S

 

Sacrifice

"The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master." – AYN RAND


Saddam Hussein

“Within his regime, Saddam ruled like Stalin: Everyone in the elite was a potential victim, and knew it. Outside the regime, he ruled more like Hitler: since oil-rich Iraq didn’t need Soviet-style slave labor, Saddam simply killed his adversaries.” - GERARD ALEXANDER (Prof of Politics at Univ. of Virginia)

 

“Law: is two lines above my signature.” - SADDAM HUSSEIN

Sadness

“Every man has his secret sorrows, which the world knows not, and oftentimes we call a man cold when he is only sad.” – HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

 

Safety

“Yes, Mom, the Scotch goes under the sink in front of the ammonia. If a child gets in there, he'll drink the Scotch first. It's for safety.” – JOHN UILDRIKS (A friend of Dave Burge’s)

 

“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

 

“Essentially, the health-and-safety agenda programs us to live life to the empty in order to live dying to the full.” – STEWART DAKERS (in the SPECCIE, April 2016)

 

“Obsession with safety is the very opposite of ambition.” – LIONEL SHRIVER

 

“No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home at Weston-super-Mare.” – KINGSLEY AMIS

 

“American health and safety concerns make the old penal colonies of French Guiana seem as relaxed as the Hugh Hefner Playboy swimming pool in El Lay. Lawsuits by greedy lawyers have turned America int one big prison. You can’t swim anywhere, you can’t say anything, you can’t write anything. Verboten is the operative word. At times I think Americans might all just die of fright, their last words being ‘OMG!’” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS (on 8 August 2020)

 

"I've been vaguely aware for some time that the word 'unsafe' carries mystical powers." -- MELISSA KITE (in 20 February 2021)

" 'Unsafe': that is the term the liberal left uses to close down debate and in some cases to insist that debate is harmful. It is of course a travesty of the meaning of the word 'unsafe'." -- ROD LIDDLE

“'Safetyism' refers to a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people become unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns." -- JONATHAN HAIDT (An author and professor at NYU)

"A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for." -- JOHN A. SHEDD (1850-1926 -- the one-time Pres. and CEO of Chicago's Marshall Field & Co.)

"Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun." -- C.S. LEWIS

“ 'Safety' is always invoked by authoritarian regimes to clampdown on free speech." -- TOBY YOUNG

Saints/Sainthood

"There are no groups of saints and there are no sainted groups." --ROY CAMERON (my X-pal)

“Sanctuary”

“They are not sanctuary cities. They are criminal hideouts.” – JAMES WOODS (the excellent Hollywood actor and rare Hollywood conservative)

 

Sanders, Bernie

"Bernie Sanders is a Grade A nutcase politically, but, for destroying Hillary Clinton’s (remaining) soul, I congratulate him.” – CAMERON GRAY (A conservative American blogger who writes for “NRA News”, “App Lives”& Ricochet)

 

"Who better to get America back to work than a guy who was actually fired from a Vermont hippie commune for being too lazy." – DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE

 

"Bernie Sanders has stood still in time, an irritable red ant suspended in amber." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

"What Senator Sanders stands for is the continuation of a very old and very dumb kind of politics: adolescent anti-Americanism." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“There's nothing funny about Bernie Sanders. He's a sad, old, delusional crank shouting gibberish in the street. He belongs in a mental health facility, not a laugh line.” – P. J. O’ROURKE (in 29 Jan 2020)

 

San Francisco

“San Francisco is mellow. The men are poorly dressed, the gays are in charge, and the women are on Prozac.” – TOM BETHEL (He said this rather a long time ago, but I’m pretty sure it’s still true today.)

 

“San Francisco smells of caution and reserve.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS (He said this in 1995. If he went back today, I think he’d find that the place smells rather earthier.”

 

Sanitation

“The Department of Sanitation is obviously discriminatory. There's much more trash on the streets in poor neighborhoods than there is in neighborhoods where the affluent live. There is also clear discrimination in who the Department of Sanitation hires... Garbage pickup day is a trigger warning for me. It is hurtful to see very few people like myself – in their 70s and wearing coats and ties – emptying garbage cans into sanitation trucks. True, I can't lift a garbage can. But many other municipal agencies hire people who can't do their jobs. Why should the Department of Sanitation be different? Next, the Department of Sanitation causes pollution of the atmosphere – you can smell it! It harms the Earth's ecology by dumping dirty garbage into the ground. ‘Landfills’ are nothing but land filled with dirty waste... And studies show that the Earth is losing dirt at a rapid rate due to rising sea levels from climate change... causing dirty oceans. Funding for the Department of Sanitation could be reallocated to community programs such as ‘sanitation counseling’ where teams of trained trash experts promote and support households with the goal of reducing waste output through ‘smart garbage’." – P. J. O’ROURKE       (in August 2021)

Sarcasm

“You have delighted us long enough” – JANE AUSTEN (In “Pride and Prejudice”, and this is really just an example of sarcasm....)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

"Honey, tact is for people who aren't witty enough to be sarcastic." – MEGAN MULLALLY                                                    (Witty and sarcastic actress)

"I'll speak for myself, but there's a lot of humor to be found in sarcasm and darkness. You talk to any paramedic," -- NICOLAS CAGE                                                                                                                                                                                 (Humorous, dark and sarcastic actor)

"Quipping well is the best revenge." -- JULIE BURCHILL

"Sarcasm. I wonder who invented it? Whoever it was didn't get enough credit. It's not like we can get through our days without it. That made it a lot more important than the cotton gin or the telegraph." -- KYLE SMITH


Satire

“Satire is what closes on Saturday night.” - GEORGE S. KAUFMAN

Satisfaction/Dissatisfaction                                                                                                                      

“It's better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” – JOHN STUART MILL                                                                    (It is? )

Saturday

“Anthropologists have noticed that almost every tribe on earth suffers from the belief that something exciting will happen on Saturday night if only one dresses up colourfully and stays up late.” – MILES KINGTON (a very funny English writer who, among much else, in 1995 wrote a play called “Waiting For Stoppard”)

 

“Saturday nights in strange cities can alienate the calmest of travelers.” – PAUL THEROUX (a Saturday night my wife and I once spent in Newcastle-upon-Tyne comes to mind)

 

Saudi Arabia

“The Saudis are like shrimp. You may like them, but there is no way you could say they are kosher.” - SHIMON PERES (the perpetual Israeli pol and one-time PM.)

