates his mother.” – ELVIS PRESLEY

"If a man has been his mother's undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success." --SIGMUND FREUD 

“Nothing in nature, not even the expansive force of water as it turns into ice, is as relentless as a mother’s love for a son.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

“Being a mother was a long gamble on which you staked your happiness, and there were too many losers.” – GUY BELLAMY

 

Mothers (single)

“Bush routinely says that ‘single mothers’ have the hardest job in America. Actually, many of them don’t have jobs at all, but only (Minn. Gov.) Jesse Venture and – on an exceptionally good day – his maverick cousin McCain might be insensitive enough to say it.” – RICH LOWRY (in April 2000)

 

Motivation

“There is a difference between pushing an old lady into the way of an oncoming bus, and pushing an old lady out of the way of an oncoming bus. It simply will not do to say in both cases that you are pushing an old lady around.” – WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

 

“We fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.” – T. S. ELIOT

 

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” -- NIETZSCHE
 

"A man may stand to gain a great deal of peace and quiet from telling his wife that he loves her. But he really may love her nevertheless." – JAMIE WHYTE                                                                                                  (A New Zealander philosopher, journalist and essayist who occasionally appears in the WSJ and with whom I spent some “quality time” in a London pub with my daughter Annie, and a thoroughly splendid bloke.)

 

“A thief believes everybody steals.” – EDGAR WATSON HOWE (American novelist and magazine editor, late 19th century)

 

"The secret of getting ahead is getting started" -- MARK TWAIN

 

“There really is never more than a single reason for doing anything.” – ALEXANDER CHANCELLOR

 "Never assume the other guy will never do something you would never do." -- WILLIE MAYS   

"Humans are dominated by three motives: honor, fear and advantage." -- THUCYDIDES

“The greatest motivator in the world is your ass on the bench. Ass meets bench, bench retains ass, ass transmits signals to the brain, brain transmits signals to the body, body gets ass off bench and plays better. It's a hell of a sequence.” -- BOBBY KNIGHT    (the famous college basketball coach)

Motorcycles

“The motorcycle is a device created by the team of God and Darwin to rid the world of useless young males.” – P. J. O’ROURKE (Speaking of which, it almost rid the world of one of  my left legs….)

 "I've never seen a motorbike stopped for speeding. Probabaly because they're going too fast." -- MICHAEL PALIN

"One thing about the bikers. They don't sue." -- CARL HIAASEN


 

Motoring (and Motor Racing)

“Personally, I love NASCAR about as much as I do hockey. The only thing that would get me to watch a car race on TV would be if they ran over a hockey player every couple of laps.” – ROY BLOUNT JR. (in his “Dispatches From Up South”)

 

“After a while you're so late for work people think you're dead. You almost hate to disappoint them, which explains some people's driving.” -- JAMES LILEKS

 

“Even more important than being drunk, however, is having the right car. You have to get a car that handles really well. This is extremely important, and there’s a lot of debate on this subject – about what kind of car handles best. Some say a front-engined car; some say a rear-engined car. I say a rented car. Nothing handles better than a rented car. You can go faster, turn corners sharper, and put the transmission into reverse while going forward at a higher rate of speed in a rented car than in any other kind. You can also park without looking, and you can use the trunk as an ice chest. Another thing about a rented car is that it’s an all-terrain vehicle. Mud, snow, water, woods – you can take a rented car anywhere. True, you can’t always take it back, but that’s not your problem, is it?” – P. J. O’ROURKE


"55 miles per hour? Hell, 55 miles per hour is the speed at which a man of sporting spirit... double-parks." - P. J. O'ROURKE 

“I don't care if the door gaps are straight. When the driver steps on the gas, I want him to shit his pants.” – ENZO FERRARI (one of the original “Comendatores”)

 

“NASCAR is a merry-go-round interrupted by the occasional explosion.” – CHARLES C.W. COOKE

 

“Parking is for the poor.” – TOBY VIEIRA (An English novelist, in his “Marlow's Landing” – not nearly as good as, but nevertheless only the second novel I've ever encountered about the rough diamond business, after P. N. Gwynne’s “Firmly By The Tail”)

 

“Racing in Monaco is like riding your bicycle in your living room.” – NELSON PIQUET (the great Brazilian F-1 driver)

