R

Race (“Racism”)

“Racism is not the cause of the black underclass; it is, to be candid, the effect.” – ROGER CLEGG (He is the president of the “Center For Equal Opportunity” in Sterling, Va. Jan. 2006)

“Everyone is prejudiced, but racism is actually pretty rare.” – WILL SMITH (the thesp)

“When you are a society that allows congressmen to be denounced as racists because they voted against some spending program or other, what do you call a man who really is a racist? An artichoke?” – DAVID GELERNTER

“Have decades of massive social spending and arrogant do-gooding yielded a racial animus so intense that black citizens would make a  hero of a thing like (O.J.) Simpson out of plain spite?” – DAVID GELERNTER

"All the evidence is that people are racist until they're taught not to be." -- CHRISTOPHER BRAY (writer and biographer of Michael Caine and Sean Connery)

 “A bigot, a racist, surrounded by his loony Fruit Of Islam leibstandarte in uniforms which are a cross between the SS and old-style Pullman-car porter’s outfit, Farrakhan is clearly a suitable case for treatment. But he does have one saving grace. The contempt in which he holds the white liberal establishment and the discomfort he is causing this unctuous section of American society, the most patronizing of all the politically correct classes, is a joy to behold.” – DAVID ENGLISH (English is English, and the chairman of Associated Newspapers. Or, at least, was in 1995).

“There is no racist like an anti-racist.” – ANTHONY DANIELS (a.k.a. “Theodore Dalrymple”)

"If everything is racist, nothing is." -- SUELLA BRAVERMAN (The British Home Secretary, in June 2023. And, for the record, Ms. Braverman had an Indian-Kenyan dad and an Indian-Mauritian mom.)

“The problem is that showing that one is not racist is not the same as actually helping black people, or even treating them as full human beings.” – JOHN McWHORTER (the American author and himself a black chappie…)

“In the Orwellian world of higher education, those who believe that race should have nothing to do with admissions decisions are routinely branded as ‘racist’.” – JAMES TARANTO (the editor of the WSJ’s Opinion Journal’s “Best Of The Web”)

“The number of subjective definitions of "racist" is almost infinite but the only objective definition of the word is 'one who believes that there are human races'." – CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

“You know America's gone to hell, when the best rapper out there is a white guy and the best golfer is a black guy.”  – CHARLES BARKLEY (in 2000)

"Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn't matter which color does the hating" ~ MUHAMMAD ALI

 “Maybe it’s just me, but aren’t most of the people begging for a ‘new conversation’ on race the same folks who shouted ‘racist!’ at anyone who disagreed with them during all the previous conversations?” – JONAH GOLDBERG (in March 2008, in response to the Obama insanity…..)

“Calling people racist often has the effect of making them more racist.” – JONAH GOLDBERG (in August 2019)

“Racism arises from more than ignorance.” – MATTHEW PARRIS (You can say that again. In fact, I’d go further and posit that ignorance is one of the few guardians against “racism”.)

"Let the white man once have a misgiving about his own leadership, and the dark races will at once attack him, to pull him down into the old gulfs." -- D. H. LAWRENCE

"Political correctness needs to die. Living in a politically correct world means living in a limited, humorless, intellectually stunted world. It needs to stop.  The 'racist' war will finally end when the left no longer benefits from waging it." -- MELISSA CLOUTHIER                                                                                       (the lady in q. is a Dr. and a chiropractrix, as well as being a prolific blogstress.)

“Ninety percent of the racism in America today comes from the Democratic Party and the Left. They live off it and exploit it. It is unconscionable to the degree they do this, ruining the lives and futures of the very people they say they are helping in the process. I am uniquely positioned to say this because I spent most of my life on the Left and was a civil rights worker in the South in my early twenties. I was also, to my everlasting regret, a donor to the Black Panther Party in the seventies.” – ROGER L. SIMON

"It is the legacy of Adolf Hitler that has effectively  prohibited not only all references to races, it goes without saying, but also to one degree or another all reference to ethnicities, peoples, civilizations, diverse cultures, origins in general, and nations in their temporal aspect, that is, their heritage, transmission and survival. But I do not believe in a conspiracy: alas no, what I believe is that there are obscure movements in the depths of the species, subject to the very laws of tragedy, starting with the first of them, which has it that the wishes of men and civilizations whose disappearance is foreordained shall be granted." -- RENAUD CAMUS (in his 2023 "The Second Career Of Adolf Hitler")

"I cannot think why the Mongoloid (Asian) peoples are described as 'yellow':  their colour ranges from white, through tan, to red, some of the girls, seemingly the prettiest and best dressed, are of a very pale cream, like new ivory." -- GEORGE COURTAULD (in his 1995 "The Travels Of A Fat Bulldog")

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

“Challenges are what they are. They don’t organize themselves around our pieties. If a problem has a race/ethnicity/national-origin element, the solution has to account for it.” – ANDREW C. MCCARTHY

"The problem with hiring a guy because of his race is, it gets very hard if you have to fire him." -- DAN McLAUGHLIN                                                                 (from REDSTATE, on the near impossibility of mounting a Democrat primary challenge to Obama)

“The lofty idea of ‘the war on racism’ is gradually turning into a hideously false ideology, and this anti-racism will be for the 21st century what Communism was for the 20th century: a source of violence.” -- ALAIN FINKIELKRAUT (the French philosopher, in 2005)

“Once we distinguish race and culture, the way is open to acknowledge that not all cultures are equally admirable, and that not all cultures can exist comfortably side-by-side.” -- SIR ROGER SCRUTON 

“The word ‘racism’ is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything.” -- THOMAS SOWELL

“Racism is not dead. But it is on life-support, kept alive mainly by the people who use it for an excuse or to keep minority communities fearful or resentful enough to turn out as a voting bloc on Election Day.” – THOMAS SOWELL

“If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago, and a racist today.” – THOMAS SOWELL (2015)

“Racism is not dead, but it is on life-support – kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as 'racists'.” – THOMAS SOWELL

"Great and ordinary Americans lived and died to end the horror of slavery. ended, the tool was taken up again as segregation and Jim Crow. Segregation resurfaced as apartheid called 'diversity'; power is now usurped not through the practice but through the accusation of racism, and the possession of the hammer creates the delusion that everything is a nail." -- DAVID MAMET (in2022)

"A 'racist' has come to be defined as anyone who is winning an argument with a liberal." -- PETER BRIMELOW (The pugnacious British-born financial journalist. Not a big favorite of the libs.)

“Britain and Germany are natural allies because the other large European nations are not white men.” –  PRINCE HEINRICH OF PRUSSIA (1862-1926, the younger brother of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and I say, …. steady on old chap.)

“What drives the futile debate over race in America is white liberals' psychological need to feel morally superior to other whites.” – JAMES TARANTO

“Race cards are like dollar bills. Print off a couple trillion and they don't buy much.” –  DAVE ”IOWAHAWK” BURGE

”If you need graduate school to understand how something is racist, it's not.” --  DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

“Race may be a troublesome inheritance, but it is better to explore and understand its bearing on human nature and history than to pretend for reasons of political convenience that it has no evolutionary basis.” –  NICHOLAS WADE                                                                                                                                         (The British author of “A Troublesome Inheritance”)

“As soon as I hear the word 'racist bandied around I immediately suspect that whoever is doing the bandying has already lost the argument and is climbing into a bunker which he or she believes is impregnable, impossible to assail. It's the real-life equivalent of the Get Out Of Jail Free card and has been effectively stripped of all meaning.” – ROD LIDDLE

"If you look up the topic of racism on Wikipedia, it will tell you in the introduction: 'Racism is a relatively modern concept, arising in the European age of imperialism, the subsequent growth of capitalism, and especially the Atlantic slave trade, of which it was a major driving force.' The real truth is that racism has been with us forever, of course -- since we first emerged from the primordial slime, slithered on to land and decided that we would rather be with creatures who looked a bit like us and were wary of those who differed." -- ROD LIDDLE (in September 2020)

“The trouble that besets us is not white against black, and it’s not black against white either. It’s the left against liberty. Leftism — by which I mean the end of liberty through forced ‘equality’ — by which I mean the absolute power of a ruling class over the unwashed many — by which I mean tyranny — by which I mean leftism — uses race as a ploy, uses the poor as pawns, uses violence as a means, but has only one purpose: power; the power of the elite few.” – ANDREW KLAVAN

“Slavs, Latin and Hebrew immigrants are human weeds, a deadweight of human waste. Blacks, soldiers and Jews are a menace to the race.” – MARGARET SANGER (Feminist icon and founder of Planned Parenthood, here in 1922)

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

“In (America), race is poured on everything, like ketchup.” – JAY NORDLINGER

“I like living in a country with so little racism people have to fabricate racism.” – JOHN NOLTE

“The white race of South Africa should be the predominating race; We (Indians) believe as much in the purity of race as the whites. About this mixing of the Kaffirs with the Indians, I must confess I feel strongly. I think it is very unfair to the Indian population. Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized. The reader can easily imagine the plight of the poor Indian thrown into such company!” – (MAHATMA) MOHANDAS K. GANDHI (This was before he moved to India to become the galactical darling of the liberals and kumbaya-ists – while he was still a lawyer in South Africa, wearing a white suit instead of a loin cloth and looking out for his people...there.)

“The history of racism in the United States is a history of the Democrat Party. It's that simple.” – CHRIS PLANTE (on WMAL radio, 18 Feb 2016)

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

“White racism exists. But its social power is weak. The social power against it is overwhelming.” – JOHN O'SULLIVAN

“It's worth remembering that 'racial resentment' is not the same thing as racism.” – RAMESH PONNURU

“In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.”-- LEE KUAN YEW

“In the public square and in political discourse, racism isn't about racism. Racism is in fact a kind of shorthand for the vices, real and imagined, of conservatives – and particularly middle American conservatives, geographically and spiritually outside the coastal elite's sphere of influence.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 “ 'People of color', a meaningless non-category in which Nigerians and Bengalis are lumped in with Mexicans and Iraqis." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

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

“Being black doesn't give you a license to call people racist any more than being Jewish gives you a license to call people anti-Semitic.” – ALAN DERSHOWITZ

"It is literally impossible to be racist to a white person." -- MANISHA KRISHNAN  (a wahine at VICE Magazine, in 2023)
 

“The divisive politics of anti-racism from America, with its demented campus dramas and neuroses about 'safe spaces, 'micro-aggressions' and 'cultural appropriation', they make it almost impossible for people of goodwill of all ethnicities to rub along together.” – MUNIRA MIRZA                                (Deputy-Mayor for Education and Culture under Boris Johnson, in London – here in September, 2017)

“We're well on our way to the label (of “racism”) becoming a perverse badge of pride; if you're outside the far-left faithful, your first charge of racism constitutes a losing of your political cherry, inoculating against any further sense of injury. The commonplace code for 'not one of us' is morphing into a meaningless playground taunt, just as forgettable as 'stupid'.” – LIONEL SHRIVER

“Keeping infuriatingly diligent Asians from veritably taking over America’s best universities has become a prime directive of their admissions departments – all in the interest of fighting racism.” – LIONEL SHRIVER

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

“As far as racism goes, the modern Loony Left seem to forget that Hitler was Left wing. But of course, we are all called racist now, and the word is actually meaningless. It’s just a way of changing the subject. When someone calls you racist, what they are saying is ‘hmm, you actually have a point, and I don’t know how to answer it, so perhaps if I distract you by calling you a bigot we’ll both forget how enlightened your comment was’.” – MORRISSEY (Stephen Patrick Morrissey, the ex-leader of “The Smiths” and now solo singer – in April 2018. The guy's music may suck, but he's bloody 100% right here, by God....)

"Black people can be racists too." -- (LORD) HERMAN GEORGE OUSELEY (Baron Ouseley, a black man himself, is a British parliamentarian who is, among other things, the Chairman of "Kick It Out", an organisation dedicated to the eradication of "racism" in English soccer. And he said this on the BBC on 11 May, 2018)

"They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along and spoil it." ~ THELONIOUS MONK (1960)

"Of course, different races had different ideas -- some didn't wash, 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)

"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

"There was far too much of this sentimentality about nowadays, the idea that you had to be twice as nice to Negroes and Jews and Indians and so on whatever they were like, which the better types among them must surely resent." -- KINGSLEY AMIS                                                                                                (in his 1962 short story "All The Blood Within Me")

“The United States is a nation that in many ways was created, and I’m sorry to have to say this, from way back, on racist principles.” – BERNIE SANDERS

"Accusations of racism are a kind of brainless addiction on the Left, like slot machines. Whenever they feel unsatisfied with anything, they break their minds into quarters, put them in the slots, yank the arm down, and repeat." -- KYLE SMITH

"Race only matters to racists." -- JANIE JOHNSON (one of the Queens of the Twoot)

"Every white Jewish guy wishes he was black." -- BEN STILLER      (No, Benji, maybe every LEFTIST white Jewish guy wishes he was black….) 

“I know very well that the idea of being ‘colour blind’ is out of fashion, that MLK’s vision of character over skin colour is considered to be naive. But that vision surely made our society better. I’m not sure the modern vision of ‘race consciousness’ is making things better.” – SEAN ONO LENNON (brave lad. You wouldn’t think it takes courage to say any such self-evident thing, but in May 2021, it does.)

“I know that there is race prejudice, not only in America, but also wherever two races meet together in numbers.” – ZORA NEALE HURSTON (granddaughter of slaves; 1891-1960)

“It might seem puzzling that we have seen such a furore about racism and racial discrimination at this particular time in our history when all possible measure of racism indicate that there is less of it than at any time in the past 70 years. I call this ‘BARTHOLOMEW’S LAW’.” – JAMES BARTHOLOMEW (in THE SPECCIE, June 2020

" ‘Racism’ is just the pejorative (another is ‘tribalism’) that the bien-pensants give to the quite normal aspect of human nature, (and present to some degree in everyone), to prefer ‘one's own kind’ to ‘the other’. We can deplore and pass laws against it, but we can't deny its universality." -- JACK JOLIS

" ‘Racism’ is an integral part of human nature – it's a ‘problem’ like envy, lust, sloth, and gluttony are ‘problems’. But it's a staple (if an artificial) cause dear to the world-wide Left, and since we're culturally governed by that Left, it must be our constant, all-exclusive obsessive concern." -- JACK JOLIS

"Most human beings (not all, but a large majority), of all races and nationalities, harbor attitudes that we, in our modern age, choose to qualify as 'racist'.  This is part of human nature. We can bemoan it all we want, but if we're smart we learn to... manage it, (along with other idiosyncrasies of human nature)." -- JACK JOLIS

"Racism is the witchcraft of the 21st century. Now, as then, it’s hard to find witches. Many people haven’t actually seen a witch. Yet powerful people create public hysteria & insist witches are everywhere. Some are invisible! Now, as then, it’s about power and social control." -- DINESH D'SOUZA

"I've never understood how being defined by skin colour can be emancipatory. Isn't that what the racists want? The opposite of racism is being colour blind." -- ALEXANDER PELLING-BRUCE (A half English-half Ghanaian "Gold Coaster" man)

“There is a left-wing view of racial politics that’s assumed to be the black view of politics.” – KEMI BADENOCH (the Nigerian-born lady Conservative UK Under-Secretary of State For Equalities, in October 2020)

“You can’t pick and choose the rules depending on the colour of someone’s skin. That is what the racists do.” – KEMI BADENOCH

“Western liberals, stricken with guilt about their real or imagined ‘racism’, are unwilling to see that Asian people also dislike each other because of appearance or skin colour.” – RICHARD WEST

“The Hanoi government’s brutal treatment of half-caste children, and then their expulsion in the 1980s, failed to dislodge from the liberal Western mind the deep-rooted delusion that only white people are ‘racists’.” – RICHARD WEST (the great English war correspondent, of Southeast Asia and Southern Africa)

"There was a time when an allegation of racism was one of the worst things someone could be accused of. Now, it’s a punchline." -- DEREK HUNTER (In TownHall, January 2021)

"There are 330 million (American) citizens. If you gathered together all of the purported white supremacists, white nationalists, KKK members, neo-nazis, and any other white racist groups, you wouldn't find enough to fill-up a football stadium. There is no systemic racism in America today." ~ ALLEN SUTTON (A black American, of an outfit called STEWARDSHIP AMERICA, on 12 March 2021)

“Race-baiting has become not only the most important stratagem but practically the only one that Democrats and their allies resort to in the public messaging. They try to terrify Asian Americans with insinuations that white Americans are targeting them with violence, when the reality is that whites, Asians, Hispanics, blacks and everyone else is most at risk from the lawlessness that Democrats have tolerated (and more than tolerated) in the cities under their control. As they make abundantly clear with every riot, the rising left wing of the Democratic party simply considers law enforcement the enemy.” – DANIEL McCARTHY (director of the Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship Program at The Fund for American Studies and editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review and a contributing editor at The Spectator. In April 2021)

"This country's doomed, and not just because of African-Americans." -- JOE BIDEN                                                         (in a leaked "Zoom" conference, 8 Dec 2020 – and no amount of attempts by the Left to obfuscate this cuts any  mustard. The fool said this, and that’s that.)