 

“Saudi camel-drivers-turned-self-proclaimed royals do not like to pay for the mess they leave behind their ample posteriors, and they definitely do not like to pay for their women. (I've often wondered if they really think women stay with them for their looks.)” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

“Saudi and Gulf culture – another misnomer if ever there was one.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

"Nobody ever wins when dealing with the Saudis -- who are as royal as my jockstrap." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

“The House of Saud is indeed foul, corrupt, authoritarian, medieval and brutal. But it is also markedly much, much less of all those things that any government which might conceivably replace it.” – ROD LIDDLE

 

“In Saudi Arabia, the rulers are exponentially more liberal than the population – and also rather more pro-western.” – ROD LIDDLE

 

“We have a Saudi crown prince who is being more frank about Wahhabi-inspired terrorism than the British.” – JOHN R. BRADLEY (on then-Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in THE SPECTATOR, in 10 March 2018)

 

“Morally, it is not much fun having to choose between Saudi And Iran, but at least the former is the ally of the West.” – CHARLES MOORE

 

"Saudi women, in fact, don't exist at all -- they're small voids hidden completely under their vestments. A black-cloaked woman moving down a pale, sunstruck alley seems a shimmering, absent darkness headed out some unfathomable, maybe fatal, errand." -- DENIS JOHNSON

 

“Like Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman is so hated by the press, he might as well be a Republican.” – DAVID REABOI (in THE FEDERALIST, 28 Feb. 2021)

"The progressive Left hates MBS (Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and the heir to the Saudi throne), in spite of the fact that he is leading the greatest cultural reform in the kingdom's history. He will prove to be one of the most important leaders of his time, a truly historic figure on the world stage." -- MIKE POMPEO

Scandinavia

"The Scandinavian welfare states, which express so well a sense of obligation to distant strangers, are beginning to make it more difficult to express a sense of obligation to those with whom one shares family ties." -- ALAN WOLFE       (in his 1989 book "Whose Keeper?")                                                   

Scarcity  

"The creation of wealth is not remotely a liberal goal. Rather than create it, intellectuals prefer to redistribute it, to allocate scarcity. Earth Day in 1970 was a turning point. The environmental movement encouraged liberals to impose scarcity on the lower orders." -- TOM BETHELL

«Schadenfreude»

« There is nothing so disturbing to one’s well-being and judgment as to see a friend get rich. » -- CHARLES KINDELBERGER (described to me only as “an American economist”)

 

“No man sympathises with the sorrows of vanity.” -- DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON

 

“Nothing on this Earth is more entertaining than smug people in a panic.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

 

“The problem with political obsessive’s is hat they instinctively judge ideas not according to their effectiveness but by the extent to which they annoy their opponents. A policy is judged not by how well it works, but by the degree to which it reduces the contentment of those social groups whose statues you most want to see fall in relation to one’s own.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“Its not just enough to fly in first class, I have to know my friends are flying in coach.” – JEREMY FROMMER (a financier from New Jersey, as reported by my pal Sam Glasser, the lawyer-slumlord)

 

“One’s own rise offers a precarious happiness, shadowed as it is by the threat of reversal and others’ greater triumphs; but the downfall of another provides permanent satisfaction.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

"I read the financial pages not so much to find tips for the best way of increasing my savings, as to come up with a huge concern (preferably a bank, of course) which has gone down the hole without even time to say glug-glug-glug." -- BERNARD LEVIN (the long-time columnist for the Times Of London)

"Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little." -- GORE VIDAL

"There are sources in the Jewish tradition that warn against exultation at the downfall of one's enemies. But I am not Jewish." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY

Schiff, Adam

"Adam Schiff you are so full of the stuff I dig out of my bull pens that if somebody throws one more cow patty at you , you will tip over backwards A human being cannot harbor as much hate as you carry in your heart without it destroying them eventually." -- CHARLIE DANIELS


“Adam Schiff: You’re a two faced, forked tongued, sniveling little man without honor, loyalty or patriotism. You disgrace your oath of fealty. You’re a muck raking liar who makes a mockery out of your office You’re not in service to this nation, you’re in disservice to it.” — CHARLIE DANIELS (Crikey, the late country singer had it in for the commie-poofter Senator from Commiefornia, and good on ol’ Charlie, sez I….)

Schumer, Chuck

"Is there anybody lower than Chuck Schumer? Anybody? Even the thug Governor Cuomo -- he's the Duke of Windsor compared to Schumer." -- MARK SIMONE (5 Oct.'20)

Schwartzennegger, Arnold

“Arnold Schwartzenneger looks like a condom full of walnuts.” – CLIVE JAMES (the late English author, TV “personality” and general wise-ass)

Science, (-tists)

“Science cannot offer any help with the knottier problems besetting the human race. It can remedy bad smells, bad pains, and bad roads, but not bad behavior, bad government, or bad ideas.” -- JOHN DERBYSHIRE (the English-born American author, mathematician and curmudgeon.)

 

“The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, and social. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the esteem of our peers. For most people, wanting to know the truth about the world is way, way down the list. Scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought, restricted to small cliques whom the generality of citizens regard with dislike and mistrust. There is probably a sizable segment in any population that believes scientists should be rounded up and killed.” - JOHN DERBYSHIRE

 

“Science makes a marvelous servant of humanity, but a very poor master.” - MICHAEL NOVAK

 

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts” – RICHARD FEYNMAN                                                                                          (Nobel Prize-winning physicist)

 

“If a science has an adjective it probably isn't science.” – RICHARD FEYNMAN                                                                              (he was referring specifically to “environmental science” – but it would be just as applicable to “political science”)

 

“There's nothing wrong with middlebrow science. People like to learn things. I enjoy reading about theoretical physics – or rather enjoy reading the first paragraph; after that it's gibberish. 'The quoson beams interact with weak-attractor fizbin particles along the visible puce spectrum, confirming theories that fubari waves diffuse the hork factor.'.” – JAMES LILEKS

 

“If there's one thing that terrifies the Party of Science, it's science.” – JAMES LILEKS

 

"But science is not a belief system. It is not an alternative to religion." -- JAMES LILEKS

“Magic is just science that we don’t understand yet.” – ARTHUR C. CLARKE

"The excitability of scientints, particularly when they are talking gibberish, is a matter that would repay close study, and a substantial university grant." -- BERNARD LEVIN (the long-time columnist for the Times Of London) 

“This is a hard thing for some to hear, but science operates as magic for most of us. Most of us don't really know how things like electricity, copy machines, computers, medicine, and rising-crust pizza actually work. We're just told that scientists worked it out and we believe it because that stuff works. I open up my laptop and it lights up (I'm talking about my portable computer, sickos). But Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law still holds true: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“Look, science, unlike God, really doesn’t care if you believe in it. And casting doubt on one part of it doesn’t break the spell. That’s the whole point of science; it’s not magic.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

"Science is skepticism." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“Agenda-driven scientists are our white-coated priesthood and we must heed their warnings and respond accordingly. Respond how? By increasing government spending. That never changes. More government will be needed to solve whatever crisis has been spotted by the radar science. Although when you think about it, more government is not a particularly 'scientific' response to any crisis. How many problems are solved by government spending? Government workers were certainly helped. They enjoy lifetime tenure, and more money helps to separate them from the problems they are supposed to be addressing.” – TOM BETHELL

 

“A problem is discerned, or invented, the government steps in, and then the problem seems only to grow more serious. And that suits the scientists just fine. They are more interested in their own funding, tenure, and security than in any detailed accounting of progress or decline in in their own field.” – TOM BETHELL

 

“These people invoke ‘science’ as if they are summoning a Norse god. Science isn't an incantation, but a process that is never fully settled.” – JON GABRIEL (editor of “Ricochet”)

 

“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass, God is waiting for you.” – WERNER HEISENBERG (German physicist, winner of the 1932 Physics Nobel Prize for the “invention of quantum mechanics” and, you'll    notably remember, the muse and alias of Walter White in “Breaking Bad”)

 "The progress of Science is generally regarded as a kind of clean, rational advance along a straight ascending line; in fact it has followed a zigzag course, at times almost more bewildering than the evolution of political thought." -- ARTHUR KOESTLER      (the influential English anti-Stalinist, author and friend of Orwell's)

"I never quite understand what science worshipers think science is." -- FRANK J. FLEMING     (in  April, 2024)

“A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections – a mere heart of stone.” – CHARLES DARWIN

 

“Physics is the only science, all else is stamp-collecting.” – JOHN BATCHELOR (the late-night radio guy – and he said this was a “proverb” but I never heard such a proverb, so as far as I'm concerned, he said it.)