"The American road is designed for children and grandparents." -- WALKER PERCY

“My interest in watching men drive machines in ovals is limited. And in this documentary, the title character (“Senna”) mostly comes across as an uninteresting dope. Sure, he played a dangerous game, but ultimately it's a meaningless one. The lowliest private first class delivering mail to his fellow troops in Afghanistan is risking his life, too – but in the cause of something noble. Senna's game was providing cheap thrills for himself and the sweaty masses in exchange for ludicrous compensation.” – KYLE SMITH (the NR “culture” reviewer, who himself served as a  ILT in Gulf War I)

 

"Motor racing is expensive and absurd, dangerous and irresponsible." -- STEPHEN BAYLEY

"Those 4 guys in the late 60s who attacked a jewel merchant on New York's West 47th St., on the sidewalk, so they could steal his jewel-filled station wagon, which they abandoned two blocks later because none of them could drive a stick shift. Where would I be without such people?" -- DONALD WESTLAKE 

“There’s no excuse for crashing a car sober.” – STEPHEN FRY (Very P. J. Orourke-ish....)

"I never learned to drive:  I was too poor and then I was too rich" -- ALEX KARP     (CEO of Palantir -- AI) 

Mountains (& Mountain Climbing)

“I was much put out of humour by the most horrible precipices.” – (BISHOP) GEORGE BERKELEY (Upon finding himself amongst the Alps, in 1714.)

“Nobody climbs mountains for scientific reasons. Science is used to raise money for the expeditions, buy you really climb for the hell of it." — (SIR) EDMUND HILLARY

"There are no real endings to mountain stories. Beyond one summit lies another .And death, the epilogue of one adventure, soon becomes a prologue to the next." -- DANIEL LIGHT     (in his mountaineering book "The White Ladder")


“Movements”

“Great movements start as a cause, evolve into a business, and end up a racket.” – ERIC HOFFER

“Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a Devil." — ERIC HOFFER

“Multiculturalism”

“Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read him.” – SAUL BELLOW

 

“Pygmies are pygmies still, though perched on alps.” – SIMON BARNES (true enough, although I know the pygmies, and they’re a much- maligned bunch. They’re totally Stone Age, of course, but they’re brave and cheerful little runts.  Wouldn’t want to be one, though – they lead tough and limited lives.)

 

“One of the great advantages of a multicultural society is that it gives you a clear view of the varieties of human evil.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

“Multicultural tolerance or understanding does not extend to the past, provided that it is the past of one's own country. To the true multiculturalist, however, all other pasts are acceptable, excusable, or even aludable.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

“The great thing about multiculturalism is that it doesn’t involve knowing anything about other cultures, just advertising your warm fuzzy feelings towards them.” – MARK STEYN

 

“The politicians like to call it ‘the cultural dialogue’, but the truth is that the multicultural dialogue is really a lot of strange and disheartening monologues.” – JANE KRAMER

 

“It should be clear by now that in today’s world the basic values of Western liberal democracy are, in fact, superior to those of ‘Islam’, sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Latin America. The West’s ideals are not artifacts of the ‘white race’ but have evolved through its contacts with the rest of the world and have absorbed the useful within them to become the best of the world. Mankind should now agree upon this core global standard and urge universal conformity with it.” – PAUL BITA (a Kenyan-born writer, in July 2006.)

 

“Multiculturalism is principally an exercise in Western self-abasement.” – MARK STEYN

 

"If it's a choice between 'Heather Has Two Mommies' and 'Heather Has Two Imams', bet on the Imams every time." -- MARK STEYN

 

"The devotees of multiculti tolerance and the Allahu Akbar crowd are united by their reliance on the shut-up card." – MARK STEYN

 

"It's 2015, and beheading is just one strand in the vibrant tapestry of the multicultural utopia."– MARK STEYN

 

“'Multiculturalism' is really a suicide cult conceived by the western elites not to celebrate all cultures, but to deny their own.” – MARK STEYN

 

“Maybe multiculturalism is just a nice idea for people who haven’t been bombed yet.” – MARK KELLY (of the CBC, June ’06)

 

“The search for roots and the insistence on ethnicity, as a reaction against assimilation, is what has made the U.S. ungovernable in parts and hypocritical throughout. A society cannot tolerate more than so much diversity; there have to be shared assumptions and shared values, otherwise there can be no community and no communications, which is why so many Americans agonize over both.” – MINETTE MARRIN (English journalist)

 

“Human beings are equal, cultures are not.” – AYAAN HIRSI ALI

 