"The worst thing about CRT isn’t the blatant bigotry and racism, that’s all over neo-Marxism in all its forms. Collectivist grouping is it’s greatest evil. Group guilt always leads to group blame, and genocide is next." -- HENRY KRINGLE                                                                                                                                (A good man on the Twoot, 1 Nov. 2021)

"America is the least racist country in the world. This is due partly to the fact that America is a nation of immigrants and partly to the fact that America is the world's most successful experiment with democracy. Not only did America produce the planet's first Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia in 1821, but America ended slavery by a convulsive force of arms in 1865,something which no other nation has done." -- PAUL JOLIS (In his excellent 2022 memoir "Going Mobile")

"I am sad that some black people and some white people still think this is a racist country. It’s not, and I can remember when it was." -- BEN STEIN (who was 77 years old when he said this in May 2022)

"There'd be no climate crisis if it wasn't for racism." -- JANE FONDA (Jan. 2023. Hanoi Jane is a commie gift that keeps on giving.)

"I'm 28 years old and I still haven't been lucky enough to experience the racism and oppression that LeBron and Oprah experienced that made them billionaires or the segregation that made Obama president." -- DOM LUCRE (a black American anti-leftist "activist" and founder of something called "Credit Cadabra")

"Saying only white people can be racist is obviously a racist definition of racist." -- ELON MUSK

“My life was saved by white man, I don’t know what racism is.” --DWAYNE MICHAEL CARTER JR.       (the real name of the "Rap" music artiste known as "Li'l Wayne")

Race, (“Critical Race Theory”)                                                                                                             

" 'Critical race theory' is nothing more than old anti-white Mau-Mau racist hucksterism now pompously decorated with impenetrable Marxist jargon and pseudo-academic diversionary smoke.”– JACK JOLIS

“Critical Race Theory (CRT)  behind woke attitudes is, in intellectual terms, a revival of South African apartheid, but with the racial hierarchies upended.” – CHARLES MOORE

“Critical Race Theory is the tip of a 100-year-long spear to push Neo-Marxist ideology into America and the rest of Western Civilization, and ‘systemic racism’ is the lie that makes it sharp.’ – JAMES LINDSAY (the founder of something called “New Discourses”, on 3 May 2021)

" ‘Critical race theory’ means that those who do not consider America ‘systemically racist’ can be theoretically criticized as racist.” – LARRY ELDER (the great black American radio host, on 5 May 2021)

“Comedy is an excuse to be racist” -- ROBIN DIANGELO (The white queen-bee of Anti-white racism, in July 2021)

“Critical race theory explained: No matter what has ever happened to any non-white person, it's the fault of white people, so blame them.” – PHILIP SCHUYLER (on the Twoot, 19 Sept. ‘21)

"The worst thing about CRT isn’t the blatant bigotry and racism, that’s all over neo Marxism in all its forms. Collectivist grouping is it’s greatest evil. Group guilt always leads to group blame, and genocide is next." -- HENRY KRINGLE                                                                                                       (A good man on the Twoot, 1 Nov. 2021)

"Critical Race Theory is the real pandemic that is destroying the fabric of our nation." -- TOM FITTON (The boss of "Judicial Watch", in December 2022)

"CRT and DEI are teaching people who were never victims that building a new racism is the answer to problems they never had." -- JIM HANSON (prominent ex-Special Forces guy and author, in Jan. 2023)

" 'Critical Race Theory' is tied inextricably to the notion that white folks are racist even when they are striving to be anti-racist (which is one reason why I've kinda given up striving)." -- ROD LIDDLE

"This is the paternalism of the guilty conscience: seeing ourselves as the kings of infamy is still a way of staying on the crest of history. Since Freud we know that masochism is only a reversed sadism, a passion for domination turned against oneself. Europe is still messianic in a minor key. Barbarity is Europe's great pride, which it acknowledges only in itself; it denies that others are barbarous, finding attenuating circumstances for them (whicih is a way of denying them all responsibility). 

By erecting lack of love for oneself into a leading principle, we lie to ourselves about ourselves and close ourselves to others. In Western self-hatred, the Other has no place. It is a narcissistic relationship in which the African, the Indian, and Arab are brought in as extras." -- PASCAL BRUCKNER (this is just a rather long-winded way of describing the Leftist trick of using apparent "self-hatred" to actually re-establish their supremacy. Bruckner is the French author of "Tyranny of Guilt")

"In 1994 South Africa was the first modern nation to be (re)founded on the anti-white principles of Critical Race Theory, and now it is reaping the results of that choice. South Africa is now a failed state." -- MAC MADDON (in THE AMERICAN THINKER, Sept. 2023)

"Critical Race Theory is the most abominable, divisive form of postmodernist indoctrination I've ever seen. It is my view that critical race theory is far more than the postmodernist immolation of the meaning of racism, already being torn to shreds by turning interpersonal annoyances into "microaggressions" of privilege. Critical Race Theory is a Trojan Horse for some darker elements. CRT was presented to the Democratic Party and every teacher's union in America as this enlightened, progressive means of "educating" folks about race. But as with every Trojan Horse, there are people inside that want to go beyond the oppressions of race." -- ISAIAH L. CARTER (an articulate black bloke on the Twoot, on 25 Jan 2022)

"If you stand up against so-called 'anti-racism' -- 'critical race theory' -- which basically says all white people are bad, there's no discussion -- you are cancelled, you have to be silenced. This is cultural totalitarianism." -- MELANIE PHILLIPS (the ex-Leftist British journalist, in April 2023)

Radicalism

"If you are going to be radical, look reassuring." -- JAMES FORSYTH (The "Political Secretary" of PM Sunak of the UK, in Dec. '22)

Radio                                                                                                                           

“Television is an industry, radio is almost a way of life.” – MICHAEL VESTEY                                                               (one-time BBC-radio muckamuck, later the Radio Critic of the UK SPECTATOR)

“Radio is the theater of the mind; television is the theater of the mindless”. – STEVE ALLEN (“Steverino”. Hilarious, if  liberal, comedian and father of the American talk show.)

“Raison d’Etat”

“Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the Government itself go to pieces lest that one be violated? Even in such a case, would not the official oath be broken if the Government should be overthrown when it was believed that disregarding the single law would tend to preserve it?” -- ABRAHAM LINCOLN ("Raison d'Etat" -- a fittingly Frogue term with no precise English equivalent -- is the justification for extra-legal behavior by a government, either in foreign or domestic policy. I first encountered it when I joined the CIA, and discussed things with my wise old ex-spook dad, who had close ties with the French intel services, and who used the phrase. Here, Lincoln was justifying his admittedly illegal suspension of Habeas Corpus during the Civil War).

Rape, (“Rape”)

“Hint: If you need a bunch of lib feminist  psychodramatists  to tell you that one-nite hook-up 6 months ago was actually 'rape', it wasn't.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

“Describing rape as primarily about violence rather than sex is like saying that robbery is primarily about violence rather than money.” – DENNIS PRAGER

"The age of consent thing is really a feminist social construct. Do we really believe you have to be 18 years old in order to consent to sex otherwise it's rape? It's really about artificially increasing the marketplace value of older women." -- NICK FUENTES (This guy Fuentes is really a repulsive character, and I only include this bit of nastiness to show how lefty trendiness can be used against itself)

Rape, “Date”

“Then came the business with alcohol. Being drunk while committing a crime is never a mitigating factor, the courts are clear about that. But now a woman who had too much to drink and consented to sexual intercourse was to be considered a rape victim – a bizarre case of double standards, of effectively doublethink. And worrying for me, too, because I don’t think I’ve ever had sexual intercourse with a woman who was sober. Oh, maybe once, and it was all a bit grim. But – if the man’s drunk – no mitigation. If the woman’s drunk – rape. Utterly utterly deranged.” – ROD LIDDLE

Rationalization

"Man is not the rational animal. He is the rationalizing animal." – ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

“So convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.” – BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Reactionaries

“Everyone is a reactionary on subjects he knows about”. – ROBERT CONQUEST (this is known as “Conquest’s Law.  Robert Conquest was a true Cold War hero – a noted “Sovietologist”, as well as a good friend and collaborator of a/ Kingsley Amis, with whom he co-wrote the hilarious comic novel “The Egyptologists”, and of b/ my father, for whose autobiography he wrote a most generous blurb.  Great gentleman, Conquest….)

“Modern conservatism was born as a reaction to various utopian ideologies, starting with the French Revolution.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“Maggie Thatcher? Reactionary?  Well, there's a lot to react against.” – MARGARET THATCHER

“The philosopher Kenneth Minogue came to a dinner party last year and one of my mildly left-wing friends asked nervously if he was a conservative. 'No, I am not a conservative!” he exclaimed with some relish. “I am a reactionary!” I join with him in finding the tag 'conservative' inappropriate as a description of my views. All around me are people whose idea of conservatism is to conserve whatever amount of state ownership and control has already been established and perhaps add a bit more.” – JAMES BARTHOLOMEW (a hotshot young conservative Brit journalist and the author of “The Welfare State We're In”)

"The most terrifying force of death comes from the hands of men who wanted to be left alone. They try, so very hard, to mind their own business and provide for themselves and those they love. They resist every impulse to fight back, knowing the forced and permanent change of life that will come from it. They know, that the moment they fight back, their lives as they have lived them, are over. The moment the men who wanted to be left alone are forced to fight back, it is a form of suicide. They are literally killing off who they used to be. Which is why, when forced to take up violence, these men who wanted to be left alone, fight with unholy vengeance against those who murdered their former lives. They fight with raw hate, and a drive that cannot be fathomed by those who are merely play-acting at politics and terror. True terror will arrive at these people's door. They will cry, scream, and beg for mercy but it will fall on the deaf ears of the men who just wanted to be left alone." -- ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN 

“The conservative movement is literally reactionary in the sense that it is a counter-reaction to socialism and cultural Marxism. It is reactionary in the sense that it is the socialists who have been busy bees since 1932 pushing America towards their model. We have always reacted to that, saying:

Stop it. But they never stop, ever. And if you beat them at the ballot box, they just infest the judiciary.” – “ACE OF SPADES”                                                             (the blogger. And this reflects my own thinking on the matter as well. I’m by nature a disrupter, so certainly not a “conservative; and I’m no “rightist” as I don’t believe there IS any “right” to begin with — no, I’m a Reactionary: One who reacts.)

“The thing about reactionaries is, we react.”– KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

Reading

“You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad.” – GERTRUDE STEIN

“Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

"My idea of hell is being stuck in a hotel room without a book to read!" – RONALD REAGAN

“The only excuse for reading is to steal.” – JOHN UPDIKE (now that’s the heart of a true writer....)

“The number of hardbacks on your bedside table is in inverse proportion to the number of arched backs in your bed.” – A.A. GILL

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture.  Just get people to stop reading them.” – RAY BRADBURY

"The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. ... You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." -- RAY BRADBURY (1920-2012)

"At the day of judgment, we shall not be asked what we have read, but what we have done." -THOMAS á KEMPIS (a 15th century German “canon general”, whatever the hell that is, when it's at home. And how cool to have an “à” as a middle name....)

“Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.” – WALKER PERCY

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

"Reading makes the world better. It is how humans merge. How minds connect... Reading is love in action." – MATT HAIG (Me, I don't believe a word of this bilge, but I'm told that Matt Haig is a "bestselling author", and it sounds fancy enough, so I reluctantly included this....)

“For reading is an effort, which is why it’s a decreasingly popular medium in an impatient age.” – LIONEL SHRIVER (in June 2018)

“None of my children have ever read a word of my stuff. None of them! Not a word! Why should they? They know me well enough, as it is. It’s a very intimate experience, reading a book. You’re as close as you get to anyone – except in bed. No, closer.” – J.G. BALLARD

“Reading is the best antidote to debauchery I know of.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

“People who don’t read are brutes.” – EUGENE IONESCO

“Every book is a children’s book if the kid can read” - MITCH HEDBERG (the late surrealist American funny-man) 

“We read to know we are not alone.” – WILLIAM NICHOLSON (the British screenwriter, playwright and novelist)

"Reading is companionship." -- DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON

"Smart people believe what they read only up to the age of 50 or so." -- NEAL B. FREEMAN

"How the hell can I work with people who don't read?" -- WILLIAM J. CASEY (uttered to a small group -- which included yours truly -- in exasperation shortly after becoming Reagan's CIA Director)

“People don’t get their morality from their reading matter: they bring their morality to it.” – CLIVE JAMES

“Go! Be disturbed! You don’t go to great fiction to be comforted.” – ALICE McDERMOTT (the American novelist and college prof, responding to students who were “disturbed” by the fiction of Flannery O’Connor)

"Reading is just a secondhand version of living." -- LLOYD EVANS     (while this is semi self-evident, it's also semi-poetic.... so it goes in.) 

“We are told, and I believe it to be true, that as one grows older one goes further and further back in time in the choice of one’s reading, until at the end one comes back at last to the Bible.” – PROF. JOHN GREENWAY (the late Gonzo Anthropologist from Colorado)

Reagan, Ronald

“The oldest man ever to be elected president, President Reagan brought to Washington an administration of old men (Bill Casey, Caspar Weinberger, George Shultz) and old ideas that made America young again.” – R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR. (Founder/editor of The American Spectator)

“Belief was at the heart of the Reagan presidency – it was almost all there was to it, and it was enough.” – JOSEPH EPSTEIN

“He brought down the ‘Evil Empire’, and all the rest is details.” – MARK STEYN

"The elites were stupid about Reagan in a way that only clever people can be." -- MARK STEYN

“The record of the period before President Reagan was one of galloping socialism. The Reagan years were ones of retreating socialism, and the post-Reagan years, of creeping socialism.” – MILTON FRIEDMAN                (he wrote this before the galloping Marxist Obama came galloping along )

"That Reagan -- he may know very little, but he understands everything!" ("Ce Reagan -- il sait peut-être très peu, mais il comprends tout!") -- COUNT ALEXANDRE DE MARENCHES (the then-boss of French intel -- the dgse -- in 1985, to my late dad. And, incidentally, I've said the same thing about the great Sarah Palin.)

“Everybody I know despises Reagan, but everyone I don’t know thinks he’s great.” – MARTIN AMIS          (in 1988)

Real Estate

“In the kingdom of the restless the realtor is royalty.” – FERDINAND MOUNT (and Americans are restless people…)

“The price of (real) property does not reflect any underlying use value – it is simply a function of how cheap and easy it is to borrow money.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

"Selling houses wasn't like selling anything else. People went away and thought about it." -- GUY BELLAMY

"You can still stay damn poor owning your own land." -- J. P. DONLEAVY (takes some doing, but if anybody could manage this... he could.)

