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Naiveté

“Naivety is charming in children and female undergraduates; in multimillionaire Hollywood types it is painful.” – ROB LONG

 

Names (Taxonomy)

“Bad luck always pursues peoples who change the names of their cities.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL (cute – but inasmuch as bad luck pursues people regardless of whether they change the name of their cities or not, I reckon ole Winnie was on pretty safe ground, here…)

 

“Far as I’m concerned, if it’s not in the Bible, Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Tennyson, and was not the name of any English king or queen, or of any Greek or Roman deity, it’s not a name.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE (SPOken like a gentleman, sah!)

 

“If you don’t have the names of things, the knowledge of them is lost.” – RICHARD FORTEY (“fellow” of the (UK) Royal Society and President of the (UK) Geological Society).

 

"You can call a rattlesnake a 'rhythmic reptile' all you want, but you still can't let your kids play with it in the sandbox."-- SHANNEN COFFIN

 

"The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms." -- SOCRATES

"States (governments) generally like to know where to find people and distinguish one individual from another. That’s how we got last names." -- JONAH GOLDBERG 

 

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

 

"Speaking of odd nomenclature, we passed Poison Creek then drove across the Sheepshead Mountains to the Crooked River, (Oregon). Have you noticed that Americans ran out of place-names after they crossed the Mississippi River? Back east locales were given high-minded monikers with classical references (Syracuse, NY, Athens, GA)"-- and he might have added Ithaca, NY -ed --"or heroic in memoriams (Washington, DC, Lafayette, IN), or melodious Indian words (Mississippi). Out west they just called it any old thing -- Sick Headache, NM, Lost My Hat, UT, What's This?, AZ.They were busy people, those pioneers, going places, doing things, on their way up in the world. They didn't have time to sit around on committees and take six months deciding between "Thermopylae" and "John Paul Jonesville". There's also an honesty to Western names. The Sheepshead Mountains were doubtless filled with severed sheep's heads after the cattle ranchers got finished shooting the sheepherders in the 1880s Oregon range wars. There's something to be said for such plain speaking. 'Human Garbageville' would be a good name for Los Angeles. My own native city of Toledo, Ohio, could be aptly called 'Dirtyburg', and the Rev. Jesse Jackson had, not long before, made an interesting suggestion for rechristening New York." – P. J. O’ROURKE

 

“The English, it has always seemed to me, have a certain genius for names. A glance through the British edition of Who's Who throws up a roll call that sounds disarmingly like the characters in a P.G. Wodehouse novel: Lord Fraser of Tullybelton, Captain Alwyne Arthur Compton Farquharson of Invercauld, Professor Valentine Mayneord, Sir Helenus Milmo, Lord Keith of Kinkel. Many British appellations are of truly heroic proportions, like that of the World War I admiral named Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernie-Erle-Drax. The best ones go in for a kind of gloriously silly redundancy towards the end, as with Sir Humphrey Dodington Benedict Sherston Sherston-Baker and the truly unbeatable Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraduati Tollemache-Tollemache-de Orellana-Plantagenet-Tollemache-Tollemache. a British army major who died in World War I. The leading British explorer is Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes. Somewhere in Britain to this day there is an old family rejoicing in the name MacGillesheatheanaich. In the realms of nomenclature clearly we are dealing here with giants.” – BILL BRYSON (in his great “Mother Tongue”)

 

"To be sure, a lot of British foods don't sound very attractive -- toad-in-the-hole, bubble and squeak, bangers and mash, faggots in gravy, gooseberry fool, clotted cream. No one, as far as I can tell, has ever satisfactorily explained why the British insist on endowing their foods with strange and unseductive names. I am convinced that if the British had given their foods pretentious names like 'galantine of pork saucisson en croute' or 'julienne of vegetables Wellington', people would gobble them up and there would be no jokes about British cooking." -- BILL BRYSON

"I was immediately attracted to some shirts in the window, entirely because of the name: Seidensticker Splendestos. I am prepared to wear a shirt sight unseen if it's called a Splendesto. It's so good a name it ought to be a word in its own right, denoting a higher level of excellence beyond splendid.

I grew up in an age when people valued good names. It was a time when washing machines had Luxe-o-Matic spin cycles, lawn mowers had Trigger-Torque starter buttons, record players had Vibro-Sonic speakers. Even clothing was exciting. My father once owned a McGregor Glen Plaid Visa-Versa Reversible Jacket and got real pleasure from showing people, including total strangers, how you could turn it inside out and have a second, bonus jacket.

All that is gone. Nowadays we have nothing but meaningless names. Look at Starbucks and their cup sizes -- Venti, Trenta, and Wanko Grande or whatever. Giant corporations everywhere have names that mean nothing -- Diageo, Lucent, Accenture, Aviva. I used to have an insurance policy with Windsor Life, but now the company is called ReAssure. This is a fabulous name if they ever decide to make incontinence pants for the elderly, but it is a terrible name for an insurer." -- BILL BRYSON

"The largely inexplicable popularity of jack as a component with which to build words: jackhammer, jackknife, jackboot, jackass, jack-in-the-box, jack-o'-lantern, jack-of-all-trades, jackrabbit, jackstraw, jackdaw, jackanapes, lumberjack and car jack.  In none of these, so far as is known, does jack contain any particular significance. People just clearly just like the sound of it." -- BILL BRYSON      (I mainly include this because my alter-ego's name is "Jack)

“Old-time comedians used to say that if you mentioned the word ‘Schenectady’, you got a laugh. ‘Schenectady’ was funny. So was ‘Poughkeepsie’. ‘National Public Radio’ has a similar effect on me.” – JAY NORDLINGER

 

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

“Because if you were not happy with your name, then a small but sustained lifelong stress was imposed on your psyche, your sense of self. It was like being condemned to wear too-small shoes all the time: you could still get about but there would always be a pinching, a corn or two aching, something unnaturally hobbling about your gait.” – WILLIAM BOYD                                                          (in his 1005 short story “Never Saw Brazil”)

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

 

“If you have difficulty remembering people’s names go to either South Korea, where everyone is called Mr. Kim, or to Senegal where everyone is called Mr. Diouf.” – PETER BIDDLECOMBE (or Swaziland, where everyone is a “Dlamini”)

 

“Names have value that exceed someone’s existence.”  – JONATHAN HOLLOWAY (The black President of Rutgers U., explaining in 2020 why he’s not changing the place’s name, even though Squire Rutgers was a slave-owner. And the same goes, by the way, for Fort Bragg and Fort Benning.)

 

“Westerners are named for the prophets, Southerners for the apostles, and Yankees for their ancestors.” – EV ERLICH (in his engaging book “Grant Speaks”)

"When our second son came along I searched my head for an original name and came up with Trumper, which my dictionary informed me meant a splendid person. I had thought of calling the baby Zenda, as in The Prisoner Of, because I had so enjoyed the film (the first version). But I decided that Trumper would be more suitable." -- TERRY-THOMAS 

"Farr's Law Of Mean Familiarity:

The Boss of a business refers to Co-Director Michael Yates as Mike;

to Assistant-Director Michael Yates as Michael;

to Sectional Manager Michael Yates as Mr. Yates;

to Sectional Assistant Michael Yates as Yates;

to Indispensable Secretary Michael Yates as Mr. Yates;

to Apprentice Michael Yates as Michael;

and  to Night Watchman Michael Yates as Mike." -- STEPHEN POTTER (In his 1952 classic book, "One-Upmanship". And in my experience in biz – this is exactly how it goes.)

 

“Beyond Barstow were straight roads to arid, empty ground. Where a town appeared, it was difficult to see what it was there for. The names hinted at the arbitrary nature of the settlements: Needles, Yucca, Kingman – and on up to Searchlight and Boulder City. There was no history or sentiment in them. They were the casual bequests of people who had been through here long ago and passed on to other things. We went through Grasshopper Junction, declined to turn off to a place called Chloride and pulled up the black mountains towards the Hoover Dam. The names of the mountains remind you of why Twain and thousands of other Americans came here in the last century. There is Eldorado Canyon, Opal Mountain, Copper Mountain and Micah Peak. They called Nevada the silver state, and millions of pounds worth of the stuff was pulled out of these unforgiving hills. Back down west of Kingman there are the remnants of Calico – a ghost town.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS (From his amusing 1995 book, “From Wimbledon To Waco”)

“Until I was thirteen, I thought my name was ‘Shut up’.” - JOE NAMATH

 

"Any generalization about New York is bound to miss the mark. There are unbelievable names -- Jim Gangulas and Rick Zyzzes -- whose origins are sometimes lost even to their bearers. An extremely personable gentlman from Madagascar once introduced himself to me as something that soundedd more or less like Nameletronkuontrantarisa, but immediately added, 'Of course that's impossible. Just call me Désiré.' If your name is Whitney, you'll probably be asked to spell it." -- VASSILY AKSYONOV