 

"To say that the fetus is a person if the mother wants it and it's not if she doesn't is not science, it's spin." -- WILLIAM McGURN

 

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

“If we are not able to ask skeptical questions of scientists, to interrogate those who tell us something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along.” -- CARL SAGAN (in 1996)  

"There is no such thing as 'consensus science'. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period." -- MICHAEL CRICHTON

 

"Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something, reach for your wallet because you're being had." -- MICHAEL CRICHTON

 

"The most important words in science are not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny,...'." -- ISAAC ASIMOV

 

“It’s not science I don’t trust, it’s the scientists.” -- JAMES DELINGPOLE

 

“Conservatives are right to be skeptical. Take any politicized issue is connected to some disagreement about scientific fact. I do not believe there is a single case in the last couple of decades where a major scientific organisation  took a position that went against the platform of the Democratic Party. What an odd coincidence that ‘science’ always, without exception, supports the liberal worldview.” -- NATHAN COFNAS (of Oxford University, and although his general gist is spot-on, he neglects the major exception to this: biology.)

 

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

 

“There is no such thing as brainwashing. It is a concept with no scientific basis, generally regarded as pseudoscience. It is mainly a literary device, one popularized by ‘The Manchurian Candidate’. ‘Brainwashing’ is right up there with ‘recovered memories,’ ‘multiple-personality disorder,’ homeopathy, chiropractic, reiki, the anti-vaccine movement, and the terror of GMO vegetables in the catalogue of voguish nonsense that has made its way at least partly into the mainstream of American life. Everybody loves science — until they don’t.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"Whenever I hear the phrase 'the science', I reach for my revolver." -- TOBY YOUNG (channeling Hermann Goering, who famously said the same thing about "culture")

"When skepticism becomes a dirty word, science is in deep trouble." -- CARL HENEGHAN (a prominent, Oxford-based, English medical doctor)

“No scientific hypothesis deserves the name unless capable of being falsified.” – SIR KARL POPPER

 

“Regarding the scientific method, the point is that whenever we propose a solution to a problem, we ought to try as hard as we can to overthrow our solution, rather than defend it.” – SIR KARL POPPER

 

"Science is not, as the mass media seems to believe, certain. It is a collection of competing hypotheses. And scientists are not wholly objective -- they are tied to their various paradigms and terribly reluctant to give them up even when compelling evidence shows them to be bunk." -- ROD LIDDLE

"It is no use following the science if the science comes from only one direction and there is no open debate." -- ROD LIDDLE

"I was at school before science was invented." -- (LORD) PETER CARRINGTON (1918-2018.  Margaret Thatcher's Foreign Secretary.)

 

“Safe spaces, diversity quotas, gender-neutral pronouns, culturally relative facts,  heteronormative  hegemony. What is my woke-quotient? At least as far as science is concerned, it’s a satisfactory zero. Science is not a patriarchal instrument of colonial oppression. Nor is it a social construct. It’s simply true.” – RICHARD DAWKINS (the famous atheist)

 

“10 out of 10 scientists agree with whoever funded them.” – JAROME BELL   (a black conservative retired USN officer and GOP candidate for Congress from Virginia Beach, VA, in July 2021)

 

“Science begins by keeping track of time.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

“Science is like a feast. There’s something there for everybody.” -- SAMUEL M'CHEYNE GLASSER

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

"Every time I hear the words 'Schrödinger's Cat' I reach for my gun." -- STEPHEN HAWKING (echoing Hermann Goering's famous "Every time I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my revolver.')

“Engineering or technology is the making of things that did not previously exist, whereas science is the discovering of things that have long existed.” -- DAVID P. BILLINGTON (who died in 2018, was an author and Prof. of engineering at Princeton) 

"When you have to call things ‘Science,’ they aren’t.” -- PETER THIEL (at "NatCon2" in October 2021)

"If you can’t debate it, it’s not science." -- CARL GOTTLIEB (in Sept. 2023)

"If science can't be questioned it's not science anymore it's propaganda and that's the truth" ~ AARON RODGERS                    (the star quarterback for the Green Bay Packers, in December 2021)

"In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." -- GALILEO GALILEI (1564-1642)

“Saying ‘trust the science’ is the most anti-science thing you can say. Questioning everything particularly the results is how you do science.” – TIM KENNEDY                                                                                                                                                               (The professional UFC fighter who also is a serving US Army Special Forces sergeant)                                                          

“We own the science.” — MELISSA FLEMING (The UN Under-Secretary for Public Communications, in Sept. ‘22, and a Deep State totalitarian if ever there was one.)

“It is not as easy as some may, in this culture war, now want to portray it, that the XX or the XY is the clear distinction between the men and women. This is scientifically not true anymore," -- THOMAS BACH        (Head of the International Olympic Committee, in Aug. '24) 

“Science Fiction”

« As a recently retired university teacher, I can’t help being slightly drawn to any form of writing that reaches no part of its audience through compulsion. » -- KINGSLEY AMIS (no mean hand at sci-fi himself….)

 

“90 percent of science fiction is crud, but then 90 percent of everything is crud.” – THEODORE STURGEON (a science fiction writer, as it happens.)

 

"Science fiction shares with pornography the distinction of being a genre that can be described as either 'soft' or 'hard'." -- JAMES BRAID (Washington Free Beacon, April 10, 2016 )

 

“Science, The Party of”

“Astrology has become yet another non-falsifiable means by which liberal Democrats reassure one another of the infallibility of their prior beliefs. The ‘party of science’, a.k.a. the party of panic about GMO foods, nuclear power and climate change, is increasingly the party of moonbats.” – KYLE SMITH (in Nov. 2019)

“If there's one thing that terrifies the Party of Science, it's science.” – JAMES LILEKS

“Science vs. Religion”

« Science is directed at verifiable truth, and despite retrograde ideologies that cling to the scientific establishment, the more that science illuminates the darkness, the more whatever is seen appears wonderfully coherent, even if not entirely predictable or comprehensible. » -- MARK HELPRIN (Eh ? Not sure I agree with this, or even, come to that, understand it, but as it was written by the author of « A Winter’s Tale », one of the best novels ever, anything he says is OK by me…)

 

“Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.” – ALBERT EINSTEIN (oh, and by the way, Einstein NEVER said “The Devil is in the details.” What he actually said was “I want to know His (God’s) thoughts, the rest are details.")

 

Scientology

“If L. Ron Hubbard was really serious about creating a cult ruled by fear, money, and mind-control, he'd have founded a college.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE


Scotland

"What enemy would invade Scotland, where there is nothing to be got?" - DR. JOHNSON

 

“It requires a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch understanding. Their only idea of wit is laughing immoderately at stated intervals.” - SYDNEY SMITH

 

“But the Scots don’t really exist, either, except in the demented skirl of the bagpipe - a low moan of tribal stupidity and, in the end, nastiness.” - ROD LIDDLE

 

"Every report I read about life north of the border suggests very strongly that this (Scotland) is a country which has just bought a one-way ticket for the Booby Hatch Express; a manifestation of a palpable insanity in a people who 200 or so years ago were the best-educated and most thoughtful in the entire world." -- ROD LIDDLE

“Take Scotland. Most anywhere you go around the planet, from Hong Kong to Hudson's Bay, almost everything that works was created and developed by Scotsmen. Now the whole joint's a statist swamp where government spending accounts for 75 per cent of the economy and the menfolk idle away their days on a diet of drugs and fried Mars Bars with a life expectancy in the less salubrious parts of Glasgow getting down to West African standards. They'll never make any contribution to the world again. Second Amendment types insist the same thing could never happen here, but they underestimate the transformative power of government at their peril...” -- MARK STEYN

 

“It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.” – P.G. WODEHOUSE

"Nobody has built an attractive house in Scotland for centuries. For despite being a people of considerable artistry, violence and taste (sic), the only thing the Scots seem to pay no attention to in this world is the sightliness of their homes. Their lack of interest in beautiful architecture rises almost to the heroic." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY (in June 2023)

“Indeed, I come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.” – JAMES BOSWELL (the biographer of Dr. Johnson, of course....)