"There are really only three super-tribes in London: the ones who will never be able to get mortgages, the ones who live and die by the mortgage rate, and the ones who do not need mortgages. Those are the ranks of slavery and freedom, the rest is all just questions of degree." -- JAMES HAWES (in 1996) 

"A real-estate developer was not like an industrial CEO or an investment banker. No, you either had the aura, the aura of magic, fireproof confidence, and invincibility -- or you had nothing. The cardinal rule of real estate development was: Other people's money!" -- TOM WOLFE

"Real estate development is a good business to get into -- and it's a good business to get out of." -- SAM ZELL     (the big-time Chicago real-estate tycoon, and... you could say the same for the two businesses that I'm personally familiar with:  diamonds, and intelligence.)

Reality

“Reality is the name we give to our mistakes.” – JOHN O’SULLIVAN (English-born ex-editor of NATIONAL REVIEW, and he jokingly said that Oscar Wilde should have said this.)

“It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.” – MARK TWAIN

"What are called the facts of life can be a prison." -- SHIVA NAIPAUL     (well, yes... but they're still the facts of life.) 

“The American people don’t believe anything’s real until they see it on television.” – RICHARD M. NIXON

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.” – PHILIP K. DICK (the sci-fi author)

“Create a concept, and reality leaves the room.” – JOSE ORTEGA Y GASSET

"That old friend of conservatives -- reality." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY 

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

“That's the thing about liberalism: the promising is easy; it's the delivering that's hard. Republicans have failed utterly in making this point rhetorically. But, perhaps just in the nick of time, cold hard reality (in the form of the Obamacare all-front clusterfuck) came riding in from over the horizon to the rescue. Reality doesn't always change minds, but it has a much better track record than Republicans do.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"Acknowledging the fact that human nature has no history is the first principle of realism, and realism is conservative." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"Words describe reality—accurately or inaccurately—but they don’t create reality." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

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

"We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are." - ANAIS NIN

«Then again, fiction has to be realistic. Sometimes, it seems, the real world does not.» – IAN RANKIN (the lefty Scottish crime novelist)

"Perception wins all the battles, reality wins all the wars."– SHERMAN LOGAN                                   (A commenter on NRO, and while I sympathize with him, I don't think this is always true – in some cases, such as Vietnam, perception becomes reality. To our detriment, of course....)

“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)

“Mystery is what is absolutely necessary in order for reality to exist.” – RENE MAGRITTE

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” ― ALDOUS HUXLEY

“The trouble with fiction… is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.” – ALDOUS HUXLEY

"I slept soundly and had no need for cheering dreams. Facts are better than dreams." -- WINSTON CHURCHILL

"Reality is not a point, it's a cloud of possibility" -- AMOS TVERSKY (a noted "mathematical psychologist", whatever the hell that is)

"The real world is just beyond the visible world." – DONALD WESTLAKE

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

"Politics allows people to vote for the impossible, which may be one reason why politicians are often more popular than economists, who keep reminding people that there is no free lunch and that there are no 'solutions' but only trade-offs." -- THOMAS SOWELL

"I am like Tintin -- I respect realities." -- CHARLES DE GAULLE (I knew thee was a reason why I instinctively liked DeGaulle…..)

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

“See the world as it is.” -- ALBERT JAY NOCK (the American libertarian, 1870-1945)

“Things are usually what they seem to be.” – KINGSLEY AMIS (proving that any old banality can make it into my Compendium – if the author is eminent enough....)

“Realists” (Political)

“’Realists are a breed of Utopian because they expect governments to be purer than the people they represent.” – JONAH GOLDBERG (what he was getting at, here, is that people are often motivated by something other than pure, economic “self-interest”)

“In practice, a realist is often someone who has lost the foreign-policy argument.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“Realism is often code for ‘my preferred policy.’ No one likes to say their position is “unrealistic.” More to the point, ‘realism’ is often what ideologues of various stripes call their point of view after they lose a foreign policy argument. ‘Look at those crazy ideologues’, the avowed realists shout.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“The opposite of an idealist is not a realist. A realist is an idealist who is aware of the limitations of a particular idea and of his own abilities. A realist is a pragmatic idealist. The true opposite of an idealist is a cynic, a nihilist, an idealist who lost faith in the power of ideas, maybe a hedonist and often a European.” – HANA SCHOLZ (a lady from Peterborough, Ontario, writing in THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR, in March ’08)

“The politics of reality is the certain knowledge that, over the course of time and under the weight of experience, ideological abstraction will yield ultimately to either the obdurate facts of public finance or the timeless imperatives of the human spirit.” – NEAL B. FREEMAN (the old NATIONAL REVIEW war-horse, on his old boss' Bill Buckley 1965 NYC Mayoral run, of which he was the campaign manager.)

"Realism is never genocide's enemy." -- PAUL BERMAN (A lefty NYU prof, in his book "Power And Idealists", and even though I think this is both wrong and infelicitously phrased, I include it because it's just such a... startling thing to say.)

Reason (and Unreason)

"You cannot reason a man out of something that he was not reasoned into in the first place." -- JONATHAN SWIFT (Mr. Gulliver's Travels. And what he said could just as easily go for Obambimania as for religious fanaticism.)

"We have a tendency to overestimate the role of rational thought in human life." -- ALBERT EINSTEIN

“Reason alone will not move men.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“Reason is like fire, an immensely useful tool that can very easily destroy if not used correctly.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"Reason is not a source of values, but a somewhat useful means of judging their worth and convincing people to do the right thing. Reason is indispensable, but not sufficient, to forming good conscience." -- JONAH GOLDBERG 

“The merely rational man will not marry, and the merely rational soldier will not fight.” – G. K. CHESTERTON

“Reason  itself is a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.” – G. K. CHESTERTON

“It is entirely irrational to ignore the irrational.” – SIR ANTONY JAY (the creator of “Yes, Minister” and “Yes, Prime Minister”)

“That's the thing about irrational positions, people defend them irrationally.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“If you think human beings are always rational, it becomes impossible to explain at least half of history.” – THOMAS SOWELL

“Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.” -- LORD BYRON

"To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead." – THOMAS PAINE

“Even when most people are reasonable, this does not mean that reasonableness will prevail.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

"Politics is driven by evens, it is not primarily driven by reason." -- JAMES W. PHILLIPS (A one-time British advisor to the Conservative Prime Ministers on science and technology)

“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” – DAVID HUME (Scottish philosopher, 1711-1776)

"The heart has its reasons that reason ignores." (“Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point”) -- BLAISE PASCAL (The Frogue heavy thinker, 1623-1662 -- died young from all that heavy thinking)

“Rationality is far less potent than feelings.” – ANDREW SULLIVAN (in May 2021)

Rebellion

“We may defeat the King a hundred times, and he is still the King. But and (sic) he defeat us once, we are all hanged men, and our posterities are undone.” –  EDWARD MONTAGU, THE EARL OF MANCHESTER (a mover and shaker during the English Civil War, 1642-1651)

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

“The lot of the man who has rebelled too much is to have no energy left except for disappointment.” – EMIL CIORAN (Romanian philosopher)

"Want to be a rebel? Be a conservative. Today’s counterculture is conservative.": -- MARY FRANCES MYLER     (in the AmSpec in July 2024) 

“Redistribution” (of Wealth, Income, etc.)

.”It is wrong to even speak of the 'distribution' of income and wealth. Income and wealth are not distributed. Income and wealth are created, and in a fair society they come into the world atached to the rightful owner that produced them.” – STEPHEN MOORE

Reform

“Reformers are busy people, tireless people, whose displeasure with the world as it is inspires them to improve the lives of their fellow human beings no matter what, and they get cranky when you bring up the law of unintended consequences.” – ANDREW FERGUSON

“Many of today’s problems are a result of yesterday’s solutions.” – THOMAS SOWELL

“I thought there'd be a lot fewer norms broken in the process of protecting our beloved norms.” – DREW MCCOY (a guy on the Twoot, in response to efforts by Democrats in 2019 to get rid of the Electoral College and to pack the Supreme Court)

"And what on earth does more damage than a reform administration?" -- DAVID MAMET

"Reformers like to reform the world because it is easier than trying to reform themselves." -- MALCOLM BRADBURY

"Reform? Aren't things bad enough already?" -- LORD SALISBURY (ROBERT GASCOIGNE-CECIL) (my kind of chap. 1830-1903)

Refugees

“No one disputes that genuine refugees should be given sanctuary. The big question is: where? According to the Geneva Convention, a potential refugee must apply for asylum in 'the first safe country' reached, which in this case would mean somewhere in Africa. This never happens. No one seems to question why.” – NICHOLAS FARRELL (An English journalist working in Italy, in Sept. 2016)

“America should be a refuge for the persecuted but not for the persecutors.” – MARK TOOLEY (the President of something called the “Institute of Religion and Democracy”, in Feb. 2017)

Regret

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

“It's no good thinking about the chances you missed.” -- MARGARET THATCHER

"I'd rather regret the things I've done than regret the things I haven't done.” - LUCILLE BALL (in 1947, at about the time that she was a room-mate, albeit briefly, with Eva Ortega (Jolis))

“I think the best way somebody can show they’re sorry is to fix themselves.” – MEL GIBSON

"Remorse could be forgotten. Regrets, never." -- PHILIP THODY

"I might have some regrets... but I can't remember what they are." -- PETER COOK (the late, great English comic)

"Regret is mainly caused by not having done anything." -- CHARLES BUKOWSKI (a very trendy literary chap, back in the trendy 60s)

Regulation

“The reality is that crises are more often caused by bad regulation than by deregulation." – NIALL FERGUSON (one of Harvard’s very few non-leftists)

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

“Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.” – DALAI LAMA, THE

“Yet the basic fact remains: every regulation represents a restriction of liberty, every regulation has a cost. That is why, like marriage (in the Prayer Book’s words), regulation should not 'be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly'.” – MARGARET THATCHER

"If you're using a net and the fishes are going through the holes, you don't need a bigger net -- you need smaller holes." -- WAYNE LAPIERRE (the head of the NRA, 5 January 2016)

"Don't just stand there, un-do something!" -- ARTHUR LAFFER

Reincarnation

“No, I'm not sure I believe in reincarnattion. It'd be rather draining if the same people kept coming round and round again.” – JOANNA LUMLEY (“Patsy” in AbFab, and the patron saint – along with Paul Jolis – of the Gurkhas.)

"If you were a pigeon you could fuck forty times a day. It is something to be borne in mind when you are filling out the form for reincarnation." -- A.A. GILL (these arresting words happen to be the very first ones in his1996 novel "Sap Rising")

“Relationships”

“When I suffer a little from melancholy I think that I even miss the sound of toast being scraped – a sound that heralds the imminent finish of an affair or marriage; the only louder noise is that of the slamming of a door as somebody leaves the premises, whatever they may be, in a strange vehicle called a huff. Old friends turn me into ashes.” – JEFFREY BERNARD (the late old “Low Life” columnist for the UK “Spectator”. A fine old prototype curmudgeon…)

"I'm monogamous from time to time." -- Mme. CARLA BRUNI SARKOZY

“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

“Quite possibly, the most ticklish relationship in human history is that between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law.” – JAY NORDLINGER

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

"Truth has never made for real comfort in any human relationship." -- BRYAN FORBES

"And one thing is certain. That at the very exact moment you think everything is beginning to go alright with a woman, be sure of one thing. It ain't." -- J. P. DONLEAVY

"You should never phone a woman, without realizing that she may have a guy next to her listening in bed." -- J. P. DONLEAVY 

"Always the fucking girl you think you've got, you ain't got." -- J. P. DONLEAVY

"This relationship business is all a question of timing. I think. That and drugs of course." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS (the very amusing English novelist)

"If the interactions of human beings were drawn in pen, the world would be a giant scribble." -- PAOLO GIORDANO (the author of HOW CONTAGION WORKS)

“They had got engaged at the very time they had become bored with each other .” – ALAN JUDD

“No matter where you are, or how much enlightenment is around, human relations are tricky.” – JOHN UPDIKE

“Making love was one thing. Showing affection on the morning after implied a deeper commitment.” – NELSON DEMILLE

“We do not see people as they are any more. Instead, we see – or learn to believe that we see – those ghostly entities we call ‘relationships’. There’s me, there’s you – and somewhere in the middle, there’s our relationship.” – SHIVA NAIPAUL

"I don’t like anybody unless they’re really good looking but usually after talking to them I don’t like them either." -- SAMUEL M'CHEYNE GLASSER

"We all of us to some extent chart our voyages through life based on the weather occurring in our loved ones." -- DONALD WESTLAKE

"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

"If you have things in common, you only fight over them." -- NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE (rather insightful, that...)

"When it comes to romance, as I can attest, girls' modus operendi is: 'Find a feller you really like, and change him'." -- BEN SCHOTT      (the English author of eponymous "Miscellany" and "Almanac" and homage to P.G. Wodehouse, "Jeeves And The King Of Clubs")
 

Relatives

“A paternal aunt is like a threatening storm.” – SCHOLASTIQUE MUKASONGA (a Tutsi Rwandan lady novelist, and I must confess I include this quote more for her exquisite first name than for her words’ particular deathlessness.)

Relativism

“But if all ideologies are indefensible, then all ideologies are equal, and the centre ground becomes a moral void.” – MAURICE SAATCHI                (the Brit advertising wallah, and a backer of the Conservative Party.)

“Relativism – the quasi-religious faith of post-sixties eggheads, who abandoned any notions of objective excellence as culturally determined, or as mere artifacts of exploitation, or as mechanisms of social control, or all of the above.” – ANDREW FERGUSON

“‘Some things are good, others are bad’ has sometimes been an extremely important point to make, but never has it been an interesting one.” – HELEN RITTELMEYER (A writer from North Carolina)

“What a relativist really believes — or believes he believes — is that 1) there is no such thing as value (as distinct from mere preference) and 2) there is no such thing as truth.” – ROGER KIMBALL

“Many are the things on which one opinion is not as good as another, and culture is among them.” -- JOSEPH EPSTEIN

“There is one thing a professor can be absolutely sure of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test one can count on the student's reaction: they will be uncomprehending.” -- ALLAN BLOOM                (my old philosophy prof at Cornell.... from, of course, his seminal “The Closing Of The American Mind”)

“When truth is relative, political expediency becomes the truth.” – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

"Nothing can of itself be labelled as 'wrong'." -- DR. JOHN ROBINSON (1919-1983 -- he was the Bishop of Woolwich, UK) 

“Who are we to say that Beethoven was greater than the mold on his cheese?” – JAMES LILEKS

“When you are courting a nice girl, an hour seems like a second, when you are sitting on a red-hot cinder, a second seems like an hour. That's relativity.” – ALBERT EINSTEIN                                                                        (Actually, that's relativism -- In fact, the great Paul Johnson opens his magisterial "Modern Times" with a 2-page explanation of the crucial difference between "relativity" and "relativism". I think the good Doctor Einstein was committing a joke, here... a double joke, really.)

“Relativism is the orthodoxy of our age. Asserting that any one set of beliefs is more deserving of respect than any other is a sin against the Holy Spirit of Non-Judgmentalism.” -- MICHAEL GOVE                                          (ex-Secretary of Education in Cameron's Conservative UK government, in April '15)

"There aren't two sides to this story. There's just one side: it's called the truth." -- RUDY GIULIANI

“It's more gratifying to assert 'Nobody else's values are better than mine' than to concede 'My values are no better than anybody else's'.” -- WILLIAM VOEGELI

"The world moves, and ideas that were good once are not always good." – DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER

“Never voting for a lesser evil means never voting.” -- TULLY BORLAND                                                                            (A philosophy professor justifying voting for the unsavory Roy Moore in Alabama, 2017)

"Only intellectual fashion and the tyranny of Right/Left thinking prevent intelligent men  of goodwill from perceiving the facts that traditional authoritarian governments are less repressive than revolutionary autocracies, that they are more susceptible of liberalization, and that they are more compatible with U.S. interests." -- JEANNE KIRKPATRICK      (Reagan's Democrat-but-anti-communist Ambassadrice to the UN, and a friend/collaboratrice of my dad's)

Religion (and Cults)                                                                                                       

“I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea.  He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his people.” – MUSTAPHA KEMAL (ATTATURK)                                                                       (for those of you who are  victims of “public educations”, he was the founder of modern Turkey.)