"Derelicts become vagrants, then the homeless. The people are the same, but the social problem has been inverted into a political solution: rename and worship them. Employees are now referred to as human resources. the folks described are the same, butt the difference is semantic, which is to say, in the way they care considered, and, so, treated. what does one do with employees? One pays them. What does one do with resources? One exploits them." -- DAVID MAMET

"Never trust anyone who uses three names." -- SID ROSENBERG (On his "Bernie and Sid" WABC radio program on 23 May 2022)

“Nanny State, The”

"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them." – THOMAS JEFFERSON

“If we become a country in which we say, 'Please, tell me how to live', we're doomed.” – PETE HAMILL                      (the lefty old NY Post columnist, in his book “Prohibition”)

Napoleon                                                                                                                    

"Napoleon was the least French of Frenchmen, The encounter between Napoleon and France was accidental." -- PATRICE GUENIFFEY (In his book "Napoleon And De Gaulle: Heroes and History")

                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“I found the crown of France in the gutter and picked it up on the tip of my sword.” – NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

 

"Napoleon was a man obsessed with making nature go his way." -- AMANDA FOREMAN (the Anglo-American author and historian, and daughter of the ex-communist "Hollywood Ten"  Carl Foreman)

 

Narcissism                                                                                                                

“Narcissism is high self-esteem with no self-knowledge.” – WYNN WHELDON                                                       (An English blogger and columnist, in August 2013)

“The great narcissistic fun of always blaming yourself for everything is that you make everything about you.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"Only spies and others with something to hide act as if they want you to know everything about them on first meeting." -- CHARLES McCARRY

 

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

 

National Anthem

“It’s awkward watching other people sing their national anthem. Like meeting a whole country as it comes out of the shower.” – HUGH LAURIE (the great Brit comic – he played, among much else, Bertie Wooster to Stephen Fry's Jeeves – before he amazingly Americanized himself as «House, M.D.»)

 

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

 

Nationalism

“They (coloured people) think they’re English because they’re born here.  That means if a dog’s born in a stable, it’s a fucking horse.  I’ve never heard such fucking nonsense” – BERNARD MANNING (Brit comedian – not well received by the “right” people, don’t you know…)

 

“Patriotism can give way to nationalism very easily, and historically nationalism has been a friend of statism, collectivism, and restraint of free trade. Let’s hope that, in its efforts to fight off one-world statism, the Right does not take refuge in a ‘patriotic’ statism instead.” – JONAH GOLDBERG (which is pretty much, a definition of fascism – nationalistic socialism – again, what the hell do we think the abbreviated acronym NAZI stands for, anyway?...)

 

“A modern German denouncing nationalism is like a dried-out alcoholic demanding prohibition; neither of them understands that it is possible to enjoy the stuff in moderation.” – BRUCE ANDERSON

 

“By the way, nationalism in public policy is socialism. Socialized medicine = nationalized healthcare. Etc. Go through any speech by Hugo Chavez, Castro etc and replace nationalism w/ socialism and vice versa. The meaning doesn't change. My point is, invoking the ‘new nationalism’ is just like saying ‘the new socialism.’ ” – JONAH GOLDBERG

                                                                                                                                                                                               

“Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception.” – GEORGE ORWELL

                                                                                                                                                                                               

“I’m as patriotic as anyone from sea to shining sea, but there’s not a molecule of nationalism in me.” – WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.

 

“The lesson many in the West took from the Holocaust is that nationalism is bad; the message Jews took from it is that nationalism is necessary.” -- RICHARD PATER (An English “political analyst” living in Israel)

 

“Nationalism, for all its shortcomings, creates a shared sense of belonging that's essential if the haves are ever going to give a helping hand to the have-nots.” -- TOBY YOUNG (Nationalism as “wealth-spreader” -- who knew? Ah – Toby Young's OK, in any case....)

 

“The smaller the country, the longer the memory.” -- ANDREW MARR (The BBC's version of Bret Baer, here talking about Croatia – specifically of a massacre conducted there by invading Ottoman Notmuslims against the locals in the 14th century, but he could just as easily be speaking of Belgostan...)

 

“Nationalism is safe only if it is republican.” -- HENRY R. NAU (Author and Professor of International Affairs at George Washington U, and I’m pretty sure he meant the “republican” to be un-capitalized.)

 

“Before national institutions developed, there were place, language and some sense of common belonging.” – HENRY TOMBS (Cambridge University professor of History)

 

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

“Nationalism is the consciousness of nationality; and the consciousness of nationality comes from the constant consciousness of danger.” -- G.K. CHESTERTON

 

"Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind." -- ALBERT EINSTEIN (I not only disagree with this statement, but, worse, I find it banal as well -- but Big Al saved it with "measles".. Anyway, he said this in 1929)

"'Nationalism is a shape-shifter term, sometimes seen as a liberal project (as in the 19th century) sometimes not (as in the 21st.) But it is contingent on place too. Clearly some countries are permitted to be nationalist today and others are not. Yet the reason lots of Europeans are against nationalism isn't that nobody should have it, but because we're not sure if we should." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY                                                    (in March 2019)

 

“Now, there is no such thing as ‘man’ in this world. In my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and so on. I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare I’ve never encountered him.” -- JOSEPH DE MAISTRE                                                                   (French -- actually, Savoyard -- "ultramontane" conservative philosopher and diplomat, who continued to advocate for the monarchy until his death in 1821)

 

“What keeps society together are bonds of history, territory, language, and allegiance. Only when this sense of membership is in place are people disposed to submit to a common rule of law and willing to place contractual obligations to strangers about tribal and family ties.” – ROGER SCRUTON

 

“Victimhood has always been the core of nationalism. We are oppressed by Them: if We were free, our problems would be solved. This has been the lure of nationalism, and the reason why it is invariably disappointing once achieved.” – ROBERT TOMBS (a British professor of French History at Cambridge University)

         

                                                                                                              

Nationalism vs Patriotism (see Patriotism vs Nationalism)

“Nationalization”

“Most countries decay into statism through nationalization: Britain nationalized health care in the late Forties, France nationalized the banks in the early Eighties. But that's not the American way. So the veneer of a private sector is maintained as an ever more implausible façade for a hyper-regulated statism: Big Government at one remove, subcontracted to nominally private paperwork shufflers across the land. In health care, banking, homeownership, college tuition, Americans now enjoy considerably less freedom of movement than citizens of openly statist nations in Europe.” -- MARK STEYN

 

“When a government owns an industry, the industry owns the government.” -- JOHN O'SULLIVAN

 

Nations (Nation States)

«A state is an organization with a comparative advantage in violence, extending over a geographic area whose boundaries are determined by its power to tax constituents.” – DOUGLASS NORTH (a Nobel-prize winning economist)

 

“A nation was defined as an agglomeration of people equipped for making war.” – ANTHONY BURGESS (in the “olden days” – circa 450 AD)

 

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

 

“Nation-Building”

“Transnational nation-building is like a mangled Hotel California: We never seriously check in, and yet we never leave.” – MARK STEYN

“If the experience of the last ten years has taught us anything, it should be this: We can bomb our enemies back into the Stone Age, but we cannot bomb them into the 21stcentury.” -- MICHAEL GREENSPAN                       (on the Twoot, in September 2015)

NATO

"America heads a military alliance of non-military allies in which it expends vast amounts of diplomatic energy trying to persuade the world's richest countries to cough up a token detachment of non-combat troops to man the photocopier back at barracks while the Third Infantry Division slogs up into the mountains to do all the fighting." -- MARK STEYN

 

“Thanks to American defense welfare, NATO is a military alliance made up of allies that no longer have militaries.” – MARK STEYN

 

“NATO's mission is to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." – LORD ISMAY             ( General Hastings Lionel "Pug" Ismay, 1st Baron Ismay, Churchill’s chief of Staff during WWII   and the first SecGen of NATO)

"Every country has the right to choose the way it ensures its security. This holds for the Baltic states as well. Secondly, and more specifically, NATO is primarily a defensive bloc. I can only repeat what I have said several times. The enlargement of the bloc is supposed to improve international security and the security of its member countries.” – VLADIMIR PUTIN                                                                                                   (he said this in 2002. Of course, he’s “evolved” since then, but it’s still a pretty useful quote to use against him — it’s particularly amusing to read in March 2022)

"The role of our NATO allies reminds me of an old saying about a ham-and-eggs breakfast: the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed. (NATO was the chicken in this case.)" -- MIKE POMPEO      (Trump's superb SecState and CIA boss -- the only guy to ever hold both those positions) 

Natural Resources

"If natural resources determined a country's wealth, Guinea would be the most prosperous country on earth, followed by Russia; and filthy rich Switzerland and Singapore would be wallowing down at the bottom of the list." -- JACK JOLIS

Nature

«Anyone who studies nature must get used to violence.» -- JIM CRACE (novelist: BEING DEAD)

 

«Any person who has spent time outdoors actually doing something, such as hunting and fishing as opposed to standing there with a doobie in his mouth, knows nature is not intrinsically healthy.» -- P. J. O’ROURKE