 

"Scotland is ruled by socialists who want revenge against England, but revenge against nothing that they can clearly define"-- ROGER SCRUTON

 

“I'm afraid Scotland's like Greece -- all of the good elements long ago de-assed the area for ideologically more convivial climes around the world (mainly the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and even, long ago, South Africa and Rhodesia), leaving behind a rump of embittered farniente socialist layabouts, cranks, grumps, incompetents and inadequates.” – JACK JOLIS

 

“In 1776, Scotland was home to Adam Smith. Today, it’s a lovely cesspool of weak-tea socialism.” – JONAH GOLDBERG (in 14 November 2020)

 

"In the 130 years from Frances Hutcheson in the 1720s to Thomas Carlyle in the 1850s, Scotland was the most brilliant country on Earth: a greater array of philosophers, writers, engineers, geologists and mathematicians per capita than any country, even Germany, and an intellectual domination of Europe." -- ROD LIDDLE

"This is the problem with Scotland, I find. You never know whether the next person you meet is going to offer you his bone marrow or nut you with his forehead." -- BILL BRYSON

 

"We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilization." -- VOLTAIRE (no longer, pal, no longer.) 

 

Sea, The

“The sea endures no makeshifts. If a thing is not exactly right it will be vastly wrong." - JOHN BUCHAN (the great British novelist. “The 39 Step”, among many other ripping yarns)

 

"Lots of stuff happens on the high seas that wouldn't or couldn't happen on land. It was a different planet out here; a watery grave, waiting to receive the dead." -- NELSON DEMILLE

 

“The sea has never been friendly to man. At most, it has been the accomplice of human restlessness." – JOSEPH CONRAD

 

“I don’t hate all seas. I like the Atlantic. That’s my sea. Breakers rolling in. Sand-castles eaten up by the onrushing tide. Sand left glistening by the receding tide. Limpets drying out on the rocks. Streams to dam. Tongues of sea flicking their way in, sliding into rock-pools. Rock-pools coming to life again. Tides, change, drama, that’s my sea. The Med just sits there, like a lukewarm soup. Disgusting.” – DAVID NOBBS

 

“The internet is morally neutral, like the sea.” -- TANYA GOLD

 

"All of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean and therefore we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. So when we go back to the sea -- whether it is to sail or to watch it -- we are going back from whence we came." -- JOHN F. KENNEDY (in Newport, RI, in 1962)

"Even on land we're all at sea." -- GRAHAM SWIFT

"The seas are as they ever were: a nation to themselves, beyond the laws of civilization." -- WILBUR SMITH

“The Pacific is the desert of waters – we seem to have sailed out of the inhabited world and the Grampus to have become the Frankenstein of the ocean.” -- CAPTAIN SIR HENRY BYAM MARTIN                                                                                        (the captain of HMS Grampus, in 1846)

“The Pacific Ocean is for leisure. But the Atlantic is for work.” -- NIGEL WILLIAMS

Secrecy

“In the good old days of the Cold War, Athenian hacks used to say that there were only two countries where secrets were safe: China and Greece. In the former nobody talked. In the latter everyone did, hence no one believed a word.” - TAKI THEODORACOPPULOS

 

“It is crucial to demonstrate to foreign governments that we can keep secrets if we want them to tell us secrets.” – ANDREW C. McCARTHY

 

"The alternative to secrecy isn't always openness: sometimes it is misunderstanding, confusion and flying blind." -- MATTHEW PARRIS

“Telling the truth with a jesting air, he had discovered, was the safest way of protecting your secrets." -- DAVID LODGE

“Difficult things are almost always accomplished entirely in secret.” – DANIEL SILVA (the American thriller writer)

 

“Secrecy is part of the currency of bureaucratic life, there to be traded. The only way to keep secrets is not to tell them until they rust, when no one is interested.” – ALAN JUDD

 

“You can have openness or you can have government, but you cannot have open government. Not effective government, anyway.” – ALAN JUDD

 

“Always better to hide a big secret with a little one.”

“Why?”

“People look no further.” – ALAN JUDD

 

“Three people can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.” – BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

"Everybody always talks too goddamn much. Always." -- WILLIAM J. CASEY (when he was Director of the CIA, in conversation with a small group of about 5 or 6 people -- which included me) 

"The penetration of secrets, whether personal or public, is one of human nature's abiding attractions." -- BRYAN FORBES (seems self-evident, but it makes a good corollary to another self-evident statement, viz., Bill Casey, above)

"The secret of a happy life is to have no secrets." -- CHARLES McCARRY     (even if true, is there such a thing as a human being without secrets?)

“Americans like to have an idea where things are going, so they tend to not like irony or secrecy.” – JOE QUEENAN

"It's not enough just to steal a secret. It must be done in a way that the theft remains undetected." -- JAMES JESUS ANGLETON

"It is not me that can't keep a secret. It's the people I tell it to that can't." -- ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Secretaries

"You always can't help but fall a little bit in love with faithful secretaries. Especially in the doom situations when you watch the rats run for their holes." -- J. P. DONLEAVY

Security (& National Security)

“Under our new high-alert procedures, security personnel demonstrate their sensitivity by looking for people who don’t look anything like the people they’re looking for. Never in the field of human conflict have so many been so inconvenienced to avoid offending so few.” - MARK STEYN

 

“By increasing the size of the keyhole, you are in danger of doing away with the door.” - ALBERTO GONZALEZ (Attorney General of the US in Jan. 2006)

 

“Populations which are worried about their safety will naturally turn to right-wing parties.” - BRUCE ANDERSON (British political columnist)

"When two or more people are left alone in someone else's office, just assume you're on the air." -- NELSON DEMILLE

“The stark fact remains that not a single terrorist or would-be-terrorist has ever been apprehended at an airport security desk. So it is hardly a surprise that the passengers feel they must do the business themselves.” - ROD LIDDLE (Brit. Journalist in Aug. ’06 - and can this be actually true? Shocking state of affairs, if it is…)

 

“Kmart has better security than the Navy.” - JOHN WALKER JR. (the infamous spy on being asked how he could pass on US Defense secrets to the KGB for 18 years without being detected)

 

“Congressional Democrats appear to have no real interest in the operational details of national security, other than thwarting it or complaining about it.” - DAN HENNINGER (one of the WSJ’s head honchos)

 

"Being lucky can't be our national security strategy." -- PETE HOEKSTRA (the now retired, then-doughty Republican congressman from Michigan, mocking the farce that passed for a national security policy under Obama…)

 

"I'm sure the TSA has plenty of diligent, dedicated, smart, and savvy professional employees; I often see those employees working the line that I'm not in." -- JIM GERAGHTY