“It would be a gain to the country were it vastly more superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion than at present it shows itself to be.” – CARDINAL JOHN HENRY NEWMAN (‘attago, Padre, you tell it!....)

“One can move fairly freely from Catholicism to Marxism without having to pass through liberalism. The path from the Tridentine Creed to Trotskyism is shorter than it seems.” – TERRY EAGLETON (This fits perfectly with my conviction that Socialism, in all its forms, is a religion, like any other. The idiot Eagleton, by the way, is a Marxist Professor of English -- what else? – at Oxford University – where else?)

"All sensible men are of the same religion, but no sensible man ever tells." – RUDYARD KIPLING (eh?)

"I am a God-fearing Christian atheist." – RUDYARD KIPLING (ah, that’s better…. I think…)

“Men who have nice notions of religion have no business being soldiers.” – THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON (Amen. Now, move out – troop!)

“Intellectuals can cook up an argument for anything, and religious intellectuals, who cut their teeth on justifying some wildly improbable stuff, are especially ingenious.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

“Religion teaches us how to be a failure.” – LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI (a “philosopher”. NFI.)

“Religion makes nothing happen. An individual person, or a human society, would be pretty much what it is, with or without its faith, or lack of faith — that religion is just, so to speak, a thin coat of paint over something whose salient features are caused by other factors.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

“Religious differences may be sad, but they are real; they may even result from the will of God.” – JAMES CARROLL (author of “Constantine’s Sword. The Church and the Jews: A History”)

“Humanity is, by and large, hardwired to believe in the supernatural. The only remaining question concerns the form that belief will take.” – ANDREW STUTTAFORD

“They can’t all be right. They might, however, all be wrong.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

“The most noted ‘professional theologians’ of our time seem to be either feminists or atheists or both. The simple believer cannot get a word in.” – ALICE THOMAS ELLIS

“I have always held that sectarianism and religious hatred are terrible things to behold, but that one should really start getting worried when the buggers unite.” – ROD LIDDLE

“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

“I really believe that religion and relationship with God are opposed. I don’t care what kind of religion it is. If you’ve got a whole series of behavioral laws to follow, then I mean it’s not right. That’s not God. Good luck. Give it your best shot and tell me how it works for you, but I don’t think that’s the Truth.” – WILLIAM P. YOUNG (author of “The Shack”)

"If there is one thing that is clear about human beings, it is that we have a remarkable talent for self-deception -- and what is religion but a trick we play on ourselves?" -- DAVID WOOTTON

 “Secular liberalism is the faith of the Godless.” – TOM BETHELL

“Religious beliefs are considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false: and by the magistrate as equally useful.” – EDWARD GIBBON (Not sure how this is applicable to anything – or even what it means, exactly, but it sure sounds cool....)

“While it is not possible that all the world's religions are true, it is possible that they are all false.” – DAVID HUME

“To keep the faith strong, it's best if believers don't think about it too much, especially in comparison with other faiths.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

“Contemporary militant atheists treat religion as if it consisted solely of the Spanish Inquisition and the stoning of adulterers. That its history has included things that are inimical to a liberal order is undeniable; but to treat them as the whole of its contribution is like treating the history of medicine as nothing but amputation without anaesthetic and the employment of Perkins' metallic tractors.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

“I mind my own business and I expect others to do likewise, and why God should find merit in groups of people who gather in a building and sing ridiculous hymns rather badly is quite beyond my comprehension. He doesn't sound right in the head to me.” – TOM SHARPE (the English “satirical” novelist)

“In my house growing up, the (NY) Times substituted for religion. If the Times said it, it was the absolute truth.” – JILL ABRAMSON (The incoming 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....)

"Everything is full of gods. So why bother?" -- HERACLITUS (The pre-Socratic philospher, 535-475 B.C. And I think I've finally found my religion -- I think I'm a Heraclitian. In fact, make that an Ultra-Orthodox Heraclitian.)

“To be religious is to know that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.” – LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN (the Austrian philosopher, 1889 – 1951)

“Jesus died to start Christianity. Muhammad killed to start Islam.” – RANDALL TERRY (The anti-abortion activist.)

“Religion is a comfort thing: if you believe that on the other side there's going to be Elvis and your parents and Beethoven, it doesn't matter. Nobody can prove it doesn't happen.” – JOANNA LUMLEY

“You do not have to be an atheist to doubt that televangelists have a direct line to the Almighty.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“The term "religious fundamentalist" is nearly useless; it matters quite a bit which religion you're talking about.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Religion is more difficult to talk about. I don’t think we could do ‘Life of Brian’ any more. A parody of Islam would be even harder. We all saw what happened to Salman Rushdie and none of us want to get into all that. It’s a pity but that’s the way it is. There are people out there without a sense of humour and they’re heavily armed.” – MICHAEL PALIN                                                                                                                            (The famous Python, at the end of 2013, and while he may have devolved into a politically correct wuss of the first order, at least he’s honest.)

"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart." -- H.L. MENCKEN

“A cult is a religion with no political power.” – TOM WOLFE

“Only religions still take sex seriously.” – ALAIN DE BOTTON

"If horses had gods, they would look like horses." – XENOPHANES

“There are no degrees of falsity in religions – all are equally false – but there are many degrees of nastiness.” -- JULIAN MALINS, QC (a British lawyer and atheist)

“If a religion requires enforcement, it is not a religion, it is tyranny.” – ANTHONY DOUGLAS WILLIAMSON (Canadian Christian film critic and author)

“I'm afraid to go to church for fear of hearing something very extraordinary.” -- WILLIAM LAMB, 2nd VISCOUNT MELBOURNE (Whig Prime Minister of Great Britain, 1834-41)

"Things are coming to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade private life." -- WILLIAM LAMB (him again.  My kind of bloke....)

“You must believe in God, my dear, whatever the clergymen say.” -- BENJAMIN JOWETT (famous 19th century Master of Balliol College, Oxford)

"You don’t need to go to church to be a Christian. If you go to Taco Bell, that doesn’t make you a taco." – JUSTIN BIEBER (I never thought I’d ever be quoting THIS turkey. Who’s probably the only human being I can think of who might actually benefit from converting to Islam)

“God is certainly a gentleman, and no gentleman cares to be praised to his face.” -- AUGUSTUS HARE (An English writer, in answer to a question from his friend Somerset Maugham about why he omitted God's name when saying grace.)

“Socialism is the religion people get when they lose their religion.” -- FR. RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS

 “I may not a pillar of the Church (of England), but I hope I am a buttress – I support it from the outside.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

“A church was, in my opinion, a court of law in which the judge did not really exist.” -- JON CANTER

“My Own Mind Is My Own Church.” - THOMAS PAINE

"Not only can't all religions be right, but -- at best -- all but one of them, if that, must be wrong." -- JACK JOLIS

"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)

"Gullibility and credulity are considered undesirable qualities in every department of human life -- except religion." -- CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

“Above all, religion has been the central impulse of all civilizations until, perhaps, our own.” – CHARLES MOORE

“It will not do to investigate the subject of religion too closely, as it is apt to lead to infidelity" – ABRAHAM LINCOLN

“The undevout astronomer is mad.” – JOHANES KEPLER (German astronomer and mathematician, 1571-1630)

“Religion is a kids’ party for adults.” – DAVID LODGE

“I cannot conceive otherwise than that He, the Infinite Father, expects or requires no worship or praise from us, but that He is even infinitely above it." – BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (My sentiments exactly.)

“Religion is a trick played by the powerful.” – NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI

“That’s why man invented religion. To cope with death.” – GUY BELLAMY

“We crave certainty and certainty is what cults do best. If there’s a distinction between a cult and a religion, it’s that certainty is not the same thing as faith. Faith acknowledges doubt and struggles on nonetheless. Certainty is madness.” – MARY WAKEFIELD

“Religion is incomprehensible unless you have been exposed to it. To the outsider, it must all seem absurd.” – THEO HOBSON (an English theologian – and this seems rather self-evident to me... but maybe not...)

Religious Liberty

“America did not create religious liberty. Religious liberty created the United States of America.” – BOBBY JINDAL

Remorse

"Nothing is easier to act than remorse, unless it be depression." -- THEODORE DALRYMPLE

"Remorse could be forgotten. Regrets, never." -- PHILIP THODY

Renaissance, The

“One of the nice things about having been born during the Renaissance is that at least no one could call you a flamin’ Renaissance man”. – JOSEPH EPSTEIN

“Replacement Theory”

"The very concept of a nation founded by European settlers is offensive to me. Old stock White Canadians are an unpleasant relic and, quite frankly, replaceable. And we will replace them." -- JUSTIN TRUDEAU     (the principessa is truly Castro's kid...)

“Reparations”

“I have no personal memory of those times, nor no responsibility for them. Neither does the grandson of the man who held my folks.” – ZORA NEALE HURSTON (grand-daughter of slaves, 1891-1960)

“It’s quite another thing, in the name of restitution, to deform our vision of the present and its needs, to invoke afresh cultures and identities ravaged by time and contact and powerlessness. These attempted acts of restoration are not merely dishonest: they are cruel. Too much has happened.” – SHIVA NAIPAUL (in his 1985 essay “Flight Into Blackness”)

"Have we reached the ultimate stage of absurdity where some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, while other people are not held responsible for what they themselves are doing today?" -- THOMAS SOWELL

"If you're gonna have reparations, it will be the biggest transfer of wealth back and forth because the number of whites who were enslaved in North Africa by the Barbary Pirates EXCEEDED the number of Africans enslaved in the United States." — THOMAS SOWELL

“Only 5% of white Americans have a connection to slave-owners. Obama descends from both slave-owners and slave traders.” – LARRY ELDER

“The (racial) situation is bad enough. Reparations would create far more problems than they’d solve. There ought to be a legislative equivalent of the Hippocratic injunction to first, do no harm. History is full of horrors. We can’t make those horrors un-happen. Rather than try clumsily to redress what cannot be righted, let’s at least not make everything worse.” – LIONEL SHRIVER

"Collective guilt is a moral abomination. And historical collective guilt is a moral abomination compounded by endless idiocy." -- JACK JOLIS

"I'm originally from Detroit -- I should get more reparations than anybody." -- LARRY O'CONNOR (the excellent radio talk show guy, and this contribution to a Thanksgiving Day argument over "reparations")

" 'Reparations' is like saying: 'Reparations for the victims of the plague from the guy who developed antibiotics'." -- NICHOLAS CLAMORGAN 

"As far as who are the Tarantulas, I believe those are those who feel they're a victim and are seeking vengeance and preach of Justice. But their requirements for justice and thirst for vengeance can never be met. Like a tarantula sucking their prey dry, these people drain others by guilting them into reparations for a perceived victimization." -- FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Reproduction

“If women were fastidious, the species would go extinct.” – JOHN UPDIKE

“Republic vs. Democracy”

"The difference between a democrat and a demagogue is that the democrat holds himself accountable not just to “the people” but to the rules. I am not going to indulge in another disquisition on the differences between a republic and democracy—because you can’t have one without the other, for long—but what makes a republic a republic is the idea that democratically accountable leaders are also beholden to rules beyond the momentary, and often unreflective, demands of the people." -- JONAH GOLDBERG      (In Aug. '24 -- a date by which Jonah has long-since ceased to be an effective anti-Leftist, but he retains some residual insight into some stuff, and he's on point here.)

Republican Party, (The U.S.)

“This is the problem with voting for Republicans. You think that you’re getting rid of taxes, socialism, affirmative action, extra-Constitutional cabinet departments, and Clintons, and instead (and I mean instead) we find people complaining about Charles Darwin.” – KELLY ROSS (a Republican {!!} professor of philosophy at Los Angeles Valley College, in Sept. 2005. He was, not unreasonably, irked by the whole Intelligent Design business being taught as science…)

“It was said of the Habsburgs that they always fought in the last ditch – never in the first. And the same gibe might be directed at the Republican party.” – JOHN O’SULLIVAN

“There are a small group of people who agree on most issues, and they are called Republicans. Everybody else is a Democrat.” – NEWT GINGRICH

“The modern Republican Party is a coalition of groups and individuals united by a single idea. They want to be left alone, whether they are taxpayers, property owners, homes schoolers, or gun owners..” – GROVER NORQUIST

“God put the Republican Party on this earth to cut taxes.” – ROBERT NOVAK

“Yes, the Republican party has its flaws. It often earns its nickname of "the Stupid party" and it has its weak leaders, its loudmouths too much in love with the sound of their own voices, its craven types eager to find that sweet post-elected office lobbying deal, and its boring old white men with comb-overs, speaking in legislative-ese. But by and large, the Republicans are worried about the right problems -- the big problems: crazy people who want to kill us, a skyrocketing debt, a growing culture of dependency, an avalanche of red tape strangling the entrepreneurial lifeblood of the economy, and an unsecure border” -- JIM GERAGHTY

"The GOP should be pro-life, since it spends so much time in the fetal position." – M. STANTON EVANS

«I believe in less government. I believe in fiscal responsibility and all those things that maybe Republicans used to believe in but don’t anymore.» -- CLINT EASTWOOD

"This country doesn't need a third party. It needs a second party." -- DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE (in January 2016)

“The Republicans are now learning that, to survive, a party must demonstrate compassion to the people who actually vote for them, not the people who might.” -- FREDDY GRAY (the young wise-guy Deputy Editor of THE SPECTATOR.)