“If you were to ask a believer in multiculturalism for the tangible cultural or other benefits brought to Europe by hundreds of thousands of Somalis, not as individuals but as bearers of Somali culture, he would almost certainly be reduced to silence; for the truth is that believers in multiculturalism are not very interested in other cultures (for such interest is very hard work): They are, rather, moral exhibitionists, out to prove the largesse of their minds and the breadth of their sympathies to others of like disposition.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

“Multiculturalism is a sentimental and harmful doctrine that turns the mind to mush, is evidence of an underlying indifference to the real lives of people, and is a provider of pseudo-work for lots of people such as community organizers. Multiculturalists are seldom really interested in the culture of others – multiculturalists generally rejoice at mass, and indiscriminate, immigration not because they are admirers of, say, Somali political philosophy, but because they want the culture of their own country to be diluted as much as possible.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE (the pseudonym of Anthony Daniels, the British doctor and author and world-class purveyor of good common sense, in March, 2011)

 

“'Treating people differently in order to treat them equally.' If that sounds Orwellian, it should, because multiculturalism is the smiley face of totalitarianism”. – ELIZABETH POWERS (English author and editrix)

 

"The multi-culti police, unlike the British police, is always armed and never resting." -- JAY NORDLINGER

 

“It has long been obvious that ‘multiculturalism’ is an ornate synonym for ‘anti-Americanism.’ It is anti-Americanism on a peculiar moralistic jag.” – ROGER KIMBALL

 

“The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.” – THEODORE ROOSEVELT

 

“Multiculturalism is never having to say you're sorry; you were only misunderstood.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

“The multiculturalists and the universities want to destroy the old white Anglo-Saxon education system as they see it, and produce something completely different – with no conception of what that completely different  thing would be, of course.” – ROGER SCRUTON

 

“The left wraps itself in political correctness and multiculturalism like a suicide vest.” – SARAH PALIN

 

“It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose.” – WILLIAM HENRY III                      (the author of  the book “In Defense of Elitism”)

 

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

 

"In multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with your economic and social interests, you vote in accordance with your race and religion." -- LEE KUAN YEW (of course, the founding supremo of Singapore.)

 

"What 'multiculturalism' boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture, and you can not blame any culture in the world except Western culture." -- THOMAS SOWELL

 

"Those who say that all cultures are equal never explain why the results of those cultures are so grossly unequal." -- THOMAS SOWELL

 

“So far, the most obvious result of multiculturalism, as far as I can see, has been the end of freedom of speech, thought and conscience.” – JEREMY CLARKE             (the “Low Life” columnist of  THE SPECTATOR)

 

“If you try to make everything multicultural, you end up with no culture at all.” – MORRISSEY (the singer)

 

"A multiculturalism, which scolds us to respect and even laud maladaptive cultural practices elsewhere while it pushes us to reflexively bash anything and everything American, remains fashionable within contemporary liberalism." -- DANIEL J. FLYNN (of the AMSPEC)

"I happen to be a big fan of Western civilization; I think it beats the hell out of tyranny and starvation." -- JORDAN PETERSON 

“Quasi-apartheid Multiculturalism, with his corrosive sense of victimhood.” – DAVID STARKEY

 

"Of course, different races had different ideas -- some were unclear about sex, some had queer ideas about honesty, some got out of hand at times when they'd had too much to drink." -- EVELYN WAUGH                        (in "Too Much Tolerance" in 1932)

 

"The modern doctrines of diversity and multiculturalism are a kind of homogenizing totalitarianism. Its acolytes want every institution to be filled with people who look different but think alike. What our society needs is not more “diversity” of this sort but more variety." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“‘Multiculturalism’ is an intellectual dead end.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

"Let's face it: there is no cultural integration between Europe and Africa, but if anyone says it, he or she's a racist." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

“Everyone everywhere wanted to preserve their ‘culture’; and, to do so, to preserve themselves from anonymity and nothingness, everyone everywhere seemed ready to resort or revert to barbarism.” – SHIVA NAIPAUL

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

“Multi-culturalism doesn’t embrace the cultural pursuits of white men. In fact, multi-culturalism means never having to say you’re sorry – unless you happen to be a white man. Then you’re expected to spend your lofe apologising simply for being born.” – RICHARD LITTLEJOHN (the columnist for the UK “Sun”, in 1995)

 

“Multilateralism”

"For too long, Democrats have cottoned to a foreign policy that says it’s better to be wrong in a big group than to be right alone." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

 

Murder (& Assassination)