 

«But who is to say that global warming is not good for us? Global warming is certainly not a problem for nature. The planet has  no preferred state, no ideal climate or temperature. Nor, for that matter is there an ideal or normal carbon dioxide level. The concept of ecological balance is a romantic Green myth. Nature is in a constant state of flux and the earth’s history is characterised by continual change.» -- KENAN MALIK (A British scientist in 1995)

 

«'Nature’ is defined as ‘anything that you would kill if it got inside your house’». – DAVE BARRY

 

«Nature seems best when observed from a terrace, glass of wine in hand.» -- RICHARD SENNETT (A sociology prof at Harvard and the London School of Economics, writing in the UK  SPECTATOR in Sept. 07)

 

“Nature – where would we be without it? Animal rights activists in America have managed to make the Clinton Administration set up a tortoise habitat. The endangered Desert tortoise is just as exciting and lively as a tortoise can be. America is down to its last 2 million. Now you and I might well think that 2 million tortoises was an embarrassment, a veritable plethora, a plague, even. But the ecologists insist that they have nearly run out – ‘hey, hon, we’re getting kinda low on tortoises’. So they have set aside a bit of land as a tortoise sanctuary. Now, how much land do you think you need for a tortoise” reserve? After all, tortoises aren’t exactly buffalo. Hands up all of you who think six acres would be about right. Well, this is America. So add six noughts. The tortoise sanctuary, stretching across California, Utah and Nevada, is 6,500,000 acres. That’s the same size as Great Britain. Land’s end to John O’Groats, with nothing in it but tortoises.” – A.A. GILL

"People who talk about the delicate balance of nature have never tried to wrestle privet." -- A.A. GILL (for those of you who, like me, didn't know what "privet" is -- it's a shrub, often used for hedges)

“Nature doesn’t disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment. We don’t value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life’s bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it’s been sung? The dance when it’s been danced?” – TOM STOPPARD (in his play “The Coast of Utopia”)

 

“The closer you are to living in a state of nature, the crueler nature will be — which is one reason why people who romanticize tribal or pre-capitalist life (that would be you, James Cameron) tend to do so from a safe, air-conditioned distance and with easy access to flushing toilets, antibiotics, dentistry, and Chinese takeout.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“The packaging on many products at Whole Foods notwithstanding, ‘natural’ and ‘good’ are not synonymous terms.” --JONAH GOLDBERG

"In nature, small, brightly colored, and loud usually means dangerous." -- ROBIN WHITE (the author of "Siberian Light")

 

“Speaking of flora and fauna, everything that’s more than three feet from the highway is poisonous, has thorns, or is armed with a .45 – a naturalist’s paradise!” – P. J. O’ROURKE (driving through Mexico, when he penned these soothing thoughts….)

 

“Anyone ever lost in the wild knows that Nature wants you dead.” – DAVID MAMET

 

“Nature may abhor a vacuum, but it has even less use for boredom.” – ROBERT ARDREY                       (The great anthropologist and screenwriter – he wrote one of the best movies of all time, “Khartoum” – was talking specifically, here, about some species, such as seagulls, who appear to exist for no other reason than to squabble and fight.)

 

“Nature is what we were put on this earth to rise above.” – C. S. FORESTER (Rose, to Mr. Allnut, in his “The African Queen”)

 

“For the past 200,000 years or so, mankind has done nearly everything in its power to mitigate the disagreeable reality of living with nature. Actually, when you really think about it, our entire technological edifice rests on a desire to escape the unpleasantness, capriciousness, and nefariousness of the outdoors.” -- DAVID HARSANYI

 

“Nature, on the whole, is a remarkably complex organism dedicated to killing you.” – JAMES LILEKS

 

“Vegetarianism is the noble rejection of the fierce, bloody, cruel ways of nature – which is totally awesome in all other ways and must be respected, mind you, and if animals eat other animals, it's because they're, well, animals, and we can't judge their culture.” -- JAMES LILEKS

 

“Nature, it turns out, does not mess around.” -- HEATHER WILHELM (a columnist for NATIONAL REVIEW and THE FEDERALIST, on buying a ranch in Texas and finding a great profusion of snakes there....)

 

"I would seek to be as two with nature." -- WOODY ALLEN

“Listen, old darling. Nature is the shit we were born in, but it isn’t art.” – STEPHEN FRY                          (these could have been the words of the old tart Fry himself, but in fairness to him – they’re spoken by the protagonist of his 1994 novel, “The Hippopotamus”)

“When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples.” – STEPHEN CRANE

"Suppose, for the sake of argument, I shave off a quarter of inch of bristle every week. That's one inch a month. A foot a year. That's a fifty foot beard during a life, give or take a foot or two. I try to imagine myself with a fifty-foot beard. Think of all the hair we men remove in a lifetime. think of all the hair the human race cuts and shaves, plucks and depilates from heads, armpits, legs and groin. Think of all those locks and fuzz, whiskers and fluff building up through the history of recorded time. Where has it all gone?" -- WILLIAM BOYD

Nature, Human (see  Human Nature)

 

«Nature vs. Nurture»

«It is certain that it is our brains (conscious or not, awake or not), and not our genes, that m ake us individual human beings. The case of identical twins proves the point: They have precisely the same genes, but they are different, sometimes very different, people. That’s why, in recent years, our society has legally defined death as brain death. Once our brains are gone, we are gone, even though our bodies – with all their genes – may live one. The fact is that we respect people, not genes.» -- RON BAILEY (Science Editor for REASON Magazine, in 2001)

 

Navy, The (& Navy, The U.S.)

«The U.S. Navy is a monastic brotherhood vowed to poverty, obedience, and unchastity.» -- RICHARD McKENNA (This was a looooong time ago….)

 

«Nowhere in the world was the chain of command followed more closely than aboard (a US Navy) ship.» – ALEX BERENSON

"As the American Navy has become feminized and super-woke, its sailors have lost the ability to sail their ships. But thank heavens, we have the Navy's SEALS who can do all sorts of stuff that makes for great movies and TV shows. It's all a sham." -- TED JOY (a Twitter polymath, on 29 August 2022)

"You joined the Navy to see the sea but what you saw were the giddy innards of a ship, and what you smelt (sic) wasn't the salt sea air but the smell of a ship's queasy stomach." -- GRAHAM SWIFT 

Near-Death Experience

«In order to experience a 'near-death experience', one must, as you know, have a faith that looks through death, and I have a faith which has its work cut out focusing on next Tuesday.» -- ALAN COREN (the great English humorist, famously from Cricklewood, and most famous for his collection of columns entitled «Golfing For Cats» which had a huge swastika on the cover, and for impersonating Idi Amin, on record and in columns. One funny Limey Jew.)

 

«The only near-death experience I ever had was life.» – MILES KINGTON

 

Necessity

«Necessity is the mother of self-delusion.» – HUGH LAURIE

 

Negativity

«We dislike the other side more than we like our own.» -- DAVID FRENCH

 

«Bad to the point of being laughable, but not to the point of being enjoyable.» -- SUSAN SONTAG

 

Negotiation

“We must always demand so much that we cannot be satisfied.” – ADOLPH HITLER (to one of his ministers, in 1938. So much for the “Jaw Jaw, war war” bullshit….)

 

“Negotiation is not a policy. It is a technique.” – JOHN R. BOLTON

 

"If you can't walk away from a negotiation, you aren't negotiating. You're working out the terms of your slavery." – JAMES ALTUCHER (The American hedge fund manager, entrepreneur, and author – in May 2014)

 

“If you're not at the table, you're on the menu.” – BRUCE THOMPSON                                                               (A conservative fellow tweeting from Atlanta)

 

"You don't get what you deserve; you get what you negotiate." – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“In business as in romance, the upper hand in any relationship belongs to the party most willing to walk away from that relationship.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"Neither a fortress nor a maidenhead will hold out long after they begin to parly (sic)." -- BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

«Only free men can negotiate.» – NELSON MANDELA (Not only is this not true, it's just about the opposite of the truth – just ask Scharansky, Sakharov, Bukovsky, or Solzhenitsyn – but it’s glib enough to include here....)

 

“The goal of the left is to make reality negotiable. Today otherwise rational people are now doubting the emirical evidence of their own senses. Once you begin as a matter of course to call into question the evidence of your own senses – everything becomes negotiable.” – NICK SHORT (the author of the “Politically Short” blog)

 

“You don’t negotiate with a tiger while your head is in its mouth.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

 

“You don’t get to negotiate with good guys.” – MIKE POMPEO (the US Secretary of State, on 8 Sept 2019, to criticism of negotiating with the Taliban of Afghanistan)

 

“‘Negotiations’? About what?” – A. E. JOLIS (my late pater, whenever the question of Palestinian-Israeli “negotiations” would come up....)

 

“The best deals are made by the guy who’s least hungry.” – RALPH SCHNEIDER (An executive at Diners Club, Inc., to his friend Matty Simmons, the NATIONAL LAMPOON honcho.)