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

“The problem with Republicans is that for too long our elite cared what liberals said.” – KURT SCHLICHTER (in September 2016)

"The fate of the world depends on the United States, the fate of the United States depends on the conservative movement, and the fate of the conservative movement depends on the health and success of the Republican Party." -- HARRY JAFFA (Who was a big cheese and important conservative philosopher at the Claremont Graduate School)

“The Republican Party is the most dangerous organisation in human history.” – NOAM CHOMSKY (What a farce – The Republican Party isn't even a danger to Noam Chomsky....more's the pity)

"If Republicans were any stupider, they'd be Democrats." -- JON CASSIDY                                                          (a Texas conservative writing in THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR, in October 2017)

"When a Republican wins, he always has to win beyond the margin of lawyer." -- MARK STEYN

"Republicans may learn slowly, but they learn." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“His family had been Republican under the impression that it was the party of anarchy: they had felt government to be an illusion the governed should not encourage.” – JOHN UPDIKE

"You can count on the GOP to arrive at the correct position on an issue at the precise moment it will no longer do any meaningful good." -- JESSE KELLY

Republicans-Democrats                                                                                        

“Republicans can't talk, and Democrats can't count.” – LYNDON B. JOHNSON

“Both parties run for office as conservatives. Once they have fooled the voters and are safely in office, Republicans sometimes double-cross the voters. Democrats always do.” – ANN COULTER

“To Republicans every day is the Fourth of July. To Democrats every day is April 15th.” -- RONALD REAGAN

"I didn’t become a Republican so that I would learn the secrets of khaki and cigars.  I became a Republican so that they would discover the Clash and National Lampoon." -- GREG GUTFELD 

“Every Republican officeholder of any consequence endures the machinations of the crime syndicate that is the Democratic Party.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

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

“Let the Democrats go  prospecting for their future party leaders in the deserters' dens of Canada and Sweden; we Republicans shall look elsewhere. Indeed, as for those deserters, malcontents, radicals, SDS Weatherman I and Weatherman II, yippies, hippies, yahoos, and Black Panthers alike – I would swap the whole damn zoo for a single platoon of the kind of Americans I saw in Vietnam.” – VICE PRESIDENT SPIRO “TED” AGNEW (words actually written for him by Patrick J. Buchanan, spoken in 1972)

"If Republicans were any stupider, they'd be Democrats." -- JON CASSIDY                                                          (a Texas conservative writing in THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR, in October 2017)

"The Democratic party establishment and donors broadly agree with their grassroots on nearly every issue; in the GOP the donors and establishment not only disagree with their grassroots, they think they’re stupid, especially on issues like trade and immigration” – STEVE BANNON

“If the Democrats are in the White House, the President can do anything. And I mean anything. But when the Republicans get back into the White House, suddenly the President can’t do anything.” – JACK DEVERE MINZEY

"Democrats are the only reason to vote for Republicans." ~~ WILL ROGERS

"There is something about a Republican that you can only stand him for just so long. But on the other hand, there is something about a Democrat that you can't stand him for quite that long." -- WILL ROGERS

“The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then get elected and prove it.” -- P. J. O'ROURKE  

"Republicans aren't the solution to all your problems, but Democrats definitely are the cause of all your problems." -- DAN BONGINO (8 August 2022)

"Republicans have become the party of inclusion and the Democrats have become the party of delusion!" -- DAWN MICHAEL (a PhD "sexual health counselor", of all things, on 20 August 2020)

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

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

“Republicans are always smiling and laughing.  Democrats are always scowling and crying.  What does this signify?” -- SAMUEL M’CHEYNE GLASSER

“When Democrats hold power, they wield it. When Republicans hold power, they fear wielding it will offend Democrats.” -- DR. MILTON WOLF MD                       (a medical doctor from Rice County, Kansas, on the Twoot. In Sept. 2020)

"When the Democrats win, they're in power; when the Republicans win, they're in office." -- MARK STEYN

 "The true enemy of America is the Republican Party. The Dems will always grift, cheat, and ignore the law. Who will stop them? In a real two-party system it would be Republicans, but they are weak, milquetoast losers who do nothing but talk." -- JAMES WOODS

“THE JACK JOLIS INELUCTABLE LAW OF U.S. POLITICS: * Republicans always wimp out. and * Democrats always over-reach.” -- JACK JOLIS

"If a Republican doesn't like guns, he doesn't buy one. If a Democrat doesn't like guns, he wants all guns outlawed except theirs." -- JANIE JOHNSON

“The Democrats don’t believe in our founding principles. And the Republicans don’t believe in defending our founding principles.” – MARK LEVIN

“Part of the problem is that the Democrat Party is on a mission, and the Republican Party is not. The Democrat Party is on a mission to ‘transform America’ and the Republican Party is... well, you know....” -- MARK LEVIN                                                                                                                                                     (on 11 Jan 2021)

“Republicans believe that the American economy is essentially a private economy,  Democrats really believe, honest, that it is essentially a government economy." – RUDY GIULIANI

"The Democrat party in Congress is a Marxist cult; the Republicans are a college fraternity." -- PATRICIA McCARTHY (writing in THE AMERICAN THINKER, 1 June 2021)

"Democrats are replacing Republicans as the preferred party of the very wealthy." -- LEE DRUTMAN (writing in VOX in June 2016) 

"We don't need a 3rd party, we need a 2nd party." — DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

"Republicans want to throw you in jail for smoking weed, Democrats want to throw you in jail for weed tax evasion." -- DAVE IOWAHAWK BURGE

"On fighting Islamic terrorism--which, to me, is more important than any other issue, not just because of Israel but because Islamic terrorism seeks to destroy Western civilization--Democrats don’t understand. Republicans do. I was shocked when I saw a poll which said that 48% of Democrats, supported Israel. 48%! Republicans, 70%." -- ED KOCH (the former Noo Yawk mayor, in "The Tablet", in 2013)

“When FDR was president, when Truman was president, even when JFK was president, you’re out on the street and you say to people which party represents the working class of America most people. I think they would have said the Democratic party. Today, you go out on the street and that is not the sentiment. In fact, the Republican Party probably has more working class adherents than the Democrats.” -- BERNIE SANDERS                                                                              (in March 2023) 

"Democrats are totalitarians; our GOPers except a few, are Victorian gentlemen who think Democrats are just innocent patriots with an odd view of how America should be governed." -- FRANCISCO FUENTES (in October 2023)

"We never learn how to fight these treasonous Demorats." -- FRANCISCO FUENTES     (The American Political Dilemma in 14 pithy syllables. In April 2024)

Republican Party “Establishment”

“Rather than pursuing an immigration policy that would protect vulnerable American workers and bring in skilled immigrants while disavowing Trump's divisive tone and his impractical and overbroad prescriptions, the Republican Party 'establishment' is promoting a quasi-open-borders policy that will perhaps keep maid service cheap for GOP donors – while electing a generation of Obamas.” – JEREMY CARL (a fellow at the Hoover Institution, in January 2016)

“The people who oppose what the Left is doing to the country want an opposition party. The Republican establishment has shunned that role, preferring to be Washington than to fight Washington. The people are looking elsewhere.” – ANDREW C. McCARTHY (March 2016)

"The Democratic party establishment and donors broadly agree with their grassroots on nearly every issue; in the GOP the donors and establishment not only disagree with their grassroots, they think they’re stupid, especially on issues like trade and immigration” – STEVE BANNON

"Trump takes the blows for us so we can prosper -- We the People take the blows for Democrat leaders so THEY can prosper." -- DEBBIE ALDRICH     (my great X-pal, in March 2024)

Republicans (“Moderate”)

“What you get when you cross a Democrat with an actual human being is a RINO” – RUSH LIMBAUGH

Reputation

“There is no man so fortunate that there shall not be by him when he is dying some who are pleased with what is going to happen.” – MARCUS AURELIUS

“Reputations, for good or ill, were easily won and hard to lose.” – ALAN JUDD

“A man gets burned out long before his reputation.” – TERRY HAYES

"The reputation of one's arms is everything, and equivalent to real forces." -- NAPOLEON

"I worked for about 80 years to build a reputation, then I found out I already had one." -- DAVID YATES (My old spook pal. Good man.)  

Resentment

"Resentment just sits there. It doesn't improve matters. It's a befouling, inert sensation, akin to the experience of lying in your own excrement and never changing the sheets." -- LIONEL SHRIVER

Reserve

“There are worse things than a stiff upper lip.” – LARA PRENDERGAST (defending British private – “public” – schools, in THE SPECTATOR, April 2017)

Resistance

“Probe with bayonets. If you encounter mush, proceed; if you encounter steel, withdraw.” – VLADIMIR ILICH ULIANOV (LENIN)

Resolve

"It's not the mountain before you that will wear down your resolve, but the pebble in your shoe." -- SUN TZU

Respect

"There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age. I missed it coming and going." -- J. B. PRIESTLEY

“Treating your adversary with respect is giving him an advantage to which he is not entitled.” -- DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON

"We no longer understand the meaning of the word 'respect', which has spawned wokeism in all its forms. The truth is we owe courtesy, we earn respect and we give love. The sooner we talk about courtesy again, the better it will be for everyone." -- MORAG CUMMINGS (A letter-writer to the SPECTATOR from Durham, England, on 13 Sept. 2022)

"Once an individual or company starts using the R-word (respect) you know it is in full flight from what used to be referred to as reality." -- MELISSA KITE

 "You can respect someone who's beating the hell out of you." -- DONALD TRUMP       (in 1988)  

Responsibility

"Your mistakes are your own to make — until you expect others to pay for them." – PETER SUDERMAN (of the Competitive Enterprise Institute)

“It is easy to dodge our responsibilities, but we cannot dodge the consequences of dodging our responsibilities.’” – CHARLES STAMP                                  (The British economist and businessman)

"We seem to be moving steadily in the direction of a society where no one is responsible for what he himself did, but we are all responsible for what somebody else did, either in the present or in the past." -- THOMAS SOWELL

“It is amazing how fast people learn when they are not insulated from the consequences of their decisions.” – THOMAS SOWELL     

"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

"Have we reached the ultimate stage of absurdity where some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, while other people are not held responsible for what they themselves are doing today?" -- THOMAS SOWELL

“You can delegate authority, but not responsibility.” – STEPHEN W. COMISKEY (a quotable financial manager at Morgan Stanley)

“There is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don't care who gets the credit.” -- RONALD REAGAN

“Anything which devolves responsibility from the individual to something else – especially blind fate – is necessarily a left-wing argument, as it eschews any notion of bad life choices, a lack of diligence, inherent stupidity, wickedness, idleness, failed education, torpor, a dearth of imagination and so on.” – ROD LIDDLE 

"If you could kick the person in  the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn't sit for a month." -- THEODORE ROOSEVELT

“We live in a world in which nothing that happens to us is our own fault. Slapstick has outlived its day. A slip on a banana peel isn’t funny any longer: it’s a lawsuit.” – TIM CAHILL                                        (in 1997)

Restaurants

"The high-end restaurant kitchen is probably the one place in civilian life where hierarchy and standards of discipline are as rigorously and unquestioningly observed as in the military." -- JAMES DELINGPOLE

«Do fish have loins? In a pretentious restaurant, I ordered a ‘loin of sea trout’. It looked like an ordinary piece of fish – a bit small, as is usual in pretentious restaurants – on a plate sprinkled and drizzled as though the chef had perhaps coughed over it rather violently or vigorously scratched his head before giving it to the waiter. In Australia I was once offered a shoulder of some other fish, so I suppose one might even be able to enjoy a rump of whitebait or even a saddle of flounder. But generally speaking I don’t mind loin when applied to the loinless, and somehow a loin of fruitcake sounds appetizing, or even a loin of sourdough bread.» -- BARRY HUMPHRIES (the Aussie male version of Dame Edna Everage)

“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

"Our French restaurant was in decline. Empires and restaurants had diseases of their own and once the decline set in, it was next to impossible to reverse." -- STEVE TESICH

"The three functions of a restaurant are to eat, to observe, and to meet. The most important function of a restaurant is meeting. You can eat at home and observe on a bus." -- RICHARD BROOKHISER

“They ordered and ate their way through what might as well have been, from its cost and for all he could enjoy of it, portions of grilled, stewed, and marinated banknotes, and drank two bottles of a wine apparently fermented from the juice of sun-kissed golden sovereigns.” – MICHAEL FRAYN (From his very funny 1967 novel “Towards The End Of The Morning”)

“Going to restaurants is the biggest waste of time and money there is.” – JACK JOLIS (Circa 1966. My Junior year at Cornell, as remembered by my ADPhi brother Sam Glasser. I was wise before my time)

"There are three kinds of restaurants in the country(side). There are the joints that are really just bars with kitchens, and that's where the local citizenry goes. There are places that try to be trendy by doing what the city restaurants were doing ten years ago, and that's where the weekenders and the summer people go. and there are very pretentious places with dim echoes of Maxim's, with tassels on the huge menus and too much flour in the sauces and too much sugar in the salads, and that's where everyone takes Mother on her birthday." -- DONALD WESTLAKE 

“He was off-hand – even rude – in restaurants, but he was treated very well because he only went to places where he was known, and the privilege of displaying moneyed ill-manners was included in the overall charges.” – JOSEPH CONNOLLY (in his rather horriplillating 1985 novel “Poor Souls”)

Results

"if you don't understand the purpose of something, look at the results." -- CARL JUNG

Revelation

"When the tide goes out, you see who is swimming naked." -- WARREN BUFFETT (I'm no fan of Buffett's, but this is sort of cool.)

Revenge

“If liberalism is essentially low and yellow, revenge is the purest, noblest and most enjoyable emotions you can enjoy with your clothes on.” – JULIE BURCHILL (the English “enfant terrible” who famously and very publicly slanging her ex-husband, some poor schnook of a very funny fellow writer called Tony Parsons, in public.)

"Our compulsion to avenge a wrongdoing is among the most primal of human urges. Getting even shows there is a price to pay." -- STEPHEN FINEMAN (author of "Revenge: A Short Enquiry Into Retribution")

“Revenge is sweet and not fattening.” - ALFRED HITCHCOCK

“If it's worth getting even, you might as well take it all the way and get ahead.” – JASON NORMAN (a fellow on the Twoot, in July 2020)

“I've always felt that revenge was a much-maligned aspect of human nature. Revenge is not only morally justified — hell, it's a moral imperative.” – JACK JOLIS

"Vengeance is a moral duty." -- KURT SCHLICHTER (echoing my sentiment precisely)

"The ethics of revenge? The same as the ethics of war, old boy!" -- GEOFFREY HOUSEHOLD

“Payback is medevac.” — JIM HANSON (the old Special Forces honcho, on “X” on 8 April 2024)

“Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged" – DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON

“A healthy dose of revenge is good for the soul.” – RICHARD LITTLEJOHN (the columnist for the UK “Sun”, in 1995 – and here, I must say, I agree with him “van handret partzent”, as my pals in Tel Aviv say....)

"And once Trump's gone and we have regained our rightful place in the White House, look out if you supported him and endorsed his actions because we'll be coming for you next. You will feel the vengeance of the nation. No stone will be left unturned as we seek you out in this great nation. For it is you that betrayed us." -- KAMALA HARRIS (Kahaha Mattris, sounding just the teensiest bit fascist-y, on 18 June 2020)

Revolution

“Between the revolution and the firing squad there is always time for a bottle of champagne.” – BRUCE ANDERSON (is this where the phrase “Bollinger Bolshevism” came from?)

“Inside every rebel there is an authoritarian trying to get out.” – ANTHONY DANIELS (a.k.a. Theodore Dalrymple)

“Inside every rebel, there’s a dictator trying to get out.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

"Once they attain power, revolutionaries lose all interest in revolution." -- LEA YPI      (an Albanian-born Professor of Politics at the London School of Economics, and this quote is rather self-evident... but I allow it because she's so good-looking...)

“One does not establish the dictatorship in order to safeguard the revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” – GEORGE ORWELL

“A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.” – CHE GUEVARA

“Revolutions are not always democratic, but they are, broadly, demographic.” – MARK STEYN

"For revolutionaries, the idea of a fixed human nature presents a hateful obstacle to their political ambitions." -- LOUISE PERRY   ( author of "The Case Against the Sexual Revolution" and host of the podcast "Maiden Mother Matriarch")

“My obsession has been that we should have a revolution that goes not resemble the French or Russian, but rather the American, in the sense that it be for something, not against something. A revolution for a constitution, not a paradise. An anti-utopian revolution. Because utopias lead to the guillotine and the gulag.” – ADAM MICHNIK (Polish journalist and early leader of “Solidarnosc” – one of the Good Guys….)

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

“What we have of revolution just now is financed largely by the rich.” – ERIC HOFFER (the old anti-communist, pro-American longshoreman. He was here talking about the “new left”  “revolutionaries” of 1970, but he could just as well have been speaking of the OWS jerkoffs of today.)

“The left is part of American culture only in the same sense that a virus is part of the body it is attacking. Leftism is a child of the French Revolution and it is inimical to all the cultural elements that made America a success. The American Revolution was resolutely anti-utopian. Our founders set out to purify the British political culture. They were followers of John Locke and set out to build a country which would protect and glorify individual liberty and accept all the messy imperfection that it produces. This formula was a stunning success. The French set out to perfect society in accord with the utopian teachings of Jean Jacques Rousseau. They crashed and burned. Even so leftists have been peddling the French model around the world ever since. The American left started doing so here in the late 19th century. Wilson, FDR, LBJ and Obama represent their greatest successes.” – J. P. MULHERN (A commenter on National Review Online's “The Corner”)

“He who makes a revolution ploughs the sea.” -- SIMON BOLIVAR

"In revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part is to invent the end." -- ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

 “Living in a log cabin is reactionary. People don't plan revolutions from log cabins. They're much more preoccupied with getting through the day.” -- SYLVAIN TESSON (the French travel-writer)

“I am pleased to have seen a revolution, but once is enough.” -- WALTER BAGEHOT (his “revolution” was nothing more than Louis-Napoleon's coup d'etat in France in 1851, but it's a good sound bite nevertheless....)