“The smart murder just never happens. That’s all bullshit. Murder is dumb, and then even dumber. Only two things will make you any good at it: Luck and practice.” – MARTIN AMIS

"The English (MI6) have a phrase that I commend to you 'Thou shalt not kill, yet need not strive officiously to keep-alive'." -- FREDERICK FORSYTH (my fellow member in London's Special Forces Club)

Museums

"I cannot take big museums seriously where there is a crowd of tourists. If you want to see a famous painting, you need some books and explanations of it. When I go to the British Museum with somebody, or to the National Gallery, I have just two stops: the café and the museum store. I love them." -- SLAVOJ ZAZEK

"You can be a museum, or you can be modern, but you can't be both." -- GERTRUDE STEIN      (she said this in 1930, when the NY Museum of Modern Art was just starting.... and she was quite right....)



Music

"All music is positively painful to me." -- EVELYN WAUGH (after lunching with Igor Stravinsky)

 

“The English may not like music, but they like the sound it makes.” – SIR THOMAS BEECHAM

 

"The British like any kind of music so long as it's loud." -- SIR THOMAS BEECHAM

                                                                                                                                                                                                

“When modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state always change with it.” – PLATO (eh?)

 

“Music was better when ugly people were allowed to make it.” – ROBERT PARRY                                                             (A US Army combat veteran, on The Twoot, in 2014)

 

“I am no stranger to loud music. I’ve been to a Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels concert. I once dated a woman with two kids.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

 

“Asia is the continent rhythm forgot. At best Asian music is off-brand American pop, like Sonny Bono in a karaoke bar. At worst Asian music sounds as if a truck full of wind chimes collided with a stack of empty oil drums during a birdcall contest.” – P.J. O’ROURKE

 

“Of all the noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.” – DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON

 

“Pop music of any time thrives on personal associations. Without them it loses much of its effect. A Beatles fan, contemplating the greatness of the band that changed the world, will almost inevitably end up remembering where he was when he first heard Rubber Soul, and then the Hendrix poster in his dorm room, and the incomprehensions of Mom and Dad. This is one of the things that separates pop music from  music that endures.  Beethoven’s appeal doesn’t turn on the fact that you used to make out in the back seat of your dad’s Chevy while the radio played the Andante from the emperor Concerto.” – ANDREW FERGUSON

 

“Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.” – MARK TWAIN

 

"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." -- HUNTER S. THOMPSON

 

“It is very hard to criticize a musical idiom without standing in judgment on the culture to which it belongs.” – THEODOR ADORNO (the 20th Century German philosopher and musicologist)

 

"I know only two tunes: one of them is 'Yankee Doodle' and the other one isn't." -- ULYSSES S. GRANT      (One of my favorite quotes in this whole Compendium. If I knew nothing else about Grant, this would be enough to make me like him.)

                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it.” – PIERRE BEAUMARCHAIS                                                                   (the French playwright and political agitator)

“A music lawyer I know is very pessimistic about the future of recorded music, not least because if there is no more money to be made, she won't be making any either. She thinks that young people won't start bands any more, that music will simply contract for a while. I am not so sure. Making huge piles of cash is only one reason young people become musicians. Having sex with other young people is an important one, and avoiding proper work is another. It will take more than harsh economic circumstances to negate the squalid glamour of the musician's sordid existence. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the harsh economic circumstances didn't actually encourage more young people to start bands. It's not as though they have anything else to do.” – MARCUS BERKMANN                                                                    (the “pop music” columnist, believe it or not, for the UK SPECTATOR – in Feb. 2013)

“There are few things in life more eye-opening that seeing who else shares your musical tastes.” – JAMES LILEKS

"In the end, perhaps nothing is as beautiful as a song, perhaps because nothing can be as sad." -- MARK HELPRIN


“Let me make the songs of a nation, and I do not care who makes its laws.” – ANDREW FLETCHER                                                                                    (a Scottish writer and politician, 1653-1716)

“Music is only love looking for words.” – LAWRENCE DURRELL

 

“The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.” - J. S. BACH

 

“Two years of listening had bred in me a certain contempt for music: it strives, it shouts, it whispers, it tries again, a half-octave higher, but it doesn’t get anywhere, it doesn’t escape, it eventually ends. The best you can say for it is that it’s not silence.” – JOHN UPDIKE

                                                                                                                                                                               

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." -- FRANK ZAPPA

"The best music is made by people who don't care what they look like while they're making it." -- JACK JOLIS

“He got through the song somehow and limped off amidst roars of silence from the audience.” – P. G. WODEHOUSE

"There are too many notes." -- EMPEROR JOSEPH II (1741-1790, the Austrian "Holy Roman" emperor, upon hearing "Abduction" from Mozart's "Seraglio". To which Morzart reportedly replied: "Which ones should I remove?")