 

Neighbors

 "The best way to help your neighbor is not to live off your neighbor." -- ALFONZO RACHEL (a black conservative evangelist on YouTube and videos)

 

“Net-Zero” — see Environmentalism — “Net-Zero”


Neutrality

“If we all followed the example of Sweden in defence matters, we’d all still be living under Hitler.” – DAVID MELLOR (ex-Conservative Minister under the Thatcher/Major governments. Resigned over a sex scandal which, surprisingly for Britain, did not involve underage boys, but did involve the wearing of soccer jerseys --- dun’t esk!....)

 

“Impartial historians are as insufferable as the people who profess no politics.” – MICHAEL FOOT (the extreme left-wing Brit politician – the Labour party candidate for PM  in ’83 that Maggie Thatcher creamed – and, if nothing else, certainly no neutralist…)

 

“No place is as dangerous as halfway.” – WILLIAM SAFIRE

 

“You have to be either on the side of the fire department, or the fire.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

 

“I decline utterly to be impartial as between the fire brigade and the fire.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

 

“Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” – ELIE WIESEL

 

“In our secular societies in the West, we congratulate ourselves on our lack of zeal, and think that if we stay out of religious disputes, the angel of death will not select us. But events remind us that studied neutrality makes you weaker, and not safer.” – CHARLES MOORE

 

“Trouble is, refusing to take sides is itself a political act.” – TOBY YOUNG

 

“To sit on the fence is to be on the wrong side of it.” – CYRIL CONNOLLY (in 1937)

 

“Neutrality is a relative thing. During the war (WWII) there were their ‘neutrals’, Sweden and Ireland, and there were our neutrals, Spain and Switzerland.” – ALBERT E. JOLIS (my late dad, who was a 1LT in the OSS during what Archie Bunker liked to call “Dubbyadubbyatwothebigone”)

 

Nevada/Las Vegas

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

 

“Las Vegas is the most honest city in America. Vegas is a terrible place to visit, but it is a great place to live.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

"Las Vegas is a town that's hard to get out of." -- DENIS JOHNSON

"Las Vegas, the butt-end of the American dream. The only town where I ever saw false teeth in a pawn shop window. And prosthetic devices. I've seen a guy trade his glass eye for one more roll. If it turns out Hell was designed by the New York mob, it will be a lot like Las Vegas." -- RICHARD RAYNER (in his 1988 novel "Los Angeles Without A Map")

“People come to Nevada to gamble. In Nevada you can get a drink or lay a bet or pay for sex at any hour of the day or night. When I finally got to Las Vegas, I saw quite a lot of people who looked as if they had been doing all three things continuously for the last five years.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS

 

“The lobby of Caesar’s Palace, like the lobbies of all the hotels in Las Vegas, is shrouded in perpetual night.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS

"I had always assumed that Las Vegas would be repulsive and depressing. It was not. The whole thing about Las Vegas was how comfortable the whole thing felt. I had come here expecting it to be pathetic, and instead it was merely absurd. Liberace is the spiritual father of Las Vegas, with Tubby Elvis its uncle."" -- JOE QUEENAN


“New Deal, (The)”

“The greatest myth of the twentieth century is that Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal ended the Great Depression.” –  BURTON FOLSOM (Author of “New Deal or Raw Deal?”)

 

"Instead of a New Deal we want a New Deck." -- W. C. FIELDS

"The New Deal has never ripened. It is still a Raw Deal." -- W. C. FIELDS (in 1934 — in the middle of the Raw Deal)

“Roosevelt's great domestic bequest was this syllogism: If anything called a Social Program fails, expand it.” – DAVID MAMET

 

“The Government can make work, in the main, only by appropriating those jobs already created by private enterprise, and doling them out less efficiently. A perfect example is the Civilian Conservation Corps of the New Deal, which, as Thomas Sowell has pointed out, was merely giving twenty thousand  shovels out to do the work which could be accomplished by fifty bulldozers. Why not then, as he suggested, enlarge the paradigmm, and replace the shovels with three million teaspoons.” – DAVID MAMET.

 

"The term 'New Deal' has no currency today except among people who worship central planning and think FDR brought the economy out of the ditch instead of holding a pillow over its face." -- JAMES LILEKS

 

New England

“Happiness in New England has been suspect unless football or alcohol or money is involved.” – MOBY (the “techno” music/pop star whose real name is Richard Melville Hall and who's nicknamed “Moby” because he's related to Herman Melville)

 

“In California, I had the impression that anything might happen at any moment. In New England, I had exactly the contrary feeling.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS  

 

New Jersey

“The Camaro is just incomplete without the New Jersey license plate.” – KYLE SMITH

 

“The towns of northern New Jersey are enough alike – storefronts and sidewalks and parking meters and neon signs and quickly passed patches of civic green space – to create even in a moving vehicle a sensation of being stuck.” – JOHN UPDIKE

"Dying in New Jersey is redundant." -- NELSON DEMILLE

"I was raised, or as I would say, lowered in New Jersey." -- RICHARD LEWIS (Larry David's amusing and long-suffering sidekick in "Curb Your Enthusiasm")

"The first Dutchman to settle in what we now call New Jersey was a man of independent nature called Hobo Ken. The name derives from an Indian term meaning the white man who doesn't ask a lot of damn-fool questions and throws great parties." -- MILES KINGTON (English author, journalist and humorist)

"NJ Transit, a stainless-steel tube of despair traveling through a crumbling tunnel of incompetence." -- STEPHEN WHITTY (An American critic, and author of "The Alfred Hitchcock Encyclopedia")

"New Jersey is like a keg tapped at both ends." -- BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (he actually meant by New York and Philadelphia)

 

“Arriving from bucolic Switzerland, Newark, one of America’s ‘murder capitals’, feels like Katanga circa 1960. If this isn’t a third-world airport, then I don’t know what is.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS       (for those of you who might not know, Katanga was a mineral-rich, anti-communist province of the newly-independent Congo, which in 1960 tried to break away from the Communist central government of Patrice Lumumba. It was wild – until it was all sadly put an end to by military intervention by the leftist UN)

New Orleans

“New Orleans – welfare swamp enlivened by occasional transsexual hookers.” – MARK STEYN

 

“New Orleans always seems three beers ahead of wherever you’re from.” – MATT LABASH

 

“New Orleans didn't know The War was over until 1950.” – RANDY NEWMAN (this is not one of his lyrics – he actually said this in conversation. And, uh, he was referring to the Civil War….)

 

“A strange admixture of upper-class decadence and underclass pathology, New Orleans has long been a stew of disorder and dysfunction.” – GEORGE NEUMAYR

 

“Gunfire is to New Orleans what honking horns are to New York City – background noise.” – GEORGE NEUMAYR

 

"There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans." -- PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH 

“New World Order”  – see “Globalism”

New Year’s Eve

"let me forthrightly declare that New Year’s is the worst 'holiday'—and it’s not even close. No other holiday combines the three things I hate most: existentialism, getting bumped in packed bars, spilled beer on my shoes, social pressure for “date nights,” TV specials with the worst people pretending to have a great time, staying up later than I want, waiting in a line to pee, watching performers I’ve never heard of lip sync songs I don’t like, glitter, trying to get reservations at places I don’t want to go to in the first place, forced enthusiasm by very large crowds, and celebrating accomplishments that require no effort. Did I say three? Whatever." -- JONAH GOLDBERG   (New Year's Eve, 2023)

“New Year’s Eve is Amateur Night. And like that other fool’s errand of a ‘night’, St. Patrick’s Day, a night for professionals to stay home.” — JACK JOLIS


 

New York

“There are about 20 conservatives in Manhattan; I know them all.” – RAMESH PONNURU

 

“Parking in New York is like musical chairs – except everybody sat down in about 1964” – JERRY SEINFELD

 

“I have said it before, I will say it again: I cannot understand why people live in New York. I know there are good reasons, but I don’t know what they are.” – BEN STEIN (an ADPhi brother of mine – Columbia ’66)

 

“New York City is the capital of a country that doesn't exist." – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

 

“New Yorkers should really never be included in any survey of what normal Americans do.” – KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ

"New York -- city of prose and fantasy." -- LEON TROTSKY (no, I don't either.) 

"In New York, you drop fast." -- V. S. NAIPAUL

"In New York you can sometimes tell a person's zip code by the way they dress." -- IRIS APFEL       (I'm a Noo Yawkuh, and I call bullshit, lady

“I’d rather be a lamppost in New York than mayor of Chicago” – JIMMY WALKER                                                        (Mayor of New York City 1926-1932)

                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“In New York there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.” – EVELYN WAUGH             (I’ve gotten a hell of a lot of mileage out of this quote....)

                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“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 Emigre artiste, in the late '70s. Author of an amusing novel called “Metro”.)