“One of history’s secrets is that revolutionaries’ appeal in the eyes of posterity owes much to the traits they share with the world they overthrew. “ -- CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL (Actually writing in THE WEEKLY STANDARD in 2015 about Bob Dylan, of all people.)

"The aim of the revolution is not that everyone should be poor but that everyone should be rich. We must work harder and talk less." -- CAPT BLAISE COMPAORE (The 33-year old Burkina Faso -- ex-Upper Volta --  army captain who, in 1987 overthrew the Marxist dictatorship of Thomas Sankara. He would remain president of Burkina Faso until 2014, when he himself would be overthrown. There have been a lot worse than ol' President Blaise Compaore, who never managed to make ALL his countrymen rich, but nevertheless, heh, managed OK for himself and his immediate family....)

“Oppressed masses generally stay oppressed. They may smolder, but it takes the bright to spark the revolution.” -- ANDREW STUTTAFORD

"It gets bad when you have only yourself left to topple for life to get better." -- STEVE TESICH

"There was a revolution brewing and we didn’t spot it because we didn’t make it. We expected we were going to be the revolution.” -- BRIAN ENO (The lefty "avant-garde" musician and music producer, commenting on Brexit and Trump in Jan. 2017 to the lefty Guardian)

"In revolutions the populace goes mad with a desire to view the king's real estate. It's always the same." -- MARK HELPRIN

"I've heard of revolutions that were carried out without guns, but I've never heard of one that was carried out without words."--- JACK JOLIS

“The bullshit ‘proletarian’ rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, every successful Leftist revolution has been organized and carried out by the ‘elites’. (‘Elites’ are the only ones with the mean$ and time-on-their-hands to indulge in such destructive, Utopian mischief.)" -- JACK JOLIS

“Revolution — that’s what treason is called when you win.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON 

"Revolutions begin with the mutual discovery of the ideologues and the Jacobins: the first happy to have discovered compatible souls, the second to have found flunkies." --DAVID MAMET

"If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Czar himself." -- MIKHAIL BAKUNIN (the infamous Russian anarchist, 1814-1876, in a letter to his friend Karl Marx)

“Revolutions are for settling scores.” – MARTIN CRUZ SMIT

"Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy." -- FRANZ KAFKA 

“Believers in revolutions refuse to see that all efforts to build a heaven on earth are vain, because of man’s fallen nature. Yet throughout the twentieth century, each new failure of revolution, in Russia, East Europe, China, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba and Nicaragua, was blamed not on the Marxist theory but on its ‘distortion’ or ‘betrayal’ by various deviationists.” – RICHARD WEST

“Revolutions are more often than not the step-children of under-privileged cognoscenti. They are the ones who most keenly feel the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” – SHIVA NAIPAUL

Revolution, The American

“The American Revolution is the only revolution that still resonates.” – CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS (in May 2005)

“The (American) colonies were not so much lost to the zeal of the rebels as mislaid by the incompetence of the imperial administration.” – DOMINIC GREEN (writing in THE SPECTATOR, putting the supercilious British spin on the debacle, and a whole    shitload of Yanks, including this one, would disagree with him... violently.)

“The American Revolutionary War was pretty much the exact opposite of the Vietnam War: During the American Revolution we kept on losing until one day we won; whereas during the Vietnam War we kept on winning until one day we lost.” – JACK JOLIS

“The British had to destroy the colonists’ will to resist, but they hadn’t the inclination. When you get right down to it, the British didn’t lose the war – they were unwilling to win it.” – EVERETT ERLICH (sounding a bit like my, er, friend Jack Jolis, above)

"My God, these fellows have done more work in one night than I could make my Army do in three months." -- GEN. WILLIAM HOWE (of the Rebels in Boston, March 4, 1776)

“All revolutions – whether in France, England, Russia or anywhere else – have been followed by a nervous return to an enhanced version of precisely those values they had seemed designed to overthrow.

It is only in America, where Jeffersonian democracy was and is the basis of the state, that a durable, exportable version of revolution are, as Tiananmen Square demonstrated, the most subversive on the planet. The notion that free me, equal before the law, are the basis of the constitution itself, seems to be the most revolutionary one we have come up with yet.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS

"Unlike the Jacobins, the American Founders didn’t try to work against the grain of human nature, but with it." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"America, from its founding, really did create something new. America avoided the pitfalls of revolutionary France. Its revolution was not followed by the Terror in part because it had nobler and wiser leaders. Americans were fortunate to have Washington instead of Danton, Jefferson rather than Robespierre. With America, it was different, as always. America showed a new way in which nations might be governed, but it was nowhere within its power to begin the world over again." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY 

Revolution, The French

“In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.” – EDMUND BURKE

"The French have proved themselves the ablest architects of ruin that ever existed in the world. In one summer they have done their business for us as rivals in a way more destructive than twenty Ramillies or Blenheims. In this very short space of time they have completely pulled down to the ground their monarchy: their church; their nobility; their law; their revenue; their army; their navy; their commerce; their arts; and their manufactures. They now are lying in a sort of trance—an epileptic fit—exposed to the pity or derision of mankind, in wild ridiculous convulsive movements, impotent to every purpose but that of dashing out their brains against the pavement. Yet they are so very unwise as to glory in a revolution which is a shame and disgrace to them." -- EDMUND BURKE (in 1790 -- one year into the catastrophic experiment)

“The French Revolution produced only a pile of corpses and a tyrant.” – MARGARET THATCHER

“The French revolutionary intellectuals and merchants who founded the modern state  spoke of political equality. But they knew that if the masses governed, they might well have guillotined them rather than the nobles and the priests. And so, they set up, and Napoleon perfected, a system of government that consisted of bureaucracy.” – ANGELO CODEVILLA

“Rousseau bequeathed us far more than Robespierre; increasingly, we are living in his world.” – ANDREW C. McCARTHY

“It would have been better for the peace of France if this man (Jean-Jacques Rousseau) had never lived.” – NAPOLEON BONAPARTE (when he visited Rousseau's grave on the estate of the Marquis Rene Louis de Girardin in Ermenonville {where later Claude Monet would paint nice paintings}. When the good marquis pointed out to Nappy that, without the impetus given by Rousseau's writings to the French   Revolution, Napoleon himself would not have existed, at least not as “Napoleon”, the First Consul replied that only the future would tell if it would have been better if neither he nor  Rousseau had ever lived. And I say for once Nappy was missing the Big Picture; never mind the “peace of France” – it would have been better for all humanity if Rousseau had never been born....)

“When they smile, I see blood trickling down their faces.” – EDMUND BURKE (on the Jacobins)

“The French revolution was a great event but it did not produce any great men.” – FRANCOIS FURET (Twentieth century French historian)

"We are always fighting the French Revolution, in one form or another." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"The French Revolution was as if the Manson Family took over the country." -- ANN COULTER (24 June '20)

"It was French idealism that brought about French Revolutionary hell. Robespierre didn't even have a feeling for the French people. He worshiped his own idea of the Revolution which meant in a definite sense he worshiped himself." -- ROY CAMERON

“If it did nothing else for burdened mankind, the French Revolution did at least enrich and deepen the appeal of the upper classes to the novel-reading public.” – HUGH KINGSMILL (A British author, in 1949 – and presumably he had “A Tale Of Two Cities” in mind, or    conceivably the Dumas père et fils team....)

“He who has not lived in the eighteenth century before the Revolution does not know the sweetness of life and cannot imagine that there can be happiness in life.” – TALLEYRAND (1754-1838, and old Tally’s real name was: Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord)

Revolution, The Russian

"Kerensky that jerk -- if he'd shot a few people millions would be  alive today." -- ARNOLD BEICHMAN    (as quoted by Richard Brookhiser)

Rhetoric

“Rhetoric is the art of probing what men believe they ought to believe.” – WAYNE BOOTH (American literary critic, 1921 - 2005)

Rhode Island

"My father always so vehemently denied that Rhode Island was founded as a refuge for misfits and malcontents." -- J. P. DONLEAVY      (in one of his last novels, his 1987 "Are You Listening Rabbi Löw?")

Rhodesia

“In Rhodesia it is always spring.” – WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR

"It was a waste of breath for Rhodesians to defend their regime on the facts." -- HELEN ANDREWS (of the Fund For American Studies, in December 2017)

"When Englishmen first arrived in Mashonaland (Rhodesia) in the 1880s, the civilization they encountered there had not developed currency, written language, irrigation, beasts of burden, the plough, or the wheel. From the moment the British and King Lobengula met, a colonial relationship was inevitable. Any relationship between two civilizations of such disparate attainments will be colonial, almost by definition. The best option, from that point, is for the relationship to be made as benign as possible." -- HELEN ANDREWS

Ridicule

"The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." -- MARTIN LUTHER

“The devil . . . the prowde spirite . . . cannot endure to be mocked.” – SAINT THOMAS MORE (taking his cue from Martin Luther... or vice versa....)

“It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.” – AGATHA CHRISTIE

"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them." – THOMAS JEFFERSON

Right, The

There are no entries here because I don’t believe there is, properly speaking, such a thing as “The Right”. There is The Left and the Anti-Left. (If you want entries for what you think of as “The Right”, I direct you to “Conservatives”.) The Left is only called The Left because the most extreme of the French Revolutionaries, the Jacobins, sat on the left of the National Assembly in 1789 – there was no “Right”, just “everyone else”. If they’d sat in the goddamn balcony, they’d have been “Balconists” – and there wouldn’t be any “Orchestrists”. In fact, the term “Right” as a political description was first coined by Stalin, to describe the hated Trotsky, whom he called a “Right-Deviationist”. So no, as far as THIS editor is concerned, there is no political “Right” – there’s the Left and the Anti-Left.

Suggest you consult Conservatives/Conservatism

Right-Left (see Left-Right)

Right and Wrong

"Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it." - G.K. CHESTERTON

"Nothing can of itself be labelled as 'wrong'." -- DR. JOHN ROBINSON (1919-1983 -- he was the Bishop of Woolwich, UK)

“The question of who is right and who is wrong has seemed to me to be always too small to be worth a moment's thought, while the question of what is right and what is wrong has seemed all-important.” -- ALBERT J. NOCK (one of Jonah Goldberg's and, before him, Bill Buckley's favorite ur-conservatives)

Righteousness

“Righteousness was another of life's seductive perversions, and perhaps the most truly wicked, because it posed as something it was not almost any crime could be committed in its name.” – ROBERT DALEY (The ex-Deputy Mayor of NYC, the author of, amongst other books “The Prince of the City”, and a guy who shares with Joseph Wambaugh my title of “best cop novelist of all time”.)

“The fundamental problem of politics is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness." – HENRY KISSINGER (I'm not entirely sure what this means, but it certainly sounds nice and portentous....)

Rights, (Civil, Human, etc.)

“I have recently engaged in a debate on the difference between human rights and citizens’ rights, because mankind is not an entity which could potentially guarantee your rights, whereas the nation is an entity where it is possible.” – VACLAV KLAUS (then-President of the Czech Republic, and a bloody good man, in 2004)

“While the Constitution protects against invasion of individual rights, it is not a suicide pact.” – ROBERT H. JACKSON (Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, in 1949. The same dude who’d earlier achievedFame as the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Trials.)

“Now we given 'em something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about t"These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got his, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don't move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there'll be no way of stopping them, we'll lose the filibuster and there'll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It'll be Reconstruction all over again." – LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON (in 1957, when he was a Democratic Senator from Texas and Senate Majority Leader. Hmmmm…..)

“‘Rights’ are not those things granted by the sovereign and enumerated in statute, but the precise opposite: They’re restraints upon the sovereign. They’re not about what the state allows you to do, but about what the state is not allowed to do to you.” – MARK STEYN

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

"There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences." – P. J. O’ROURKE

“You have as many and as few rights as you can ever have. You cannot invent a right. When government attempts to do this, it finds it cannot do so without also violating a right.” – DAVID STEINBERG (The New York Editor of PJ Media)

“I just reject the notion that humans have a 'right' to material goods. The state may have obligations moral or legal, but those don’t amount to universal human rights. That’s because rights come from God not from government. We’re not born with material possessions, but we are born with inalienable rights. Confusion on this point has immiserated millions.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“Saying you had the right to do x is a universally valid defense in only one venue: a court of law. Outside the dock, there are higher standards — or there should be.” -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“The 'struggle for civil rights' crossed the finish line and lost its moral power when demands switched from equal rights to equal results.” – LARRY ELDER (conservative black talk radio guy)

“People do not have the right to unregulated rights in this country.” –  AL SHARPTON                                      (A beaut from Big Al, ex-roadie for James Brown, ex-spiritual adviser to Tawana Brawley, ex- Conscience of Freddie's Fashion Mart and the current Sage of MSNBC and, of course, policy advisor to the Corpseman-in-Chief, and Conscience of the Democrat Party.)

“If you think of a right as a purely legal thing, then of course it is only a creation of the State, and a creature of the State. But states do not create rights — they only codify them. (The American proposition is not a legal doctrine at all, but a theological one: ‘That all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.’)” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Declaring a rightin a scarce good such as health care is intellectually void, because moral declarations about rights do not change material facts. If you have five children and three apples and then declare that every child has a right to an apple of his own, then you have five children and three apples and some meaningless posturing — i.e., nothing in realityhas changed, and you have added only rhetoric instead of adding apples.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“The rights of man come not from the generosity of the State, but from the hand of God.” – JOHN F. KENNEDY

“Human rights are philosophically a confused idea: but their political power consists in the fact that anyone questioning them can be made to look nasty.” – CHARLES MOORE

“The rights agenda is a game of scissors-paper-rock.” – MELISSA KITE

"Man's only right is to do his duty." -- AUGUST COMTE (Froggie philosopher, 1798-1857, and although quite piquant, I'm not at all sure this is exatement correcte...) 

“Apart from the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, I've never known what my human rights are supposed to be.” – ALEXANDER CHANCELLOR (British ex-Editor of THE SPECTATOR, and I'm afraid, old chap, there aren't any more – that's your lot, as you Brits say...)

“21st century rights are not equal but hierarchical.” – MARY WAKEFIELD

"The constitution is a radical document. It is the job of government to reign in people's rights." -- BILL CLINTON (1993 – and this, for me, is probably the most objectionable thing this son of a bitch ever said)

"Somewhere between the founding of the republic and the time when a wind from Europe blew Karl Marx's brain burps over  the ocean, 'rights'  became conflated with 'things that are good'. If you have the right to the pursuit of happiness, and taking the subway to see your paramour will make you happy, then you've the right to jump over the turnstile." -- JAMES LILEKS

“A man's rights rest in three boxes: the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.” – FREDERICK DOUGLASS

"There's no greater let-down than a civil rights movement that succeeds." --LIONEL SHRIVER 

“The collectivist view that favors the rights of man over the rights of men has historically given rise to gruesome collectivization.” --  LIONEL CHETWYND (that rare thing - a Hollywood non-lefty. Producer/director of, among other things, “The Hanoi Hilton”)

“Rights, Animal”

“The logical outcome of animal rights is to give oysters the vote.” – BERNARD COWLEY (a private gentleman living in Blakeney, Norfolk, England, in 2005)

“None of this means that animals have rights. I rather doubt if anyone has rights, except God. And if humans have rights, it is only because they have, in the first instance, duties. There is no moral possibility of animals possessing rights unless they are conscious of duties. And, unfortunately, animal duties have to be imposed by man: no animal has an autonomous sense of duty. So the so-called ‘Animal rights’ campaign is moral nonsense, and it is not surprising it is degenerating into savagery.” – PAUL JOHNSON

“Torturing a dog or a cat for sport is not disgusting because animals have rights, it is repugnant because human beings have obligations.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

Rights, Constitutional

“No law abiding citizen in the United States of America has any fear that their (sic) Constitutional rights will be infringed in any way. None, zero.” – JOE BIDEN (You wrong, old man.)