Music, “Avant-Garde”                                                                                            

"I never knowingly listened to Schoenberg, but I think I might once have trod in some by mistake." -- SIR THOMAS BEECHAM

Music, Bad

“Then there are young people with earphones in their ears and trances on their faces. I wouldn’t mind so much if I thought they were listening to anything worthwhile; but they are going deaf from bad taste. Their suffering will be merited, but it will be suffering nonetheless.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

“Hell isn't other people. Hell is other people's taste in music.” – MARCUS BERKMANN (the UK SPECTATOR's long-suffering pop music columnist. Yes, they have such a thing... to go along with their classical music columnist. Which reminds me – you young 'uns out there may be amused to learn that before the advent of the Beatles, classical music was referred to by the more philistine segment of society as “long-hair music”.)

 

“But the music we hate follows us around like a stray dog. If we stand still for long enough, it'll cock its leg and piss on our trousers. There's no escaping it.” – MARCUS BERKMANN

 

“Good rule of thumb: if you have to perform your music with choreography, your music is garbage.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

"There are few infringements so tyrannical as being forced to listen to some other generation's music." -- G.M. FORD (The Seattle-based mystery-writer) 

Music, Black

“My politically incorrect thought: All the best black music in this country, and there was a lot of it, was created in the era of segregation.” – TOM BETHELL

 

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues." – “DUKE” ELLINGTON

 

“Meeting Negroes was fine by me, especially if the Negro in question happened to be Bo Diddley or one of my other musical heroes, almost all of whom were black. For rock ‘n’ roll was the very defining inflence of my being. Nothing was more important than this musical gift from the gods. But I wasn’t sure there were any Negroes in New Hampshire, much less ones with electric guitars.” – CHRIS MILLER (My fellow ΑΔΦ, in his 2006 memoir, on his first year at Dartmouth in 1960)

 

Music, Classical

“I never looked at conductors because I couldn't understand what any of them were doing.” – ANDRE TCHAIKOVSKY (the great Polish pianist, and not the Russian composer)

 

“It takes disorganization of a high order to find oneself at a concert performance of Wagner by mistake, but I managed it.” – CHARLES SPENCER (columnist for the UK Spectator, in September 2009)

 

"Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune." -- FRANK "KIN" HUBBARD

                                                                                                                                                                                        

"The 'progress' from Mozart to Wagner was a pretty big step in the Decline of the West." -- BILL KRISTOL

                                                                                                                                                                                         

“The Mozartian legacy, in brief, is as good an excuse for mankind’s existence as we shall ever encounter and is perhaps, after all, a still small hope for our ultimate survival.” - H.C. ROBBINS (author of “Mozart’s Last Year”)

 

“Bach gave us God’s Word, Mozart gave us God’s Laughter, Beethoven gave us God’s Fire, God gave us Music that we might pray without words.” - MARK SHAW (a citizen commenting on a YouTube performance of Paulina Osetinskaya, playing Bach’s 1st piano concerto in D Minor)

 

“I tell my piano the things I used to tell you.” -- FREDERIC CHOPIN

"Western music (ED: referring to classical music, not cowboy music) is something unique, which has no equal in other cultures." -- JOSEPH RATZINGER (POPE BENEDICT XVI) (who was quite the musician himself...)  

“Nothing is more beautiful than a guitar, except, possibly two.” -- FREDERIC CHOPIN

                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“Am I alone in thinking of classical music as very slow in saying what it’s getting at? All that passionate searching, and it ends by discovering the tonic where it began.” – JOHN UPDIKE                                 (in his 1992 “Notes On The Ford Administration”)

                                                                                                                                                                                               

 “Plans should be made to blast Mozart’s entire oeuvre into outer space as such would be mankind’s best defense against an alien invasion.”  - SAMUEL M'CHEYNE. GLASSER

"The harp, the most dispensable of all the instruments, even in Debussy, gives the most trouble." -- ANTHONY BURGESS (something of a classical composer himself) 

“Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.” -- EDGAR WILSON NYE

                                                                                                                                        

Music, Country

“Country music is what happens Monday through Friday, and rock ‘n’ roll is what happens on the weekend.” – BRAD PAISLEY (American country singer, circa 2005-6)

 

"What do you get when you play country music backwards? You get your girl back, your dog back, your pick-up back, and you stop drinking." -- LOUIS SAABERDA                                                                                     (N.F.I. – Armese for “No Further Information”.)