"The best security is a lie." -- NELSON DEMILLE 

"Routine is the death of security." -- DONALD WESTLAKE  

  "Let the security of the people be the ultimate law" ("Salus populi suprema lex esto") -- CICERO    (full name Marcus  Tullius Cicero, Roman hot-shot, 106-43 BC)
                                                                                                                                                                

“National security is naturally a conservative enterprise.” – JOHN SCHINDLER                                                                   (an NSA intel analyst and “truth-teller”)

"As a general rule, allowing for exceptions: in recent decades, Americans go rogue, passing secrets to Russia for cash, to China because it's their "ethnic homeland", and to Cuba due to LW ideology (several of the DI agents have also been Hispanic)." -- JOHN SCHINDLER

“Self”                                                                                                                                                          

“A lousy childhood does not entail a lousy adulthood, because the dominant factor in personality is self-determination, and if you don’t believe that you don’t believe in human dignity.” - MARTYN HARRIS                                                                       (Brit journalist. And Amen to this…)

 

“There is nothing worse than having a nervous breakdown and nobody noticing that you are having the wretched thing.” - JEFFREY BERNARD

 

“I'm so tired of thinking about myself. I'm sick of myself.”-- BRAD PITT (I’m with you there, Bradster…..)

 

“How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it.” - G. K. CHESTERTON

"Self-understanding was neither a crutch nor a weapon. It was just something that could be kind of useful if you were actually inclined to try to make yourself a little bit better." -- KYLE SMITH

“Be yourself. Everybody else is taken.” – OSCAR WILDE

"How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone," -- COCO CHANEL

“You never speak about yourself without loss. Your self-condemnation is always accredited, your self-praise discredited.” - MICHEL EYQEM DE MONTAIGNE

 

“It's not that we don't now know who we are, but that we no longer want to be who we are.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE (nice one, Ted....)

 

“So: you go to the middle of nowhere, and find out that, because you're there, it's the center of the world.” – WILLIAM LEITH (English journalist)

 

“The lesson in the Baby Boom’s lifelong fascination with personhood, personality, and persons is that people shouldn’t be taken personally.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

"There's just enough of me, but way too much of you." --  P. J. O'ROURKE

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind" -- BERNARD BARUCH (the FDR adviser and all-around liberal “big-head”)

 

“Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live.” – NICOLAS CHAMFORT (French aphorist, 1741-1794. Damn interesting guy  – he started out as a royal courtier; he was secretary to Louis XVI's sister for awhile, but became a Jacobin and joined the revolution, but then “moderated” and became a Girondiste, and was eventually imprisoned during the Terror, at which point he committed suicide.)

 

“You land on the shore of your own being in total innocence, like an explorer who was looking for something else, and it takes decades to penetrate inland and map the mountain passes and trace the rivers to their sources. Even then, there are large blanks, where monsters roam.” – JOHN UPDIKE

"He was travel-worn in the large periphery of his own mind, jaded with accumulated experience of his imagination." -- EVELYN WAUGH

"It is a poor centre of a man's actions, Himself." -- FRANCIS BACON                                                                                                   (Philosopher, 1561-1626)

 

"I am very much down to earth. Just not this earth." – KARL LAGERFELD

 

"No conductor of our time enjoys such wonderful rapport with himself as Mr. (Leonard) Bernstein." -- DONAL HENAHAN (The late American music critic, and like Donal Logue, he mis-spelled his first name)

"Only I myself am novel -- the experience is not." -- MALCOLM BRADBURY

Self-Awareness

"To know oneself is to disbelieve utopia." – MICHAEL NOVAK

"Self-understanding was neither a crutch nor a weapon. It was just something that could be kind of useful if you were actually inclined to try to make yourself a little bit better." -- KYLE SMITH

“Looking for your true self invites unending disappointment.” – JOHN GRAY (From his very interesting anti-Utopian book “The Silence Of The Animals: On Progress And Other Myths”)

 

“Only the self-aware can have charm, as it’s bound up with a sensibility that at best approaches wisdom, or at least worldliness, and can’t exist in the undeveloped personality.” – BENJAMIN SCHWARZ (Writing in THE ATLANTIC, May 2013)

 

"'Know thyself'? If I knew myself, I'd run away." -- GOETHE (Funny guy, Johann. Incidentally, amongst his many works is a theatrical version of the Pied Piper of Hamelin -- that's something I might pay good shmundo to see....)

 

“Humanity must be defined by something other than self-awareness -- otherwise leftists aren't human.” – JACK JOLIS

"Few of us look into ourselves and discover things we like." -- NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE

 

"To understand someone, you have to understand what the world looked like when they were twenty." -- NAPOLEON

 

“I awoke, only to find that the rest of the world is still asleep.” – LEONARDO DA VINCI

 

“If you think you can do a thing or think you can't do a thing, you're right.” -- HENRY FORD

 

“Not to see oneself as a tragedy at 20 is proof of want of heart – not to see oneself as a comedy at 50 is proof of want of head.” – GEORGES CLEMENCEAU

 

"Perception and self-perception are two entirely different things." -- HARRY THOMPSON (the biographer of Hérgé and Peter Cook)

"Like most busy and successful people, they lived as if the past had never been." -- ALAN JUDD

 

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

 

"The last thing we ever learn about ourselves is our effect." -- WILLIAM BOYD (you don’t really think about this – but the man’s almost certainly right....)

 

“Self-knowledge may be alarming, but without it we remain in a state of arrested development, prey to spurious vanities not worth the cost of the ink and the stone used to celebrate them.” – SHIVA NAIPAUL

“You're not Dylan Thomas,  I'm not Patti Smith. / This ain't the Chelsea Hotel; we're modern idiots." -- TAYLOR SWIFT     (I must confess that I've never knowingly heard so much as a second of this specimen's music, but here I give her a B+ for self-awareness.  Although, Taylor {if that is your name}, Patti Smith was no great shakes either....)

Self-Centeredness

"It is a poor centre of a man's actions, Himself." -- FRANCIS BACON  (Philosopher, 1561-1626)

“Let me have my own way in exactly everything and a sunnier and pleasanter creature does not exist.” ― THOMAS CARLYLE

“Only self-centered people fear death.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

Self-Control

“I am, indeed, a king, because I know how to rule myself." – PIETRO ARETINO (Italian – Venetian – author, playwright, poet, satirist and blackmailer – quite a fellow, 1492-1556)

 

Self-Delusion/Self-Deception

“I am more and more of the opinion that the greatest single psychological factor in human affairs is not love, pride, greed, nor any of the other usual suspects; it is wishful thinking. We want things to be so. Therefore we believe them to be so. When science (or events) teach us otherwise, we lose our tempers. And science doesn't care! Which of course just makes us madder.” - JOHN DERBYSHIRE

 

“People devote the better part of their lives to the task of fooling themselves, and one of their favorite techniques is protesting too much.” - FLORENCE KING

 

"False hopes? There's no such thing." - BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA (the French have an expression for this: “Con, et content de l’etre”)

 

“When we lack the will to see things as they really are, there is nothing so mystifying as the obvious.” – IRVING KRISTOL

 

“Never forget that intellectuals and educated people are far more prone to feats of self-delusion than ordinary people.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

"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

“The most wonderful thing I know is the human capacity for self-deception. It keeps everything else going.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

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

“The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in.” -- A. E. HOUSMAN    (the great English pote, 1859-1936)