"As far as I can tell, there are only three unassailable Constitutional rights left in United States: The right not to be 'discriminated' against. The right to have an abortion. The right to have a gay marriage. In the eyes of a liberals, nothing-not the freedom of association or religion or anything else mentioned in the First or Second Amendment-will ever supersede these consecrated rights. The rest? Well, it's malleable, depending on the situation.” – DAVID HARSANYI

“A Bill of Rights that means what the majority wants it to mean is worthless.” – JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA

“The government has no more right to tell me what goes into my mouth than it has to tell me what comes out of my mouth.” – MILTON FRIEDMAN

Riots, Rioting, Rioters                                                                                                          

“If you think free speech is assault but assault is free speech you’re a moron of world-historical proportions. And if you think rioting is some charming rite of passage, you deserve to have your campus destroyed.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“Those 1960s lefties were a tougher crop than the playschool communards of today’s campuses.” – JONAH GOLDBERG                                                            (in Jan. 2017)

“Kyle Rittenhouse is on trial so that no one will dare stand in the way of the left’s shock troops ever again.”-- ANN COULTER

Risk                                                                                                                                       

“Nature is merciful and does not try her children, man or beast, beyond their compass.  It is only when the cruelty of man intervenes that hellish torments appear.  For the rest – live dangerously: take things as they come; dread naught; all will be well.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL (amazingly, he scribbled this on the bottom of a hospital bill he happened to be paying at the time. An added bonus to this quote is that it finally explains where those great early 20th Century battleships got their name…)

“Not to be prepared to take risks is the greatest risk of all in life.” – FRANCIS KING (the English writer)

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

“By the standards of today, the main purpose of human life is to eliminate all risk so that human life will last as long as humanly possible, no matter how tedious it gets.” – DAVE BARRY

“We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.” -- REINHOLD NIEBUHR

"One always starts a journey in a strange land -- taking too many precautions, until one tires of the exertion and abandons care in the worst spot of all." -- GRAHAM GREENE (in 1939)

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

"The risks we take during the course of our lives are inconceavably great compared to our only once chance of being.” — DANNY DE BELDER (my pal the Belgian polymath and... risk-taker)

"Most people never expose themselves to the risk of anything interesting happening to them." -- GUY BELLAMY

"You have to risk your life every six months to stay alive." -- ELIA KAZAN (this is clearly hyperbolic hogwash, but the great movie director created a nifty aphorism nevertheless) 

"What I do know is that a way out of the current predicament becomes an economic necessity long before our world becomes risk-free." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY (in May 2020)

"Quite simply, nothing will ever change for the better if you don't accept risk." -- MIKE POMPEO 

Robots

“There is much anxiety that artificial intelligence will enable robots to replace human beings in millions of office jobs. But anyone who has ever worked in an office knows that intelligence alone cannot replicate mankind in work mode. For people to be truly superseded in the workplace, robots will also need to be programmed to exhibit artificial stupidity.” – CHARLES MOORE

Rock Music, (see Music, Rock)

“Role Models”

“You can’t be what you don’t see.” – RORY SUTHERLAND (supposedly quoting “someone who grew up on the South Side of Chicago told me”.)

Rolling Stones (The)

“Laughing about how old the Stones are is nearly as old as they are.” – MARCUS BERKMANN (the English writer on music in July 2013)

“This man (Mick Jagger) has child-bearing lips.” – JOAN RIVERS

"I admired the intelligence, if not the art, of this thin young man Mick Jagger, and considered that he looked the quintessence of delinquency." -- ANTHONY BURGESS (when Jagger was briefly considered to play the lead role in "A Clockwork Orange")

 “I’m not sure I should say it, but they’re a blues cover band, that’s sort of what the Stones are.” -- PAUL McCARTNEY

"If the Stones' lyrics made any sense, they wouldn't be any good." -- TRUMAN CAPOTE (In 1963, when they were just cranking up) 

Romania

“Imagine an unsuccessful Neapolitan thug marrying a penniless whore from Novgorod (Russia) and their issue would resemble something equating to your average Romanian.” – ROD LIDDLE

"This is the real-life country (Romania) where it is always winter and never Christmas." -- PETER HITCHENS     (he wrote this on the day the Ceausescus were executed, 25 Dec.1989 -- though it seems to me that the disappearance of the Ceausescus was the best Christmas present the Romanian people could have had....)

Romance

“Life always has romance when you're young and the government is bad.” – JAMES LILEKS (from his rather hilarious first novel, “Falling Up The Stairs”)

“And you discover that it's much easier to romanticise from a decision.” – WILIAM LEITH (???)

"It is true that romance never takes place at home." -- PAUL FUSSELL  

"She likes what she calls 'romance'. To her that means candles, rose petals, and a bathtub. I don't understand what this thing is that women have about candles. All I can say is that there must've been a hell of a lot of sex in the eighteenth century." -- MARK HELPRIN

“Romanticism”

"'Romanticism' is the tradition of rebellion against the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, as launched by Rousseau and a variety of poets, artists and political theorists. In the eternal battle between facts and feelings, romanticism is the battle flag for the forces of feelings. In its myriad ideological manifestations, romanticism holds that abstract rules -- of science, the market, even constitutional democracy -- are a ruse, a form of exploitation that denies our true humanity for the benefit of those who have rigged the system. A romantic ranks feelings, instincts, passions and intuitions above cold and unlovely dictates of reason and rules." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

Romney, Mitt:

"He (Romney) may not be perfect, but at least he's not nuts." -- RAMESH PONNURU (Senior Editor of NATIONAL REVIEW. And this has "bumper sticker" written all over it....)

“I think, Mitt Romney had  an authentic inauthenticity problem. He seems fake but that is actually him. When you see an alligator for the first time and you say there is no way that is real and then you lean over and you see it move, whoa, it is real. Alligators just look fake. Mitt Romney just looks fake. He seems unauthentic and it was a real problem for him in a way that I think if you had a different candidate who had the same wealth, maybe even the same business background but was a little bit more organic, you know did not refer to his love of sport without the ‘s’ at the end, that sort of thing it would have helped.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

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

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques

"Rousseauism has taken hold of leftist imaginations in a way not seen since the 1840s. It expresses itself in the neo-romanticism of the rewilding movement and the land-reforming zeal of the Extinction Rebellion mob." -- JAMIE BLACKETT (a British politician, writer, landowner farmer and political activist,in August 2023)

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

Rowing                                                                                                                      

“I watched the fitful progress of the oarsmen. To my mind it was the most uncomfortable method of transport ever devised, with the possible exception of brachiation.” – GUY BELLAMY                                 (“brachiation” is, apparently, what monkeys do when they swing from limb to limb in trees)

“In civilized societies rowing had been confined to the criminal classes.” -- OSBERT LANCASTER (the English cartoonist, author and critic of the 50s, 60s and 70s)

"It is very difficult to interest a man actually engaged in the practice or rowing, in the beauties of nature that are all around him." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS    (in his 1993 "Two And A Half Men In A Boat")

Royalty

“It’s a pleasant change to be in a country that isn’t ruled by its people.” – PHILIP, DUKE OF EDINBURGH (in Paraguay, to then-Dictator Alfredo Stroessner.  Cool.)

"I speak Spanish to God, Italian to Women, French to Men, and German to my Horse." – CHARLES V                       (of the Holy Roman Empire which, as we all know – not least for having been repeatedly told it by Unca Frankie – was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire)

“I managed to avoid the last disaster in slow motion between Big Ears and the Porcelain Doll. I give the marriage seven years.” – PETE BROADBENT (The Right Rev. Pete is the Bishop of Willesden. Or at least he was until November 2010, after which he said this about the upcoming marriage of Prince Wills and Kate Middleton, at which point he was induced to “withdraw until further notice” by his bosses, the po-faced old liberal farts of the C of E.)

"It's a bad idea when cousins marry" -- EDDIE IZZARD

"I liked Queen Elizabeth II for the same reason that I liked Richard Nixon -- because the Left didn't." -- JACK JOLIS

“I am absolutely in favor of the royal family.  I have always liked the way they keep their heads down, avoid controversy, shun jokes and conceal whatever personalities they have.”  -- ALEXANDER CHANCELLOR (a one-time editor-in-chief of THE SPECTATOR)

"Both Harry and Meghan seem personable young people but the role of a royal is not, as they and many commentators seem to believe, to 'change the world'. It is to carry out duties with fortitude and discretion, much as Liz and Phil have done for 70 years, and keep your own fatuous opinions to yourself. But there's not much chance of that, I fear. We are in for a tsunami of vapid emoting from two people who, however pleasant they might be, are not necessarily the best equipped to pontificate about the many real or imagined injustices in the world and what to do about them." – ROD LIDDLE (in May 2018)

“We are the Royal Family. We are never tired and we love hospitals.” – QUEEN MARY                    (1867-1953, Wife of King George V, full name: Victoria Mary Augusta Louise Olga Pauline    Claudine Agnes, Princess of Teck.  Holy cow.)

"I can't wear beige because people won't know who I am." -- QUEEN ELIZABETH II

"And I have to be seen to be believed." -- QUEEN ELIZABETH II

"Charles is the standard definition of a liberal -- as assemblage of special interest groups. His mother being the exact opposite, she embodied a profound respect for the way things are done." -- RICHARD STARKEY 

“A kingdom is what you get once organized crime becomes a monopoly and by dint of age attains a patina of respectability.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"A monarch occupies a space to prevent something worse occupying it." -- TANYA GOLD    (in January 2024)
 

“This is supposing the present race of kings in the world to have had an honorable origin: whereas it is more than probable, that, could we take off the dark covering of antiquity and trace them to their first rise, we should find the first of them nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang, whose savage manners of pre-eminence in subtility obtained him the title of chief among plunderers; and who by increasing in power and extending his depredations, overawed the quiet and defenseless to purchase their safety by frequent contributions.” – THOMAS PAINE

"(Prince) Harry is what happens when royalty is crossed with celebrity and ends up as a new kind of privilege, without duties but with lots of attitude. It shows how royalty, unanchored, can be captured, lobotomised, capitalised and monetised." -- MELANIE McDONAGH

“The Nazis tend to make us forget that the Hohenzollerns were... not great.” – RICHARD BROOKHISER (in 8 March 2021)

“Like most royal persons the world over, Goodwill (King Goodwill of the Zulus) exhibited a rather touching mixture of natural dignity, good tailoring and not quite understanding what was going on.” – CHARLES MOORE

“The Windsors are like the Corleone family: blood is thicker than marriage.” – RICHARD LITTLEJOHN    (the columnist for the UK “Sun”, in 1995 – long before the Meghan-Harry debacle, but at the height of Diana-mania)

"The British royal family had to abandon their habit of playing Monopoly. It always led to arguments. How unlike them." -- MARK MASON (reporting on the book "Around The World In 80 Games" by Marcus du Sautoy)

"She was hard to argue with -- she was not born a Serene Highness for nothing." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS     (referring to his long-suffering wife.  And, speaking of "serene highnesses", that's what Bokassa insisted everyone call him after he'd made himself "Emperor" of the Central African Republic/Empire)

“There is not a single crowned head in Europe whose talents on merit would entitle him to be elected a vestryman by the people of any parish in America.” – THOMAS JEFFERSON

"The throne sits upon filth and filth upon the throne." -- FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE     (this is pretty banal, and if a Fred Nutz had said this it wouldn't be included -- but as it was ol' "God is dead" himself, alright, it goes in.)

Rudeness

"It is a most painful experience to find, when one has been rude, that one has caused no surprise." -- EVELYN WAUGH

"Don't be fooled by rules. Our fathers were limited by rules. You're taken in by rules. My family only survivedd because they broke them. Rules are for idiots." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS   (the words of his pal "JP" in his 1993 "Two And A Half Men In A Boat")

Rugby

“Come on: this is a sport for gay, middle-class cavemen.” – ROD LIDDLE (In the UK, where they have an “aristocracy”, “middle class” means what we Americans understand as “upper class”.)

“A rugby player’s like a baby: if it’s asleep, don’t wake it. It’s just asking for trouble.” – FAY WELDON

“Like many Americans, I’ve had difficulty understanding the rules of rugby. To me a rugby scrum always looked remarkably like what sometimes goes on in the parking-lot after a dance at which the sponsors were lax about checking for bottles at the door, and I know the only rule for a parking-lot engagement of that sort is to try to take your leave before the police show up.” – CALVIN TRILLIN

Rules

"When people are free to do what they want to do, one of the things they want to do is to make rules." – G.K. CHESTERTON

Rumors

“In his long exposure to gossip and rumour his experience was that the more unbelievable stories were the true ones.” – GUY BELLAMY

Running

“It's unnatural for people to run around city streets unless they are thieves or victims. It makes people nervous to see someone running. I know that when I see someone running on my street, my instincts tell me to let the dog out after him.” – MIKE ROYKO (the old-time Chicago newspaper columnist, and he reminds me of my own vow, when I left the Army, never to voluntarily run against unless 1/ I was playing a game or sport that required it – such as running with the bulls in Pamplona; 2/ I was late for some sort of appointment or transportation, or 3/ I was being chased by someone with ill intent – and I think I've followed that injunction pretty well.)

Russia, (-ns)

“Russian society can be likened to an hour-glass that does not work. Those at the top neither exploit nor oppress those at the bottom; they don’t even govern them; they simply ignore them.” – STEPHEN HOLMES (described only as a “specialist on Russian law”, in 2003)

“Putin is probably not a liberal or a democrat, but he is more liberal and more democratic than seventy percent of the population.” – MIKHAIL KHODORKOVSKY (if you can call a sudden overnight Russian “oligarch” billionaire a poor schnook, then this is the poor schnook ex boss of YUKOS who Putin chucked seemingly open-endedly in the slammer. in 2006.)

“In Russia’s unaccountable political system, the oppressors have liberated themselves from the oppressed.” – STEPHEN HOLMES (a lib and an NYU prof, but credit where it’s due – this is a pretty nifty statement.)

“Russians have a dexterity in lying and a natural talent for falsehood.” – THE MARQUIS ASTOLPHE-LOUIS-LEONOR DE CUSTINE (presciently, in 1839)

“I came here to see a country, but what I find is a theatre. In appearances, everything happens as it does everywhere else. There is no difference except in the very foundation of things.” – THE MARQUIS ASTOLPHE-LEONOR DE CUSTINE

“What’s left of the Soviet Union has hit the apocalyptic jackpot: The Middle East has Islamists, Africa has AIDS, and North Korea has nukes, but only Russia has the lot – a disease-riddled Slav population and a fast-growing Muslim population jostling atop a colossal nuclear arsenal.” – MARK STEYN

“Russia faces the choice between aspiring to be like America or being forced to become like Africa.” – YEGOR GAIDAR (the then- finance Minister, in 1995)

“The real problem with Russian society is less some Manichean struggle between the ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ than the inextricable confusion of the two.” – CHRISTIAN CARYL (of  NEWSWEEK, in 1995)

“Homicidal alcoholics with delusions of grandeur.” – ROMAN GENN (artist and NATIONAL REVIEW’s “house caricaturist” and, incidentally, a refugee of Soviet Russia himself)

“Darwin, if he'd studied Russia instead of Galapagos finches, would have come up with the theory of "survival of the filthiest." – P. J. O’ROURKE

“Does modern Russia have a cause? If the Kremlin has any basic ideology at all, then it is a Ryannair ideology – a brutal, minimalist, we-can’t-believe-you-are-falling-for-this-ideology-crap ideology.” – HUGO RIFKIND (Brit columnist, in September 2008)

“From the Soviet systems’ bleak futility, Russia has transformed itself into an immense gangster state.” – ROB LONG (in Sept. 2008)

"It is a habit of Russians to look for irony and wit where perhaps none exist." -- MICHAEL CAINE      (There's no Russian word for "humor" -- the closest they come to it is "irony".)
 