 

“You can marry a person of the same gender in New York City, but you can’t eat your own wedding cake without Bloomberg slapping it out of your hands.” – JIM TREACHER (writing in the Daily Caller, in 2011)

 

“Want to ban gay marriages in NY?  Tell Bloomberg they’re fun” –  DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE (Back before it became “The New Normal”)

 

“New York City is the only place where people complain when their neighborhood improves.” – FRED SCHWARZ (who lives in New York City and writes for NATIONAL REVIEW)

"Music and making money is to New Yorkers what music and war was to the Germans." -- WALKER PERCY    (yes -- "was")

"Ignoring you is a New Yorker's way of being considerate." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON      (Who's from Texas)            

"In almost every corner of these United States — even Ohio — there is some sort of local pride; the two great exceptions to that are New York City, whose residents have instead of municipal pride a form of Stockholm Syndrome, and Texas, which has instead of a statewide identity a statewide case of psychotic grandiosity." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“New York City is the Great American amplifier. What’s good in America is better in New York, and what’s off in America is at its rancid sour worst in our first city.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"Americans from outside New York apparently think that it would be a great place if it were ever finished. I'd put it differently. It's a great place already. It would be even greater if they bothered to throw away the parts which have been worn out." -- MILES KINGTON (English author, journalist and humorist)

"New York is like a snazzy broad who fusses with her hair but forgets to wipe her ass." -- VASSILY AKSYONOV (ack!)


"Any generalization about New York is bound to miss the mark. There are unbelievable names -- Jim Gangulas and Rick Zyzzes -- whose origins are sometimes lost even to their bearers. An extremely personable gentlman from Madagascar once introduced himself to me as something that soundedd more or less like Nameletronkuontrantarisa, but immediately added, 'Of course that's impossible. Just call me Désiré.' If your name is Whitney, you'll probably be asked to spell it." -- VASSILY AKSYONOV

 

“Being in New York is like being in heaven, without going to all the expense and bother of dying.” – P. G. WODEHOUSE                                            (mind you, he said this in 1904... although how much better it can have been, back then, what with no air-conditioning and all the horse-shit lying around and all....)

                                                                                                                                                                                              

 “New York you had a great run. But it's over. The big apple is run by the worms.” – GREG GUTFELD                     (On the election of the Sandinista Bill De Blasio as mayor in 2013)

 

“The biggest thing moving to New York has taught me is as bad as people are at driving, they are even worse at walking.” — BRYAN DONALDSON          (some guy on the Twoot who calls himself the “Nardvark”)

 

“That’s how you deal with New Yorkers. If they yell, yell louder. If they honk, honk louder. The city gives you a shove? Shove it back. It’s a braying, seething, teeth-grinding Mixmaster of humanity, and the setting is always on puree. How anyone can get up every day and knock back their ration of that fetid cocktail is a mystery to me.” – JAMES LILEKS

 

“New York traffic is eternally congested. During rush hour, which is generally defined as the period of time in which the sun is visible, driving around town is like holding a foot race in a tar pit. Often the fastest way to get across the city is to die and be reincarnated, ideally in the body of someone who stands to inherit a rent-controlled apartment.” – JAMES LILEKS

“Just landed in Florida from NYC. Closest feeling an American can have to crossing from East to West Berlin circa 1965.” ~~ BUCK SEXTON    (Feb. 2024)

"Not that most New Yorkers are thieves. It is merely that most New Yorkers expect to be robbed, all the time, everywhere, in all circumstances, and in every way imaginable." -- DONALD WESTLAKE

"Nobody looks weird in Manhattan because everybody looks weird there." -- DONALD WESTLAKE (in 1995) 

“New York City would be okay, if they’d clean the place up and move everything back ten feet.” – JOHN HUGHES

 

“The teeming weekend parade on Broadway, the Yupper West Side: where preppies speak hip-hop, child rearing has gotten more competitive than Rollerball, and Love is a pharmacy.” – KYLE SMITH

                                                                                                                                                 

“New Yorkers are the type of people who, if struck by a bus and carried fifty feet, will feel they got the better of the deal because they didn’t pay the fare.” – JAMES LILEKS

“Writers and journalists keep recalling the turbulent New York of the 1970s, when budget cuts and crime and unemployment had brutalized the city. I lived through those days and the place was more fun that it is now. The cops wore their hair long and had droopy mustaches. The place was gritty and magnificent. It was like living in a war zone. One had allies – the cops and others like oneself, law-abiding souls. No one, but no one, took the side of the bad guys. Al Sharpton was in the future, as were all the 'community activists' that have sprung up. Media types did not dare take the side of the bad guys. They now climb the ladder of success by doing just that. Give me the Seventies any time. Down with Disneyland New York.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

“I wanted to discuss politics but never got the chance. It was just too noisy. Reflective surfaces like mirrors or glass cause sound to reflect just as they do light. And Noo Yawkers are already among the loudest in the world. Dining out has become a health hazard and causes certain hearing loss.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS               

"The reality is that most New Yorkers have a disinclination to speak English." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

“From the turn of the last century until the 1929 stock market crash, most of the apartment buildings (in New York) were designed in the beaux-arts style. They look even more beautiful when compared with the glass horrors of today. The beaux-arts and art-deco styles continued up to the (Second World) War, but then came the Bauhaus and the end of beauty and grace.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

“New York City is America's favorite foreign travel destination." -- JACK JOLIS

"To be in New York on a beautiful day is to feel razor-close to being in love." -- MARK HELPRIN

 

"Moving at the speed of New York -- that is walking as if chased, talking like a tobacco auctioneer, eyes darting, heart racing, skeptical and alert even as he sleeps." -- MARK HELPRIN

 

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

 

"Feeling important is the one treasure for which everyone in Manhattan has always been willing to lie, cheat, and kill. It is the chief thing New Yorkers work, money and goods being only subsidiary. They will do without food and water, and if necessary thrive anaerobically as long as they can touch, see, or hear someone of greater social status, someone whose fame will rub off on them microscopically atom by atom, a lingering odor imperceptible to a bloodhound but for them sufficient unto the grave." -- MARK HELPRIN

 

"New York, where word was more important than deed." -- MARK HELPRIN

 

“So you were disgusted by America but loved New York.” – ALAN JUDD (putting words in a characters mouth in “Inside Enemy” – Judd is no anti-American... far from it)

 

"But anybody can assemble in New York City without being noticed, that's what this town is for." – DONALD WESTLAKE

 

"...conservatives have no place in the state of  New York, because that's not who New Yorkers are." – ANDREW CUOMO (Governor and schmuck)

 

"I think the reason so many Americans dislike New York so much is that they sense it really isn't part of the United States." -- KELSEY GRAMMER

"In Manhattan every day from 12:30 to 3 p.m., the garbagemen backing up their grinder trucks and yelling ' 'Mon back, 'mon back, 'mon back, 'mon back', as if talking Urban Chippewa." -- TOM WOLFE

"In New York, a party was something to which you invited people you didn't know but figured you should." -- TOM WOLFE

 

“Upstate (New York) is like Montana.” – SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER (Schmuckie Chuckie said this to incoming Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, when that particular waste of space was taking over from “Senator” Hillary Clinton)

 

"The only reason for ever going to the West Side is to catch a boat for Europe." -- LISA HYDE (the rather snooty grande dame wife of my dad’s old WWII OSS buddy, the “transatlantic” Wall Street lawyer Henry Hyde, as told to my great pal Sam Glasser – whose first wife was Lisa’s daughter Kelly Piper)

 

“Women love New York, God knows why. All those clothes in the windows, or the other women in their clothes on the streets. That buzz and rub of other presences which women need, in ballrooms or seraglios; that being on display. Perhaps amid the towering verticals and the rectilinear recessions of the Manhattan grid a woman feels framed, set off, mounted to admire.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

“I assume she is happy, though with people who live in New York it is difficult to tell: the high energy level they must maintain acts as a mask.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

“Manhattan – the nation’s grandest souk.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

“A true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.” – JOHN UPDIKE

"In the narrow precincts of the Manhattan intelligentsia, a site saturated in poisonous envy and reflexive intolerance and basic impotence." -- JOHN UPDIKE
 

"Bungee-jumping would never have begun in New York, where you could get much the same adrenalin rush just by going out to by a loaf of bread." -- MARK LAWSON

 

"Today, New Yorkers don’t yell at you — because they don’t notice you." -- ABE GREENWALD  (of COMMENTARY magazine, writing in the NY POST on 27 Dec 2019)

 

"It was like being in New York, where someone could ask you the time in a way that suggested you'd just punched their mother." -- MICK HERRON

"Everyone looked more or less normal, except the native New Yorkers who always look on the verge of going postal." -- NELSON DEMILLE

“There is very little good breeding to be found in New York. At their entertainments there is no conversation that is agreeable; there is no modesty, no attention to one another. Their talk is very fast and very loud.” --JOHN ADAMS                                                                    (after he’d visited there in 1774)

                                                                                                                                        

"When a New Yorker says FU, he means Have a nice day. When a Californian says Have a nice day, he means FU." -- RICHARD BROOKHISER