                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down' ”.– BOB NEWHART

 

Music, Folk

“40 years ago, the self-consciously childlike ‘folk song’ met the civil-rights movement and helped permanently infantilise the Left.” – MARK STEYN (in the UK Spectator, 17 Jan. 2004)

 

“Now, a folksinger is one of the few things in the world which is less desirable than a child.” – L.A. “BUD” MARTIN (a great (childless) self-described slacker layabout pal of mine, one-time lyricist for my brother James’  seminal rock band BWAP, and a thoroughly good chap. And it’s funny how this quote fits, no doubt unintentionally, with Mark Steyn’s, above.)

 

"All music is folk music. I ain't never heard no horse sing a song." -- LOUIS ARMSTRONG

 

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a folk singer howling in a human ear forever.” - GEORGE ORWELL

"Wagner has some good moments, but some bad quarters of an hour." -- GIOACHINO ROSSINI (now we know why Rossini, like Cher, is only known by his one name)


“I daresay you know these Fold Dance people, Corky. They tie bells to their trousers and dance old rustic dances showing that it takes all sorts to make a world.” – P. G. WODEHOUSE

 

Music, “Metal”/”Heavy Metal”

"Some people haven't heard heavy metal before. They can't take it. If you play it for 24 hours, your brains and body functions start to slide." -- SGT. MARK HADSELL (of the US Army, on using Metallica music as to, ahem, help interrogate prisoners during the Iraq War, in 2003)

Music, “Rap”, “Hip-Hop”

“A form of music created by one performer shouting obscenities in a singsong voice while other performers torture a cat and throw garbage cans down a flight of stairs” – P. J. O’ROURKE (Peej coulda/shoulda done better on rap than this, but I stuck it in anyway….)

 

“’Rap’ is the most overtly and consistently misogynistic music ever produced in human history.” – JOHN McWHORTER (the black author of, among other books,  “Winning The Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America”.)

 

“Not long ago I heard – or rather felt the vibrations of – the first ghetto-blaster of summer. I have experienced earth tremors in Central America, but the terror they inspire is not to be compared with that inspired by the ghetto-blaster, whose rap and reggae first obtrude upon one’s consciousness not through an assault on the ears, but through a tingling in the legs, as the ground trembles rhythmically beneath one. The volume of ghetto-blaster emissions is not to be measured in decibels, therefore, but on the Richter scale.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

“I secretly harbor the belief that rap music is the fundamental cause of terrorism in the Western world. The BBC, with its eternal and deliberate state-sponsored tin ear for reality, wondered how a rap-music-loving youth or young man could possibly have become a vicious terrorist. Of course, there is the chicken-and-egg problem here: Does rap music make young men violent, or are violent young men attracted to rap music?” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE (in Feb. 2015)

 

"(“Hip-Hop”) represents the most dehumanizing images of black people since the dawn of minstrelsy in the 19th century." – STANLEY CROUCH (the black writer and academic)

 

“Rap music sounds like somebody feeding a rhyming dictionary to a popcorn popper.”– TOM ROBBINS

 

“Hip-hop is different. One of its primary purposes, I’d suggest, is to annoy people on buses. Teenagers can play it knowing that most grown-ups will hate it; black people can play it knowing most white people will hate it; men can play it knowing most women will hate it.” – MARCUS BERKMANN (English rock music critic)

 

"You got to realize that when I was 20 years old, I had a house, a Mercedes, a Corvette and a million dollars in the bank before I could buy alcohol legally." – DR DRE (“rap” artiste extraordinaire... real name Andre Romelle Young, from the sunny burg of Compton, Caulifornia)

 

«Rap is the equivalent of projectile vomiting, only worse because of the hatred in its lyrics.» -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

"We are already giving rappers the benefit of the doubt by calling them artists." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

"All rappers are just Gilbert & Sullivan wannabes." -- KYLE SMITH 

«Rap music? I'm still waiting for the music part.» – RAY CHARLES

 

«Everyone knows that rap is an ideal conduit for the expression of impotent and churlish rage.» – LLOYD EVANS

 

«But don’t mock the rap artist: envy him. A rap-artist is definitely the thing to be. As well as the affection, reverence and erotic perks traditionally due to the musician, he is also accorded the status of poet, philosopher, dissident and redeemer. Nobody ever had it so good.» – MARTIN AMIS (in 1989)

 

«Rap is witless, racist doggerel that has no more relation to actual music than police sirens have. It's monetized verbal farting, and you'll find more edification scratched onto latrine walls.» – JACK JOLIS

 

"The hip hop stars' status tests require shooting and assassinating one another periodically. How cool is that?" -- TOM WOLFE

 

Music, Rock

“Rock’n’roll may have come from America – but America came from England”.—JULIE BURCHILL (eh? This, I believe, is what is known as a “non-sequitur”.)