“There is only one thing more boring than Russians in the flesh, and that is Russians in a novel, tormented by their own stupidity, called by three different names. What is Russian literature? One universal genius, Tolstoy, and six provincial bores.” – CHARLES McCARRY (in his novel “The Secret Lovers”)

"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

"The difficulty in understanding the Russians is that we do not take cognizance of the fact that he is not a European, but an Asiatic, and therefore thinks deviously. We can no more understand a Russian than a Chinaman or a Japanese, and from what I have seen of them, I have no particular desire to understand them, except to ascertain how much lead or iron it takes to kill them. In addition to his other Asiatic characteristics, the Russian have no regard for human life and is an all out son of bitch, barbarian, and chronic drunk." – GEN. GEORGE S. PATTON JR.

“It’s superstitiously unlucky to sound cheerful about the future in Russia.” -- MATT RIDLEY

"Russia is a complete despotism, inhabited by vicious and drunken savages." -- THE ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA      (in 1782) 

“All those who have dealt with the Russians over the centuries have commented on their indifference to the truth. The lie in Russia has indeed become an art form; it is the land in where the lie has been erected as a principle of conduct. (But) because Russia has always been a land of villains it is also a land of heroes and saints.” –  SIR RODERICK BRAITHWAITE (the UK Ambassador there, in 1992)

“So convoluted, contradictory and badly drafted are Russia's laws that more or less anyone who tries to do business is forced to break them; and bureaucrats monetise their potential nuisance value, constantly threatening to close down businesses unless they are paid off. Corruption in Russia is not an aberration from an otherwise wholesome system – it is the basis of the system.” – OWEN MATTHEWS (a British journalist, in Dec. 2010)

“Russia is a great civilization currently run by cynical thieves.” – OWEN MATTHEWS (in June 2016)

"People had assumed that BMWs would come with democracy. Quite a lot did, but quite a lot were driven by those who steered the previous régime." -- NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE

“Russia’s borders do not end anywhere.” -- VLADIMIR PUTIN   (on a billboard in Moscow in January 2024)

“Talk to Russian writers and the conversation will always turn to dead dogs and drunkenness.” – LINOR GORALIK (the Russian “poet and essayist” – every Russian who isn't a geologist or an athlete is a “poet and essayist” – in January 2012)

“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)

“The Russians are either at your feet or at your throat.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

"Russians are big on blowing up hospitals, because they are cruel and cowardly and wrong, with an almost comical commitment to practically melodramatic villainy—murdering and torturing and such." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"A Russian laugh is a laugh with more philosophy than humor in it." -- ROBERT LITTELL

"Their (the Russians he met in Leningrad) manic depression was like a parody of dialectical materialism. Thesis of mania, antithesis of depression, but no synthesis. They seemed an undisciplined lot, given to tears and hard liquor; perhaps they needed communism." -- ANTHONY BURGESS (in 1960, being a wise-ass -- as always)

"Power in Russia has always come from the top, even before communism. The people are used to it. In fact, they expect it." -- JAMES WEBB (Ex-senator, decorated USMC Vietnam War platoon-leader, and author of the great "Fields Of Fire". He said this in 2001)

"The persistence of autocracy in Russia is explained less by the state's strength than by the weakness of society." -- ORLANDO FIGES (in his 2022 book "The Story Of Russia") 

“They're different, Russians. I've been to Russia twice, and I couldn't get my head around it. The men, even when they aren't, give the faint impression of being murderers. The women do a thing we don't quite have a word for, but which is to flirting what an ice-pick is to a tooth-pick.” – HUGO RIFKIND (in March 2012)

“Russian society needs fixed rules, not fixers.” – LILIA SHEVTSOVA (a “political analyst”, in 2012)

“With a shrinking population, declining life-expectancy and a culture of home-made vodka and universal theft, Russia’s only asset is its natural resources, now being plundered to exhaustion.” – PAUL JOHNSON (in March 2012)

“Gorbachev gave Russia freedom of speech. Yeltsin gave it a capitalist economy. But neither gave it what it needed most — the rule of law.” – DAVID SATTER (The author of “It Was a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past”)

“There is one thing important to keep in mind when talking about Russia – it doesn't change.” – NINA KHRUSCHCHEVA                                            (Nikita’s long-suffering, pie-faced wife)

"Russians are used to living in fiction rather than in reality." -- NINA L. KHRUSHCHEVA (Nikita's grand-daughter, recognizable by the middle initial.)

“Anyone with the faintest familiarity with Russian history will be used to the idea that whatever the rest of the world can show in endurance, suffering, bloodthirst or cruelty the Russians will generally trump it without turning a hair.” – SAM LEITH

“Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country.” -- JOHN McCAIN

"Russia is a pretty crappy country. I concede, yes, Russian literature is great. But near-constant war, lots of political oppression, and brutal winters are great incubators of top-notch novels." -- JONAH GOLDBERG    

“Drinking is the joy of the Rus/ We cannot exist without it.” – PRINCE VLADIMIR OF KIEV               (in the, er, tenth century. Shows you how much nothing’s changed, despite Lenin’s dictum that “The proletariat does not need drunkenness – they need only clarity, clarity, and again clarity.” Pull the other one, Vlad….)

“Everybody's right and everybody's unhappy, as they say in Russia.” – MARY WAKEFIELD

“Putin's is a regime run by its intelligence service, which puts on a series of political happenings to suit the political needs of the moment. 'Politics as spectacle' is an especially valuable technique for a kleptocratic regime.” – JOHN O'SULLIVAN                                                                                                                                (Of NATIONAL REVIEW and THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, here writing in the UK SPECTATOR, in   June 2014)

“Russia, always a great power, looks for cohesion in a kind of vast collective persecution complex.” – MATTHEW PARRIS

"Merely Russian business as usual: kill, deport, lie, repeat -- though not necessarily in that order." -- TIBOR FISCHER (In May 2023)

"Many Russians seem to have this genetic predisposition to alcoholism and serfdom." -- TIBOR FISCHER  

"The only way to be an effective leader in Russia is to have been chief of its intelligence service." -- SERGEY NARYSHKIN      (the boss of Russia's post-KGB FBI, the SVR, as quoted by Mike Pompeo)
                                                                                                                                                                                  

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

"When it comes to espionage, whatever your brilliant new idea is, the Russians have already done it. Probably rather well." -- JOHN SCHINDLER

"Russia does not have friends. It has puppets and clients." -- JOHN SCHINDLER

"Bismarck was supposed to have said that the most important fact of the twentieth century would be that Americans speak English; it is not impossible that the most important condition of the next hundred years might be that the Russians are, after all, white." -- JOHN SCHINDLER (the noted ex-NSA guy said this on 6 April 2021)

"When you're in the USA or Europe the Russians are just assholes. When you're unlucky enough to live next to them the Russians are far worse, a threat to your very life and way of life. If you think Russia is a model for anything except gangsterism you are very seriously fucked." -- JOHN SCHINDLER (on 15 March 2022)

“The problem with talking about Russia is you always sound crazy.” -- MOLLY McKEW (a “foreign policy and strategy consultant” and writer for “The Washington Free Beacon”, in Sept. 2016)

“Putin's land retains only nominal links with communism, and has been transformed into an authoritarian gangster society, much less dangerous than the old Soviet Union partly because it is smaller, and also because its leaders seek only personal wealth and power, rather than to promote an ideology. Even the cruelties are much reduced: the occasional enemy of the state is murdered in the street by hired killers, but dissidents are no longer executed by hundres and thousands in state prisons.” -- MAX HASTINGS (in December 2016)

"In Russia, the President assassinates you." -- BILL GERTZ

"Moscow. Stench, stone, opulence, poverty, debauchery." -- LEO TOLSTOY (in 1881)

 “Things in Russia are never as good as they seem. Nor as bad.”  – BENJAMIN DISRAELI

“The secret to understanding Russia is to realize that everyone over there, every man woman and child, is dead drunk, all the time. Except for Putin.” -- JACK JOLIS

“Russia is not really the country for someone who’s trying to give up drinking.” -- ALAN JOLIS (My late kid brother, the one-time “Soviet Studies” major at Brown. He warned me.)

"More than by any political system, we Russians are all held hostage by vodka. It menaces and it chastises; it demands sacrifices. It is both a catalyst of procreation and its scourge. It dictates who is born and who dies. In short, vodka is the Russian god." -- VICTOR EROFEYEV (The Russian writer, in THE NEW YORKER, in 2002) 

"If I was a Russian woman I would be lesbian. Russian men are not good looking." -- KARL LAGERFELD

"Americans are perpetually ambivalent if not resentful about the dependence of other nations on their power and eager to wean them from it. For Russia, on the other hand, cultivating such dependy is precisely the prupose and the proof of its great-power status." -- VANCE SERCHUK (of the KKR Global Institute, 30 Sept., NR)

"Increasingly, people do everything early in Russia. Because there isn't much time." -- MARTIN AMIS

"The rule in Russia is: This thing, like every other, is not what it seems; and all you know for sure is that it is even worse than it looks." -- MARTIN AMIS

"Yes, I know, Russia's busy. There's that other feature of national life: permanent desperation." -- MARTIN AMIS

“In Russia for hundreds of years resentments and jealousies were resolved by denunciation and arrest. Permanent  desperation is a feature of national life, and when it comes to death, Russia remains a land of opportunity.” -- MARTIN AMIS

"Russians who hate other Russians go to great lengths to live long, the better to do their hating." -- BERNARD LEVIN (the long-time columnist for the Times Of London)

 “These days Putin’s Russia doesn’t even try very hard to be a beacon on a hill. It just wants everyone else to look as rotten as itself.” -- PETER POMERANZEV (Soviet-born UK-based journalist, and Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics, in Aug. 2020.)

“Perhaps the secret to understanding Russian history lies in its grammar: it lacks a pluperfect tense. In Latin, English and German the pluperfect describes actions completed at a definite point in the past. Early Russian had such a tense, but it was erased. This grammatical lack costs its speakers dear. Russian history never becomes history. Like a stubborn page in a new book, it refuses to turn over.” -- IGOR POMERANZEV (Peter Pomeranzev’s dad – the Soviet dissident, writer, and exile. He wrote this in London, some time in the 80s.)

“Cars were not meant for Russians. First of all, Ryussians didn’t have enough roads free of frost heaves and mud wallows. More important, vehicles capable of any speed should not be placed in the hands of people given to vodka and melancholy.” -- MARTIN CRUZ SMITH

“Moscow is a scary town. It is. Why? I’ll tell you. Because there’s no tradition of private property in Russia. First of all there were workers and peasants who had nothing, and the nobility owned the country. Then there were workers and peasants with nothing and the Party owned the country. Now there are still workers and peasants with nothing and the country is owned, as it’s always been owned, by whoever has the biggest fists. Unless you understand that, you can’t begin to understand Russia.” -- ROBERT HARRIS (the novelist, in 1998)

"On the Russian chessboard the black pieces are clamped, only the white can move." -- M.J. SVOBODA (a resident of Petersfield, Hampshire {England} in April 2022, and no, I don't know what he meant either -- but it looks nifty, and would make somebody a nice epigram)

“Here in Russia, the issue is at least refreshingly clear: the State is merely a group of largely unreformed Communist Party apparatchiks who control large numbers of armed me. The mafia too has armed me. But at least it pretends to be nothing except what it is: a business. Whereas the State pretends to be God.” -- JAMES HAWES (the novelist, in 1997)

“Imagine a country four times the size of Europe, run entirely by a White Trash Vengeance Militia, convinced that they are being cheated of their place in the sun by a vast and probably Jewish-led conspiracy of foreigners. And armed with eight thousand-odd nuclear bombs and an enormous number of perfectly adequate tanks.” -- JAMES HAWES

“The first thing you have to learn about Russia, which is:  no Westerner can drink with Russians and live.” -- JAMES HAWES

"There was no such thing as law in Russia. Law was merely the jumping-off point for further negotiations." -- ROBIN WHITE (in his 1997 thriller, "Siberian Light")

"Russians hate success. They'd rather everybody be miserable than one person live happily." -- ROBIN WHITE

"The Russian army hasn't fought a conventional war against a near-peer since 1945. It's out of practice, poorly trained, poorly led, and poorly motivated. It does have plenty of heavy armaments (thermobaric bombs). It can destroy, it can't fight." -- CHUCK DEVORE (the ex-US Army Intel Officer of THE FEDERALIST, in March 2022)

"Russia is a sort of Saudi Arabia, with snow instead of sand." -- DR. JEREMY STOCKER (of the Royal United Services Institute, in January 2022)

“The secret of politics? Make a good treaty with Russia.” -- OTTO VON BISMARCK (suitably snide, but woefully obsolete in Putinoid Russia....) 

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

"Crime-ridden and corrupt, Russia is like Congo in the snow." -- AIDAN HARTLEY (In April 2022)

"A majority of Russians believe they are free, despite all the repressive actions of the Putin regime, This dominant Russian definition of freedom is one of the major reasons that Putin enjoys the support he does because his economy has continued to deliver, his policies have maintained stability, and his isolationist and aggressive stance has eliminated for most comparisons with the West.

That doesn’t mean that the majority of Russians “have no idea about the value of freedom of speech, fair elections, the need to criticize the authorities and so on, but for them such ideas are in the sphere of ‘politics’ from which they are alienated, something that fuels 'the most anti-elitist attitudes of populists'.

Perhaps almost three out of four agree about what would be the optimal arrangements if Russia were prosperous and stable, but they aren’t prepared to take the risk of losing what they have and fear that getting involved in politics will only put them and their country in danger of precisely that.

And so they support Putin and declare that they feel free – and they are even grateful to him for helping to solve their own deeply ingrained inferiority complex by isolating Russia ;" -- LEV GUDKOV     (a prominent Russian sociologist, in March 2024)

“Russiagate”

"It's not only populist halfwits who are conspiracy-minded. Look at the fervor with which bogus reports of Putin engineering Trump's 2016 victory were embraced inside the Beltway; suave Democrats and never-Trumpers started babbling like true believers at a UFO convention." --DAMIAN THOMPSON (Editor-in-chief of THE CATHOLIC HERALD in the UK, in April 2020)

“In sum, a DNC-linked lawyer – partners with a Clinton lawyer – fabricated a Trump/Russia link, fed it to DNC operatives masquerading as journalists, had Hillary trumpet it, then lied to FBI about who he worked for. Russiagate in a nutshell.” – GLENN GREENWALD (Except it was even worse, as the whole scam was approved of, and pushed along, by CIA boss Brennan and FBI boss Comey. And I only include it here because 1/ it's a pretty concise definition of the scandal and 2/ it comes from the infamous leftist, although apparently chastened, poofter Greenwald.)

Ruthlessness

“No country was ever saved by good men, because good men will not go to the lengths that may be necessary to save the country.” – NICK SHORT (US blogger, “Politically Short”)

"Fair play for one and all, that's my motto. But I don't mind playing unfair once in a while to bring it about." -- WILLIAM BOYD (actually said by a character in his 1993 novel "The Blue Afternoon")

Rwanda

"Of course I was scared (when I saw the French soldier) - he had a machine gun, and I'd heard the stories. But I was less scared than when I saw the Interahamwe - I'd rather be killed by a white than a black. Who wouldn't prefer a machine gun to a machete?" -- RENE CABYUHIRA                           (10 years old at the time of the 1994 genocide. Via my daughter Annie, who interviewed him for the Wall Street Journal in 2010)

“About Rwanda I can't bear to think let alone wisecrack.” – P. J. O'ROURKE (about which everything else he will wisecrack...)