 

"In New York I never knew whether I was going to be welcomed or murdered. You don't know who to trust." -- MALCOLM BRADBURY

"It's when in New York that I feel most European. Every time I land at JFK, I think:: 'You're the richest city in the goddamn world, build a bloody train to the airport'." —- RORY SUTHERLAND                                                                                                                                                                                       

“Maybe congress needs to pass a Fugitive New Yorker Act to return them to where they'll be happy.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE                            (on 28 April 2021, reacting to Noo Yawk’s squawking at losing a congressional seat to the latest census)

                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“Many of New York’s cabbies, if you can find one (their numbers have remained unchanged since 1937) are beyond doubt certifiably mad. Those who are relatively harmless cannot speak English and don’t know where anything is.” – KEITH WATERHOUSE                                                                             (in 1989)

 

“True New Yorkers do not distinguish among states that begin with the letter ‘I’.” – CALVIN TRILLIN

 

“New Yorkers believe in the old saying that they learn at their mother’s knee: ‘If you can’t say something nice, you’re never in danger of being taken for an out-of-towner.” – CALVIN TRILLIN

 

"The only remaining crime in New York is self-defense." -- PAMELA GELLER                                                                                                                               (the fiery Noo Yawk lady in May 2023, in the wake of the Daniel Penny outrage)

"Manhattan Island is the prime example of a city whose success led to the banishment of its middle class and its inevitable future as an amusement park and/or a slum." -- DAVID MAMET

"I’ve looked at the scene in New York, and it looks like Bangladesh." -- DONALD TRUMP (to Sid Rosenberg on WABC radio in Noo Yawk, on 1 Sept. '23)

"Do not bring the Second Amendment into this courtroom. It doesn’t exist here. So you can’t argue Second Amendment. This is New York." -- "JUDGE" ABENA DARKEH     (if that is her name.... in April 2024) 

"We call New York City the Port-Au-Prince of America." -- ERIC ADAMS    (the idiot-Mayor said this in  March 2024, and a better poitical epitaph than this I cannot imagine)

“New York Review Of Books, The”

“‘The New York Review of Each Other’s Books’.” – STEPHEN BAYLEY                                                             (The Brit  author, critic, columnist, consultant, broadcaster, debater and curator)

              

                                                                                                                      

New York Subway System (MTA)                                                                                           

"The NYC subway is now a third world garbage can." -- BRANDON STRAKA                                        (the boss of the anti-Democrat Party "WalkAway" movement, on the Twoot, 10 March 2019)

“Making a getaway by subway is not good for the nerves. The train just barely gets rolling pretty good when it slows down again, and stops, and the doors slide open in a very ominous way.” – DONALD WESTLAKE                                                                                                                                             (in 1965. Though things haven’t changed much on the subway since then – certainly not on the R train in Brooklyn!)

"The NewYork subway system was necessarily playing an every-increasing role in my life -- its mysterious and distant destinations of the Myrtle Avenue Line, the Canarsie, the Fulton Street, the Rockaway, not to mention the Concourse, the Jerome Avenue and White Plains line and trains marked GG, DD, AA, BB, EF, any of which could land you up at a godforsaken last stop in Brooklyn, the Bronx or Queens. All contributing to a nightmare of confsion for the unwary newcomer, as well as being a risk to life itself. If it can be avoided, stay off the Seventh Avenue--Dyre Avenue line, upon which I took a recent mistaken ride to the last stop, which was dire in the extreme." -- J. P. DONLEAVY (in the early 1950s -- God only knows what he'd make of the damn thing by the third decade of the 21st century...)

"Most New Yorkers are one one bad interaction away from never riding the subway again." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY (in May 2023)

New York Times (The)

"In my conception of hell, the only books to read are bound volumes of New York Times editorials." – JOSEPH EPSTEIN

 

“In my house growing up, the (NY) Times substituted for religion. If the Times said it, it was the absolute truth.” – JILL ABRAMSON (The then-Editor-in-Chief of the Times, in August 2011, and if there is a more telling quote about the liberal bias of the press, – or, indeed, a more fatuous quote about anything – I'd jolly well like to hear it....)

 

“If you haven’t cursed out a New York Times reporter during the course of a campaign, you’re not really a real Republican.” – RICK SANTORUM                                                                                                        (“in the course of a campaign”? Hell, I’d say in the course of any single day)

 

“It is sometimes difficult to explain a joke to the New York Times” – PHILIP HENSHER (Hensher is an English author and journalist. He's also a homosexual, but unlike all the homosexuals at the NY TIMES, he has a sense of humor.)

                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“You can’t defend a country according to what the New York Times will write.” – ARIEL SHARON

                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“As the saying goes, it didn't happen until it's reported by The New York Times, and not even then.” – ANN COULTER

                                                                                                                                                                             

"Opponents of free speech, such as the NY Times editorial board, do not oppose speech. They oppose freedom."-- JAMES TARANTO

 

“All The News That Fits The Tint” – JACK JOLIS (I cannot lie – I filched this from an ancient, like early '60s, MAD MAGAZINE)

 

“If you have trouble sleeping, don't, repeat don't, buy any sleeping pills. Get The New York Times (International) instead. I have never in my long life seen a worse paper. What I don't understand is why anyone would buy such a rag in a country like Britain where there are so many lively newspapers that don't invent news to suit their politics.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

“The New York Times isn’t a newspaper, it’s a Democrat Party press release.” – CHRIS PLANTE (On his WMAL radio program on 12 Dec. 2019)

 

"The paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people. This is a galaxy in which, to choose just a few recent examples, the Soviet space program is lauded for its “diversity”; the doxxing of teenagers in the name of justice is condoned; and the worst caste systems in human history includes the United States alongside Nazi Germany." --  BARI WEISS (Op-Ed Editor, resignation letter, 14 July 2020)

 

"It’s no longer just a leftwing newspaper. It’s the daily guidance of a cult." -- MIKE DORAN (of the Hudson Institute, on 17 Jan. 2022)

"The New York Times -- that first among inferiors." -- DAVID MAMET

"They (the New York Times editors) 'll address any and all criticisms, but the one charge that they'll never respond to is the leftist bias. Never never never. Hell, they won't even recognize the charge." -- A. M. "ABE" ROSENTHAL (my late brother Alan's then-girlfriend introduced me to Abe, who was, as far as I know, the only non-anti-American to ever be a NY Times editor -- and, incidentally, he was a most convivial bloke indeed. This comment was made to me in the mid-1980s and it's stuck with me ever since... and it's, infuriatingly, all too true.)

"The real tragedy of The New York Times is that their propaganda isn’t even interesting." -- ELON MUSK (2 April 2023)

"The New York Times is a threat to our democracy." -- ELON MUSK        (29 Oct. 24)

"I wouldn't explain it to the New York Times because they simply could not understand that we are the good guys." -- MIKE POMPEO

“New Yorker, The”

“Don’t ask The New Yorker if you want anything but the received wisdom of 1968, never revised or modified. They, and therefore we, are stuck in ideological time.” – ROGER SIMON

 

"Every New Yorker cartoon can be improved by recaptioning 'I think I'm going to kill myself.' -- Burge's Law.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

 

“The New Yorker always become mired in difficulties when it tries to push its intellectual competence north of Yonkers.” – PROF. JOHN GREENWAY (the late, great Gonzo Anthropologist from Colorado)

 

New Zealand

“Watching the television shots of Maoris doing their savage war dance in front of the Queen, I could well understand why our forebears thought it wise to take their lands away.” – PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE

 

“Some time ago a New Zealander asked me to make a movie, ‘New Zealand: Imagine a World Without Her’. I thought to myself, ‘That’s the world we live in now’.” – DINESH D’SOUZA (on 15 May 2019, the day after New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern declared, regarding US gun laws, “I do not understand the United States”)

 

"New Zealand is the last remaining industrial democracy in which all of the inhabitants were on first-name terms." -- MARK LAWSON

 

"There was no doubt that New Zealand took a good postcard. The problem was what would you write on it.” -- MARK LAWSON

 

"In New Zealand, if your house had two storeys, you were either in prison or you slept in the office -- with fussy gardens." -- MARK LAWSON

 

"Older New Zealanders were Brits with thin vowels, while younger New Zealanders were Australians off the bottle, or mainly off the bottle." -- MARK LAWSON

 

“She had begun to speak through her nose, like any ordinary New Zealand child, afraid no doubt of opening her mouth properly in case a tuft of wool blew into it. Open your lips and bleats came out.” – FAY WELDON

 

"New Zealand is Australia's 'Canada'." -- JACK JOLIS

"Kiwis are a politically demure populace. They are not politically screamy like the Americans, still less given to kicking back against bureaucracy like the British." -- DAVID COHEN (who calls himself a "New Zealand-based journalist and author) 

"New Zealanders are the most easily governed people on the face of the earth." -- KARL POPPER ("in the 1930s", sometime...)