"It is possible, in strange times, for an entire people, or at least a majority, to deceive themselves into believing that things are going well when in fact they are not, when things are in fact farcical. Most Romans worked and played as usual while Rome fell about their ears." -- WALKER PERCY

"Be careful not to fool yourself as you're the easiest one to fool." -- RICHARD FEYNMAN 

“Self-Esteem”

“It seems to me that whoever wants self-esteem already has it, and in more than sufficient measure.” - THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

“Goering had self-esteem - and what does that tell you?” - THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

“No one needs self-esteem. Even to consider it is to be lost beyond redemption. What everyone needs, however, is self-respect.” - THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

“’Self-esteem’, that worst and most  useless of qualities.” - THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

"Half the harm that is done in the world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't want to do harm -- but the harm does not interest them... or they do not see it... because they are too absorbed in the endless struggle of thinking well of themselves." -- T.S. ELIOT

 

“There is no correlation between goodness and high self-esteem. But there is a correlation between criminality and high self-esteem.” – DENNIS PRAGER

“The young (of today) do not even know what self-respect is or why it is necessary. What they have instead is self-esteem, that invariable precursor to a lifetime of resentment.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

“Subsidizing the markers of status doesn’t produce the character traits that result in that status; it undermines them.” – GLENN REYNOLDS (Mr. Reynolds is the famous “INSTAPUNDIT” on W's Interwebs, and this is known as “Reynolds' Law”)

 

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

 

“'Self-esteem' is the one thing American schools seem to teach really well – possibly the only thing.” – TOBY YOUNG

 

“At the heart of the gospel of self-belief are a few fundamental mistakes. First off, kids don't need encouragement to believe in 'me'. They have no trouble with that. They begin life unable to distinguish self from other, and it's anyone's guess as to when they twig that other people exist. Second, as they grow up and try to get a head, encouragement is nice, but for self-respect and happiness, there's nothing like helping others. Taking yourself seriously is quite seriously depressing.” – MARY WAKEFIELD

"Although I'm lacking in self-esteem that doesn't mean to say that I don't want to be esteemed by others. In fact I get pretty depressed if they don't esteem me. But I get depressed anyway because I don't esteem myself." -- DAVID LODGE (Speaking through his protagonist Tubby Passmore, in his terribly funny 1995 novel "Therapy")

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

 

“Our contemporary therapeutic self-esteem culture is largely an intellectual cover to enable the making of excuses for mediocrity.” – AMY CHUA (The Chinese-American “Tiger Mom” lady and authoress)

 

"Self esteem comes from achievements. Not from lax standards and false praise.” – CONDOLEEZA RICE

 

"The only thing socialists produce is debt and self-esteem."– DENNIS PRAGER

 

«A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.» – LEO TOLSTOY

 

«Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily.» – THOMAS SZASZ

 

«The government can improve your net worth, but not your self-worth.» – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

«There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless.» – ERIC HOFFER

 

Self-Expression

“I have come to the conclusion that self-expression is far from an undiluted good, and indeed that most thoughts lie too shallow for words. That is why an age of easy communication is almost certain to be an age of absence of communication.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

“If people don't want to listen to you, what makes you think they want to hear from your sweater?” – FRAN LEBOWITZ

 

Self-Hatred (& Self-Criticism)

"To say that the mistakes define us more than the accomplishments is suicidally stupid. And if you subscribe to those planks I mentioned above, I’d like to suggest that telling people they’re bigots for taking pride in the civilization that brought them forth better than any other is like taking a sledgehammer to the soapbox you’re standing on." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

 

"A society needs great objectives to which it can apply itself with conviction, instead of being obsessed with its own shortcomings.” -- HENRY KISSINGER                (in 2019, at the age of 95, at Yale's Wm F. Buckley Society, which once a year invites a speaker who's been disinvited or prevented from speaking at another US college campus)

 

“A country that allows dissent, including the derogation of the state itself, looks strong. But a country that adopts self-excoriation as its national pastime also looks weak – and we’re making ourselves look pathetic. In countries and individuals both, a penchant for self-criticism is only healthy when balanced by some measure of self-belief.” – LIONEL SHRIVER (in April 2021)

"Self-hatred is not a fundamental part of Judaism (to put it mildly), so a self-hating Jew must perforce embrace Leftism as his or her real religion." -- JACK JOLIS

"It is not that the center cannot hold, it's that there is no center at all. Nothing around which we can coalesce, nothing to unite us except for a weird all-consuming self-loathing." -- ROD LIDDLE (in March 2022, referring to the reigning "woke" leftist zeitgeist)

Self-Help

“Our self-help mind-set has created an omnivorous, perpetual appetite for ‘feeling good about yourself’. Too many modern Americans harbor outlandish emotional expectations that encourage wild swings between a grandiose pole of ‘empowerment’ and a pathetic pole of ‘victimization’, where outside forces consistently conspire to frustrate one’s entitlement to bliss. Personal desires, fears, and problems tend to overwhelm all considerations of the public good as much human interaction and governance is forced into the mold of the psychotherapy session or the support group or the therapeutic state.” – STEVEN WATTS                                         (The author of “Self-Help Messiah”, a biography of Dale Carnegie)

 

Self-Importance

“If you get to thinkin' you're a person of some influence, try orderin' somebody else's dog around.”-- WILL ROGERS

 

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important." – BERTRAND RUSSELL (for a jumped-up old lefty, ol’ Bert could be an amusing guy...)

 

“It is positively insulting how well the world functions without one.” – NIGEL BARLEY

 

“More newspapermen have been ruined by self-importance than by liquor.” – FRANK I. COBB (Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, 1869-1923)

"Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm but the harm does not interest them." -- T. S. ELIOT

"However high the chair you sit in, you still sit only upon your own arse." -- MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE (1533-1592)

“But enough about me — what do you think about me?” — GARY McNAMARA (the “Red Eye Radio” guy — the one from Buffalo, NY)

Self-Pity

“There is nothing like self-pity for insulating a person from reality.” - JAMES BOWMAN (film critic of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR)

 

“The essential ingredient of any best-seller is self-pity.” – ANTHONY POWELL (the great English novelist)

 

Self-Promotion

“Anything, though ever so little, which a man speaks of himself – in my opinion is still too much.” – JOHN DRYDEN (English poet, author – 1631-1700)

 

“A boy has to hustle his book.” – TRUMAN CAPOTE

 

Self-Righteousness

“The problem with the self-righteous is that they are so eager to virtue-signal to each other that they will go on doing it even when it is completely counterproductive.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

Self-Seriousness

“As long as I do not take myself too seriously I should not be too badly off'." -- PRINCE CHARLES (I normally give Charlie Bigears a lot of stick, but here I say – “bien parlé, patron”)

 

“It is positively insulting how well the world functions without one.” – NIGEL BARLEY

 

Selfishness

“New York is all about the arts and making money, professions which are all about self-aggrandizement and celebrity, and nothing to do with understanding the moods or needs of the rest of the people.” -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

“A person who doesn’t like children only likes people when they’re convenient to them. It’s a real give-away of selfishness.” – DAVID NOBBS

 

“The inordinately selfish are particularly susceptible to frustration... It is the inordinately selfish, therefore, who are likely to be the most persuasive champions of selflessness.” – ERIC HOFFER

 

“He had absolutely no consistent views about anything that did not directly concern him; in his opinion such views were a rather revolting luxury.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS

"Too many people don't care what happens so long as it doesn't happen to them." -- PRES. WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT

Senate (The U.S.)