 

“People want to know what the inner meaning of Mr. Kite was. There wasn’t any. I just did it. I shoved a lot of words together and I shoved some noise on. But nobody will believe it. People think The Beatles know what’s going on. We don’t.” – JOHN LENNON

 

“The decline has been absolute, and spectacularly rapid. It’s hard to see what else mid-Nineties pop can divest itself of while still claiming to be music. Structure, development, harmonic sublety, rhythmic eloquence, the palette of timbre, the shading of dynamics: all of these have gone, and we are left with a sort of bad-tempered shouting to a frenetic pulse. Pop has become truly infantile. But this… stuff, this un-music, witless drivel, smashed, debauched imbecility, is being sold. It is being pushed. It is inseperably from the decay on which it feeds: crudity, stupidity, brutality, inarticulacy, the short fuse, the crunched face, the snatched fuck, the solipsism, the hopelessness.” – MICHAEL BYWATER

 

“Pop stars, like actors, should be heard and not listened to.” – A.A. GILL

 

“Any twerp who can write a song thinks they’re Zarathustra down from the mountain. Any decent society would give them a good kicking and throw them down the salt mines for twenty years.” – JAMES YOUNG

"You know what I'd do with a voice like that? Become a janitor." -- PRINCE (PRINCE ROGERS NELSON) (referring to fellow singer, the Irish blowhard "Bono") 

“Zulu music is responsible for most of the world’s ills, having lowered the standard of civilized behavior and given us Yoko One and Keith Richards and – worst of all – the flower power peace bums of the Sixties.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

“These are the three great lyrical themes (of rock music): sex, hate, and a smarmy hypocritical version of brotherly love. Such polluted sources issue in a muddy stream where only monsters can swim. It has all the moral dignity of drug trafficking.” – ALLAN BLOOM     (the author of “The closing Of The American Mind”, and my old Western Civ prof at Cornell – seriously, one of the very few classes I actually went to…)

 

“Even now when I hear ‘A Double Shot of My Baby’s Love’ by the Swingin’ Medallions it makes me want to go stand outside in the hot sun with a milkshake cup full of beer in one hand and a slightly drenched 19 year old coed in the other.” – LEWIS GRIZZARD (Me too – in fact, I remember doing precisely that at our joint Alpha Delta Phi/Chi Phi Spring Weekend party, with Vivian Bridaham, Cornell ’67)

 

“It”s very good, but I’d still rather listen to Con Ed break up the streets.” – A. E. JOLIS (on being asked his reaction to his son’s – my brother James’ – BWAP concert at Carnegie Hall. I was there, and it wasn’t half bad. BWAP ruled….)

 

“The rock business is as vicious and unsentimental as a South African necklace party.” – D. KEITH MANO (For those of you unfamiliar with what a “necklace party” was in pre-ANC/Mandela South Africa, you should look it up.  Hint: it wasn’t pretty….)

 

“How is it that someone who plays this kind of music can afford to live in this apartment?” – JOHN BUCKLEY (one of the Great Mysteries of the modern age… He was, of course, referring to some hairy unkempt oik’s having difficulty passing muster with one of NYC’s notorious “co-op boards”.)

"You don't have to play loud to be good, as long as you don't muck up the song. Don't make the song worse." -- CHRISTOPHER JOHN MILLAR (the drummer for The Clash, whose stage name was "Rat Scabies" --in Feb. 2023)


 “Punk was in its infancy, a stage of development which it very sensibly never exceeded.” – SIMON FANSHAWE (Brit journalist.)

 

“Rock can’t be avoided by anyone, so one treats it just like traffic noise.” – JOHN SIMON (the theater critic. And this is a variation on A.E. JOLIS’ “Con Ed”  theme, above….)