"Land of the jogger and the judder bar." -- PHILIP THODY (in 1979. And apparently, "judder bar" is New Zealandish for what we Yanks call a "speed bump".)

News

“News is little more than the fortunes of the famous and the misfortunes of the rest.” – BYRON ROGERS (the Welsh journalist, essayist and TV “personality”.)

 

“Like a lighthouse, we seem able to fix our beam on everything at some point, but settle nowhere, and focus on nothing.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY

 

"News is what somebody does not want you to print. All the rest is advertising."– WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST

"News is what someone, somewhere wants to suppress -- and everything else is propaganda." -- NICK MOAR (the young Brit Conservative founder of the sensational project "PoliticsForAll", and he was “borrowing” from old man Hearst, see above – but that’s alright… I guess….) 

"Bad news is sudden, good news gradual." – MATT RIDLEY

 

“The nature of bad news infects the teller.” – WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

 

"News is what something wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising." -- ALFRED HARMSWORTH, (LORD NORTHCLIFFE) (1865-1922)

"What people try to get into the papers is seldom news, what they try to keep out of it is." -- LORD NORTHCLIFFE (ALFRED HARMSWORTH) (the WWI press baron) 

"There is no news." -- THE BBC "HOME SERVICE" (this was the entirety of their 8:45 p.m. "news bulletin" on 18 April 1930 -- and oh, how times have changed! -- or, as the great Tony Joe White once sang, "But that was another place and another time!")

Newsom, Gavin

“Gavin Newsom, permanently tanned and gelled, with the mien of a malignant Ken doll.” – LUKE THOMPSON (A California political consultant)

"Gavin Newsom would make a terrific televangelist. It's not just the hair oil and the messianic gleam, it's his abiliity to hold contradictory opinions simultaneously; to turn on a dime and espouse causes he once knew to be baloney, and to admire himself while doing it." -- MARY WAKEFIELD

"Newsom is mesmerizingly, nakedly consumed by vanity." -- MARY WAKEFIELD      (The English journalist, in July 2024)

"Gavin Newsom is the single most ruthless and evil person I've ever seen in politics." -- TUCKER CARLSON (as my Froggie friends would say, "Putain -- faut l'faire!")

"Everything Gavin Newsom says is a Ron DeSantis ad." -- KYLE SMITH (19 June 2023)

Newsweek

“Shrieking, old, irrelevant, attention-seeking victim of bad makeovers: Newsweek is the Kathy Griffin of the magazine rack.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

 

NGOs

“Many supposed 'charitable' groups are nothing of the sort. They are affinity sects with blatantly political programmes, justifying every campaigning excess as 'saving the planet'.” -- SIMON JENKINS (an honest lefty who ought to know – he was the head of the UK “National Trust” when he wrote this, in August 2014)

 

Niceness

“Resisting the tyranny of niceness is not misanthropy, it's benevolence.” -- JOHN O'SULLIVAN

 

"The key objection to niceness amounts to the fact that it's not really a virtue. A nice person won't fight for you; a nice person won't even lie for you, unless there's something in it for him." -- PETER AUGUSTINE LAWLER                                                                                                                     (writing in NATIONAL AFFAIRS)

 

“Because of course a lot of conflict erupts at places where a large number of people benefit from organized kindness.” – CHARLES ALBERT REIS HILLS (An English novelist, author and writer on poverty)

 

Niger

“Niger is not Dubai. Niger is where the desert comes to town.” – PETER BIDDLECOMBE

 "Nouakchott (is) the worst capital city in the world. Governments here routinely deny slavery still exists and persecute and imprison those who take a stand against it." -- JUSTIN MAROZZI       (In June 2024)


 

Nigeria

«In one country whose capital city begins with L and ends in S, they even rob the planes as they are taxi-ing to take off from the airport.» – PETER BIDDLECOMBE

 

“In Nigeria, where the people cheerfully said of themselves ‘There is no such thing as an honest Nigerian’, the Muslim North has conspicuously more honest than the Christian and animist South. I witness a hue and cry in a northern market, in which a thief was chased and then beaten. It was crude and vicious, no doubt, but more effective than, for example, the British police in the suppression of petty crime. Larceny on a grand scale was another thing altogether. The northern politicians were specialists in it. But you could leave your belongings in the middle of a town and find them still there when you returned.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE (he wrote this in 2006, and I’m confident in saying that things have, er, deteriorated markedly in Northern Nigeria since then.)

 

Night, (Night and Day)

“The night is more alive and richly colored than the day.” – VINCENT VAN GOGH (in a letter to his sainted brother)

 

“Nine/eleven”(“9/11”) (and “truthers)

“9/11 mobilized conservatives against radical Islam even as it mobilized liberals against conservatives.” – DANIEL PIPES (director of the Middle East Forum and author of “Miniatures”.)

 

"If our system for reviewing visa applications had achieved even the crudest measure of mere competence, there would have been no 9/11, and 99 percent of Americans would remain blissfully ignorant of Afghanistan’s location on the map." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“9/11 was a furious salvo in a war to reverse the triumph of the West.” – BENYAMIN NETANYAHU

 

“If you really genuinely believed that a shadowy cabal within the federal government had plotted to kill thousands of Americans and then covered it up, you would not be writing about it on the Internet and making YouTube videos. You would be going to the hinterlands, forming a militia, and preparing to overthrow the government and retake the country from the irredeemably evil and ruthless people running this place.” – JIM GERAGHTY

 

"It would make more sense to change Groundhog Day to September 10." -- DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE

 

"We're at war Dick and we're going to find out who did this and we're going to kick their ass." -- GEORGE W. BUSH (To his VP Dick Cheney, as quoted by his Press Secretary, Ari Fleischer)

 

“Even though the hijackers had made scores of mistakes, they were still better than us – and if anyone doubted it, there were three thousand homicides on our turf that proved it.” -- TERRY HAYES

 

"I don't believe there should be a mosque next to the Ground Zero memorial site in New York City. While the United States is a free, beautiful country that opens its arms to all people, the fact is that some Muslim thugs hijacked two planes, blew up the Twin Towers, and killed 3,000 innocent people. I don't care how anyone tries to spin it; the people behind the mosque are using our kindness as a weakness. You'll never see the Ku Klux Klan try to put up a building in the heart of Liberty City." -- LUTHER CAMPBELL (lead "singer" of the hip-hop ensemble"2 Live Crew")

"On 9-11 some people did something, and all of us started to lose access to our civil liberties.” -- REP ILHAN OMAR (D-Hezbollah; the infamous quote. Unspeakable.)

 

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

 

"9/11 is a day of remembrance for the fallen.

9/11 was the day that Islam showed us how they feel about us. Nothing has changed in how they feel.

9/11, today, is a day I remember how furious I was then. I am still furious. Nothing has changed for me." -- JIM HORN (My great spook pal from Bangui, author and diplomat –  on 11 Sept. 2020)

"Perhaps the most dubious cliché in American history is the one intoned over and again after terrorists killed 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001. That was the cliché that claimed that now 'America had changed forever'. Well, forever lasted about two years, maybe three." -- R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR. 

"Let’s be clear - 1/6 was nothing, except for the murder of Ashli Babbitt. Nothing. Zilch. On a scale of 1 to 10, it was not on the scale. President Ron DeSantis must pardon all the political prisoners, fire their prosecutors and direct the murder prosecution of the shooter." -- KURT SCHLICHTER

"What the left is saying when they compare the minor fracas of January 6 2021 with Pearl Harbor and 9/11 is that America should declare war on you, the patriots.

Pearl Harbor was an active war and followed by a war that defeated our enemy. 9/11 was an active war which our current ruling class botched.

They want the minor fracas of January 6, 2021 to be an excuse to imprison or kill you for dissenting from their garbage ideology. What else could it mean? I if you compare it to two other causes of wars, how can you claim it does not justify a third war? The message is clear.

Everything they do supports that notion.

First, what they say on social media and elsewhere.

Second, the weaponization of federal law enforcement against patriots.

Third, the attempt to disarm you.

Fourth, the attempt to disenfranchise you by arresting your candidates.

Resist. Defeat leftist candidates, by which I mean Democrats. Not only ignore but actively seek to ruin the regime media. Demand Republican politicians understand what time it is. Buy guns and ammo to lawfully defend your life & liberty & frustrate disarmament schemes.

We can only be disenfranchised, enslaved or murdered if we allow ourselves to be. If we refuse to submit, they cannot compel us. Stand fast in defense of your rights. This is your country, not theirs. Take it back." -- KURT SCHLICHTER (on 11 September, 2022)

“9/11 was an attack on something that Demo☭rats are intellectually unwilling and ideologically incapable of defending.” — JACK JOLIS (on 9/11 2022)

“I obviously never want a 9/11 again, but I would like another 9/12.” – ROB O’NEILL (The SEAL who finally got Osama Bin Laden, and I heard him say this on 7 May 2021)

"I'll remind the world again the killers of three thousand Americans are no longer conducting the bulk of their external plotting against America from Afghan soil. They are in Iran." -- MIKE POMPEO 

Nixon, Richard

“There is no point in talking about a politician’s principles. They don’t have any, but Nixon had more than those who helped bring him down.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

"Richard Nixon is a no-good lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he'd lie just to keep his hand in." -- PRES. HARRY TRUMAN (I say, steady on, old boy....) 