“The Senate only works when not everyone is nuts at the same time.” - SENATOR JOHN KENNEDY (Republican of Louisiana, in August 2020)

 

"The Senate’s one great enduring virtue: It is not the House of Representatives." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"There are only three kinds of senators -- beautiful people, surfers, and untouchables. B.P's are the senators who get face time on the networks no matter what the issue is. Untouchables are the ones who only get on the networks if they fall into the Tidal Basin in the arms of a stripper. But surfers, they're the real stars of this town, the ones who find an issue and ride it just as far as they can." -- JOHN BUCKLEY (Jack Kemp's press secretary, in 1990) 

"If you're hanging around with nothing to do and the Zoo is closed, come over to the Senate." -- BOB DOLE

Sensationalism

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

Sensitivity

“We live in more of a pussy generation now. Everybody’s become used to saying, ‘Well, how do we handle it psychologically?’” – CLINT EASTWOOD                   (to ESQUIRE magazine, in 2009)

" 'Sensitivity' is one of those words that's changed meaning. It was once used mostly to refer to sore teeth and gums. But just as 'community' now means people complaining and 'activist' now means sitting at home swearing on the internet, to be sensitive simply signifies you're politically progressive." -- JULIE BURCHILL (in April 2022)

Sentiment(-ality)

“Sentiment is a right and proper part of living; sentimentality is invariably the gateway to illusion. It is sentiment if you like the company of your dog; it is sentimentality if you maintain that he understands every word you say.” - SIMON BARNES (a British sports writer.)

 

“A sentimentalist is someone who wants the pleasure of an emotion without paying the price for it.” - OSCAR WILDE

 

“Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality.” - CARL JUNG (well, if HE says so…)

 

“Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.” -- JAMES BALDWIN (in “Notes of A Native Son”, and I guess he agrees with ol’ Jung, see above…)

 

"There has long been a dialectical relationship between sentimentality and brutality. Sentimentality is hardness of heart, or even contempt, masquerading as feeling. It is to sympathy what incontinence is to urination (except, of course, that it is voluntary and is vastly more destructive). It is mental and emotional laziness, a refusal to discipline the gratifying glow of self-regard. It has rotted us through and through." -- THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

“Sentimentality and brutality, two sides of a coin.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

“Sentimentality is selfish. When I pat a little boy on the head and go, ‘There, there! Who’s a clever boy, then?’, who loves it? Me. Who hates it? The little boy. Selfish.” – DAVID NOBBS (The English author and screenwriter)

 

Seriousness

“Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.” - G. K. CHESTERTON

 

“The truly insane theory (is) that what is amusing must be less significant than what is ponderous or grim, that what is witty must be more superficial than what is sober, that what is fanciful contains less truth than what is factual.” - LOUIS KRONENBERGER (1904 – 1980, an American literary critic, novelist, and biographer)

 

“Nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all.” -- ARTHUR BALFOUR (British Prime Minister, 1902-1905. This is one of my favorite of all quotations. And a funny one, coming as it does from the chap who gave the world the Balfour Declaration – which, as any fule kno, created Israel – and all the, ah, serious consequences that THAT entailed…)

 

“Things of which we cannot see the bottom are not necessarily profound.” – ALEXANDER WAUGH (the grandson of Evelyn)

 

“It’s very important not to have a rigid distinction between what’s flippant and what’s serious.” – HAROLD MACMILLAN

“There are people who are afraid of clarity because they fear that it may not seem profound.” -- ELTON TRUEBLOOD (1900-1994, The Quaker theologian and author, Chaplain at Yale and Stanford)

 

“Taking yourself seriously is quite seriously depressing.” – MARY WAKEFIELD (the Deputy Editrix of the UK SPECTATOR)

“Seriousness is stupidity sent to college.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

“When a person can no longer laugh at oneself, it is time for others to laugh at him.” – THOMAS SZASZ (the Hungarian-born American anti-shrink shrink)

 

“Not to see oneself as a tragedy at 20 is proof of want of heart – not to see oneself as a comedy at 50 is proof of want of head.” – GEORGES CLEMENCEAU

 

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

 

“All your normally daily business. Look at any of it closely enough and it soon becomes unreal and impossible to take seriously.” – ALAN JUDD

 

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

"The inability to be entertaining is supposed by some to be an aspect of high seriousness." -- ANTHONY BURGESS 

“When political priorities are decided by cuteness, uglier problems are easily ignored.” – WILLIAM MOORE (A columnist for the UK Evening Standard and the UK Spectator. I cannot determine whether or not he is the son of Charles Moore, but I suspect he might be.)

 

“I truly believed that if people would just unclench a little more often and enjoy themselves, stop taking everything so seriously, a lot of the world’s problems would blow off like fog.” – CHRIS MILLER (my ΑΔΦ fraternity brother, in his 2006 memoir “The Real Animal House”.)

Servants

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

 

"There are only three classes in England now, politicians, tradesmen and slaves. Now the politicians are in alliance with the slaves to destroy the tradesmen. They don't need to bother about us." -- EVELYN WAUGH                                                              (in "Work Suspended", 1942)

 

Sex

“It takes two to tangle.” – DONALD WESTLAKE

 

“Strike while the widow is hot.” – DONALD WESTLAKE (Westlake was a dog.)

 

“Being with a woman all night never hurt no professional ballplayer. It’s staying up all night looking for a woman that does him in.” - CASEY STENGEL (surely I don’t have to identify “the Ole Perfessor”, do I? Too bad, ‘cause I’m not gonna…)

 

“An exchange of perspiration” - NAPOLEON (Charming. Sweaty Dago…)

 

“I’d rather have sex than a cup of tea.” -  GEORGE ALAN O’DOWD (a.k.a. “BOY GEORGE”) (If you care. I must say, I can’t think of anything I’d rather not have than sex with Boy George. Or even thinking about sex with Boy George….)

 

“Sex is the most fun you can have without laughing.” - WODDY ALLEN

 

“There was no premarital sex in America until the invention of the internal combustion engine.” - P. J. O’ROURKE

 

“Sexual intercourse began in 1963,

Between the end of the Chatterley ban,

And the Beatles’ first LP.” – PHILIP LARKIN

 

“All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.” – EVELYN WAUGH

 

“Both my exes only closed their eyes during sex because they hated to see me have a good time.” – JOSEPH WAMBAUGH (the greatest cop novelist of all time. From L.A.)

 

“Life can little more supply

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

 

“Sex remains the surest prop for all that is funny… and sad. In the first instance we often call the result ribaldry. In the second instance it is always called tragedy.” -- R. EMMETT TYRRELL JR.