 

“It is a scene of endless opportunities chased by endless opportunists – singers who cannot sing, dancers who cannot life one foot above the other, lead guitarists who fall over their leads, keyboard wizards who have not even passed sorcerer’s apprentice. Talent is not important, for this is a system of energy desire, ego-hunger, hysteria, youthful frustration and stylistic tribalism, where it is the spirit that counts.” – MALCOLM BRADBURY

 

“Pop is of the moment, frivolous, in vogue one week and forgotten the next, currently being bought by a lot of scrofulous teenagers and to be found mostly on 45 rpm. singles. (?) Rock is older, slower, tougher, more grown-up, frequently a bit louder, comes out on albums and CD’s, has more guitars in it and was probably what you were listening to at university.” – RICHARD COOK

 

“I’ve had a long relationship with drums, and I can’t play the bloody things. It’s amazing I’ve got away with it for so long.”  --  CHARLIE WATTS (Of the famous Rolling Bones. He said this in 1993, by which point he’d already been “not playing the bloody things” for over 30 years – it makes over about 43 years, now…)

 

“90% of songs would be improved if they never unpacked the cymbals. Cowbells fine!” – MICKEY KAUS (the “sane” liberal blogger and failed senatorial candidate against Barbara Boxer. And I agree with him about the use of the cowbell in rock – an excellent innovation.)

                                                                                                                                                                                                "One chord is fine, two chords is pushing it – three chords and you're into jazz." -- LOU REED (the late rock artiste commenting on his own oeuvre....)

 

“The age of the rock star, like the age of the cowboy, has passed. The idea of the rock star, like the idea of the cowboy, lives on.” – DAVID HEPWORTH (in his 2017 book “Uncommon People”)

 

“Bliss it was to be a horny adolescent when real rock stars roamed the earth: tyrannosaurs in top hats compared to the bumbling brachiosaurs in backwards baseball caps which pass for pop idols today.” – JULIE BURCHILL (in 2017)

 

“Rock 'n' Roll is music for your neck downwards.” – KEITH RICHARDS

"The truth is that the Beatles were a pop band and the Rolling Stones a rock band, better than any this country (England) has ever produced -- even if the Who were sometimes more powerful and the Kinks cleverer." -- ROD LIDDLE (no argument from me... although Procol Harum was better than all of 'em...) 

“We tried to create an image of being tough, but we weren’t that bloody tough. Tough guys don’t join bands, not really.” – KEVIN ROWLAND (the transvestite leader of an English band called “Dexy’s Midnight Runners”.)

"Myths that no amount of facts can ever destroy -- say, the Rolling Stones being the bad boys of 1960s pop, even though the Beatles were filling their boots with speed and Hamburg prostitutes while Mick Jagger was studying accountancy at the London School of Economics." -- JAMES WALTON (One of the Speccie’s TV reviewers)

Musk, Elon

"It's fun to see 'liberals' outraged at an African-American buying 10% of Twitter probably for the sole purpose of making sure his tweets aren’t censored. And the predictable smearing of Musk by the socialist (which is to say practically all) media has just begun." -- SAMUEL M’CHEYNE GLASSER (on 5 April 2020)

"If you list my sins, I sound like the worst person on Earth. But if you put those against the things I've done right, it makes much more sense." -- ELON MUSK


"Musk isn’t even a conservative, he just thinks they shouldn’t be systemically censored — and for that alone, they hate him." -- JON LEVINE (of the NY POST, in Nov. 2022)

"Everybody loves Elon Musk except communists and perverts." -- KURT SCHLICHTER

"Musk (like Trump before him) was a lifelong, not-particularly-ideological, vaguely trendy liberal Democrat -- who was ambushed, surprised and shocked by the ravenous, vengeful Left and who's been, as a result, forced to become an anti-Leftist." -- JACK JOLIS

"Mr. Elon Musk has invited the world to abuse him verbally on his own property. That’s my definition of a generous and gracious host." -- WALTER KIRN (American author, "Up In The Air")

"Musk -- the man is the Edison, the Henry Ford of our times." -- BRIAN KILMEADE

Mystery

"Men are always in awe of an enigma" -- FREDERICH FORSYTH (my old club-mate in London's Special Forces Club, here, as it happens, talking about Muamar Gaddafi)

Myths

“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)

 

“The human race is guided by myth as much as by logic, and mythology explains people to themselves more vividly than economics.” – A. N. WILSON

"A myth is a female moth." -- PAUL O. JOLIS

"And myths, though not the same as the truth, are also not the same as lies." -- CHARLES MOORE