"Obama has been the president that Nixon always wanted to be." -- JONATHAN TURLEY (The liberal law prof -- and I don't think he meant this as a compliment)

 

“Nixon – the noxious salve for liberal sores.” – JOHN UPDIKE (in 1974)

“I never liked Richard Nixon … until Watergate.” -- M. STANTON EVANS

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

"Nobody is a friend of ours. Let's face it." -- RICHARD M. NIXON (I was)

"Tricky Dick was a saint, compared to crooked Joe." -- FRANCISCO FUENTES (A Cuban-born retired engineer, and a great American -- in May 2023)  

"Richard Nixon was and remains the  most underrated and unappreciated president, a man whom the media and the swamp hate because they knew he knew what the were all about." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS (until Trump, that is...)

"Tricky was hounded from office for merely speculating about doing things... that the Obamarroid Demo☭rats (starting with 'Crossfire Hurricane') have actually done -- times 100 -- and gotten away scot-free with. (Oh, and by the way-- he was, as he said, in fact not a crook.)" -- JACK JOLIS

Noise

"The higher one's tolerance for noise, the lower one's intellect." -- ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER (German philosopher, 1788-1860)

 

“A noise you can’t do anything about doesn’t count as a noise.” – SIR KINGSLEY AMIS (I’m not convinced that’s true, but it’s cute anyway....)

"The United States, for all its other virtues, exists in a permanent din. It is a noisy country. We are a noisy people. Our voices carry. You can sit in a crowded restaurant in America and follow every conversation in the room. If a guy fifty feet away has hemorrhoids, you're going to know about it. Noise is everywhere in America. Waitresses shout orders to the cook. Bus drivers shout at passengers. Check-in clerks bark 'Next inline!' Disembodied voices in big stores ceaselessly hector you to take up their special offers or fill the air with thinly coded messages that someone's having a heart attack in housewares." --BILL BRYSON

"Smart people like quiet because they have thoughts to interrupt."-- KURT SCHLICHTER

Nomads

"Nomads have no history, they only have geography." -- GILLES DELEUZE (French philosopher, died in 1995)

“Non-violence”

“Bloody Gandhi wouldn’t eat his dinner, so they gave him India.” – JOHNNY SPEIGHT

 

“Passive resistance only has a chance when your opponent believes in the rule of law and respect for human rights. Gandhi was effective against law-abiding Britain, but he would've frozen to death in the Soviet gulag - if he'd lived long enough to reach the camps.” – RALPH PETERS (The ex-US Army Special Forces LTC, and NY POST columnist)

 

“Despotic governments can stand ‘moral force’ till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.” – GEORGE ORWELL

 

“This nonviolent stuff'll get you killed.” – HARTMAN TURNBOW (a black, Civil Rights guy from the 60s, and in fact those words of his were the title of a book he wrote.)

 

Normality

“The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well.” – ALFRED ADLER (the famous Austrian shrink)

 

“Everyone seems normal until you get to know them.” – JAMIE LOPEZ (a California bimbo on the Twoot, expounding on the theme above....)

 

"What we have to fight for is not freedom to be abnormal, but freedom to be normal." -- G. K. CHESTERTON

"It's one thing to permit departure from norms, quite another to abandon norms, to make only abnormality normal, or to claim there's no such thing as a norm, even the one that brought us all into the world." -- LIONEL SHRIVER

"Making the abnormal normal destroys society." -- DON SURBER (the American author and blogger, in Sept. 2021)

"Normality is like some tenacious waste-ground weed: it will establish itself in the most unlikely places." -- WILLIAM BOYD 

Norway                                                                                                                                 

“There is not much to do in Norway when the nights start drawing in. Once you have dusted the sauna, sharpened your skis, listened for the distant cry of the reindeer in the mountain and knitted another bobble hat, that's about your lot.” – ROLAND WHITE                                                                                                            (of the LONDON TIMES)

 

“Norway isn’t a socialist country at all: it’s an oil emirate.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“No one goes to Norway on the way to anywhere.” – FAY WELDON

 

Nostalgia

“On the principle that time”s remembered are always best, we may even look back with affection on what was, in truth, a hellish experience.” – TRISTAN GAREL-JONES (an ex- British conservative MP, in 1999)

 

“Old is good and modern is bad. Today is an unenchanting mess. Yesterday was a mess too, once, with its poverty, suffering and violence, but time has composted it into sweet-smelling stories.” – JOE BENNETT (the author of a very funny book about England and the English called “Mustn’t Grumble” which was recommended to me by brother Paul).

 

“Possibly the only thing that lasts is old crushes.” – WLADYSLAW PLESZYSNSKI                               (The long-time publisher of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR, and this is a hauntingly romantic thought, from an unexpected quarter...)

 

“I miss the 90's nostalgia for the 70's revival of the 50's.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

 

“If the past is so great, how come it's history?” – JULIE BURCHILL

 

«But going back never works. Nothing lingers. When they’re gone, they’re gone.» – LLOYD EVANS

 

«One thinks of nostalgia as an emotion that that grows with age, but in reality it is strongest when one's young.» – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

«Looking back is fun because one only remembers the good.» – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

«They say that one should never look back, but as always, they are wrong.» – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

«Keep the memories, but don't try to go back.» – JACK JOLIS

 

«Never forget, but don't go back.» – JACK JOLIS

 

“Never look back. Never ask once again.” – MARIANO RIVERA

"I had not seen these people for years. I liked them all in the way you go on liking the members of your college fraternity, for the guys they used to be no matter how much they change. But few have been the stars they'd hoped to be." -- CHARLES McCARRY 

“Waxing nostalgic about jobs lost to technology is little better than complaining that antibiotics put too many grave diggers out of work" – GARY KASPAROV

 

“The old equilibrium you believed was normal or natural -- it, too, was just the product of some previous clash of forces. That’s why excessive nostalgia for bygone eras can be so pointless. Every Golden Age is just a ripple in the river of time.” -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"Nostalgia depends to a large extent on the ability to misremember." -- SAM LEITH 

"Bloody candles bloody stink. In the good old days everything must have stunk of candles and shit inside and horseshit and shit outside." -- ALAN JUDD

 

“Nostalgia does to the mind what alcohol does to the liver and smoking does to the lungs. Sure, it feels good, but there are consequences.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"Don't look back. You'll trip over." -- MICHAEL CAINE

"There are lots of good reasons why you may wish to go back in time, but shopping, like dentistry, isn't one of them." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

 "Souvenirs are for serial killers." -- WILL WILES

"Neuroscience is finding out what propaganda has long known: nostalgia doesn't need real memories -- and imagined past works too." -- FELIPE DE BRIGARDE (Professor of Philosophy at Duke University)

 

“Don’t look back, don’t ever look back, because you might turn around and go back.” – LARRY HEINEMANN (in his excellent 1974 Vietnam War novel “Close Quarters”)

"It really doesn't pay to go back and look again at the things that once delighted you, because it's unlikely they will delight you now." -- BILL BRYSON

 

Notoriety

"It doesn't matter what they say about you as long as they spell your name right." -- RUSH LIMBAUGH

 

Nuclear Weapons/War

“Nuclear weapons are everything and nothing.” – MARTIN AMIS

 

“The victory of Socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims!” –  CHE GUEVARA (famed subject of t-shirts)

"Any environmental or energy proposal that doesn't include nuclear at or near its top can -- and indeed must -- be dismissed as at best unserious and at worst part of the Cultural Marxist campaign of sabotage." -- JACK JOLIS

"The horror of global holocaust began with the invention of the atom bomb. The West's fear of the bomb was exploited by the Soviet Union in the Communist-funded 'peace' movement. Westerners, supposedly intelligent, were taught that global annihilation could be avoided only through unilateral disarmament. The Russians were not afraid of the bomb. It was, to them, like Dumbo's magic feather:  it allowed them to do all things." -- DAVID MAMET

Numbers                                                  

"The moment one gets into the area of $25 million and above, let alone a billion, the listener is completely out of touch, no longer really interested, because the figures have gone above his experience and almost are meaningless. Millions of Americans do not know how many million dollars make up a billion.” -- SAUL ALINSKY

 

“Aborigines count 1, 2, many. Journalists count 1, 2, trend. Social scientists count 1, 2, 3, 4, sufficient sample size.” -- AARON HASPEL (An “aphorist” with his own blog on the Interwebs)

"The decimal system is a demented abstraction that was a remnant of the French revolutionary nightmare." -- ANTHONY BURGESS (when British £ quids got decimalized, in 1971)

"Eight is infinity, sat up." -- DAVID MITCHELL    (the serious novelist, not the comic actor)