                                                                                                                                                               

“Birth control and other modern developments can drastically change the outcomes of sexual behavior, but not the impulses that drive it.” – JAMES TARANTO

 

“I stand for monogamy and chastity. And for no talking about it.” – FORD MADOX FORD (actually, it was his character Christopher Tietjens, in “Parade’s End”)

 

"People usually give less thought to whom they sleep with, and might presumably breed with, than to the breeding partners of their farm animals." --– GEORGE WASHINGTON

 

“I've had a man and I've had a woman, and there's got to be something better.” – TALLULAH BANKHEAD

“A bar is a lot of use to a man after a brothel, but a brothel is of no use to a man after a bar." -- REDMOND O'HANLON (in his 1988 Amazonian memoir "In Trouble Again") 

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

 

“Having done an impressive job of demolishing the basic societal building block of the family, the ambitious liberal is now moving on to demolishing the basic biological building block of the sexes.” – MARK STEYN

 

“Sex: the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable.” – PHILIP STANHOPE, FOURTH EARL OF CHESTERFIELD

"Have you ever imagined an Englishman with that (upper-class) accent actually in bed? I can't see it myself." -- PETER COOK (the great English comic)

 

"As far as sex is concerned, patience is a virtue. In the words of Marcel Proust, and this applies to any woman in the world, if you can stay up and listen with a fair degree of attention to whatever garbage, no matter how stupid it is, that they come up with, 'til ten past four in the morning -- you're in." -- PETER COOK (in his 1967 film masterpiece, "Bedazzled")

“Just found out 'cissexism' is a thing. A stupid thing, created by libfascists to shut you up. Cis my ass, jerks.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

 

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

 

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

 

“As the Book of Genesis put it, we became human when we became aware of our nakedness. Our sexual repressions made us into human beings.” – WILLIAM TUCKER

 

"It is our sexual repressions that have made us human." -- WILLIAM TUCKER (In his book "Marriage and Civilization")

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

“As with history full stop, there is no 'right side' of sexual history, no such thing as Free Love.” -- DANIEL FOSTER

 

“They tell you sex is a mess because it was hushed up. But for the last twenty years it has not been hushed up. It has been chattered about all day long. And yet it is still in a mess.” – C. S. LEWIS

 

“The ancient Greeks discovered sex, but it took the Romans to include women.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

“There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 450SL." – LYNN LAVNER (American comedienne)

 

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

 

"It's been so long since I've had sex, I've forgotten who ties up who." – JOAN RIVERS

 

“Sex is a private matter between a Democrat and his victim.” – ANDREW KLAVAN

"It is a well-known fact that women only start to get interested in you when other women are forming an orderly queue to get into your pants." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS (the very amusing English novelist) 

"If those in positions of power were getting enough sex the world would be a brighter, happier place." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS

“Some things are better than sex, and some are worse, but there's nothing exactly like it.” – W. C. FIELDS

 

“Animals remind you that most intraspecies violence is ultimately about sex: human violence peaks among men of mating age.” – MATT RIDLEY (actually, the 5th Viscount Ridley, is a popular author and successful businessman)

 

"What women want from men in exchange for sex is loyalty, reliability and commitment. Women in dangerous situations with a male partner have figured out that the sexual bond can usually keep the idiot in line." -- NELSON DEMILLE

 

"Why is free sex so expensive?" -- NELSON DEMILLE

"When the lust is gone, what's left is loathing or love." -- NELSON DEMILLE

“Older women are best because they always think they may be doing it for the last time.” – IAN FLEMING

 

"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

 

“Sex. In America an obsession. In other parts of the world a fact." – MARLENE DIETRICH

 
"Guilt was, after all, one of the things that made sex really interesting. One of the most positive things the Catholic Church had done for screwing was trying to stamp it out." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS

“There was a ratchet on love-making: you couldn't go back, you could only go on, or stay put. And there was a time-limit on staying put.” – DAVID LODGE (the amusing English novelist, and no one writes more amusingly about sex than the English....)

"There had always been, notoriously, more adulteries in fiction than in fact, and no doubt the same applied to orgasms." -- DAVID LODGE (the very amusing English novelist)


"Fifty is a good age, because when a woman say's 'Yes’, you are flattered, and when she says 'No', you are relieved." -- DAVID LODGE

“God didn’t mean sex for having fun. It’s for having babies. If He’d meant it for fun, He’d have designed it all a lot better than what He did.” – DAVID NOBBS

 

"Sex may not be a virtue, but how could it be a sin?" – GENDUN CHOPEL (This guy was the great Tibetan sex maven, who wrote the Tibetan version of the Kama Sutra)

 

“There’s no such thing as a dishonest erection.” – GUY BELLAMY

 

"There has to be more to life than climbing on and off naked girls -- not a lot more, but a bit more." -- GUY BELLAMY

 

“Sexual pleasure is for the rich. The upper classes have orgasms and the working class have babies.” – GUY BELLAMY

 

“Sex, like eating, has a limit; a point of saturation can be reached, and all the screwing in the world will not rattle bank foundations or bring down the walls of the Pentagon.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

“Sex is like money; only too much is enough.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

“No doubt anthropologists and zoologists can tell us that it is biologically necessary for one of the sexes always to be hungry and the other to be mostly bored.” – STEPHEN FRY

 

“During the sexual revolution, we crossed a line from sex being something you do to defining who you are. When it enters into that territory, we move beyond the possibility of having a society in which sex acts were tolerated, in the Mrs. Patrick Campbell sense -- ‘I don't care what they do, so long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses’ -- and one where it is insufficient to be anything but a cheerleader for sexual persuasion of all manner and type, because to be any less so is to hate the person themselves. Sex stopped being an aspect of a person, and became their lodestar -- in much the same way religion is for others.” – BEN DOMENECH (Mr. “FEDERALIST”)

 

"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)

 

“Why does love pitch it’s tent

At the place of excrement?” – JONATHAN SWIFT (funny guy, Swift.)

"Rule six: Don't screw unstable women. Horror and sex don't mix." -- J. P. DONLEAVY

“Sex seemed as arbitrary as Mexican justice.” – CHRIS MILLER (my ΑΔΦ brother and co-screenwriter of “Animal House”)

 

“Women love wordplay; for us wordplay is foreplay – how else do you think Woody Allen could get laid?” – KATHY LETTE (the British-Australian author)

 

"I myself am wildly non-English. I have copulated, as a matter of course, from the age of two or three with ladies of a similar age in lands where that is not considered at all extraordinary." -- M. P. SHIEL (The mixed-race, Montserrat-born English author of the sensational 1901 sci-fi best-seller "The Purple Cloud", Matthew Phipps Shiell had, indeed, a most extraordinarily prolific sex life, and he made this startling claim in a1916 letter to his London publisher.)

"People with a serious sex fetish never have a sense of humour (sic) about it." -- COSMO LANDESMAN

"Every ejaculation is premature." -- MARTIN AMIS (in his "Time's Arrow" of 1991. Incidentally, Sir Martin was knighted the day before he died, in May of 2023. His dad,  Kingsley, was also a "Sir" -- and I can't off-hand think of another father-son set of literary "Sirs"....)

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

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

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

Sex “Education”

“Sex education, invented by the Marxist intellectual hero Georg Lucàcs during the mercifully brief Hungarian soviet republic of Bela Kun, was specifically devised as an assault on bourgeois morality, the family and marriage.” - PETER HITCHENS

 

“Knowledge is better than ignorance, though, oddly enough, the dissemination of information about contraception has not resulted in a decline in the number of unwanted children or of babies born to very young mothers, but rather in an increase.” - THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

“We live in an era awash in sex or what another generation called sexual hygiene. There is sex education at an early age. Continuing sex education goes on through adolescence. When life begins for young adults, Americans have more information about sex than almost any other discipline, and most of it is useless. They still get pregnant in vast numbers out of wedlock, have abortions, and suffer all the other calamities associated with sex.” – R. EMMETT TYRRELL JR

"There is no 5-year old in the world that is explicitly gay, lesbian, transgender or heterosexual. Small children do not think about sex and sexuality unless they have been groomed to do so by an adult." -- CANDACE OWENS

"The only problem our family has with sex is when to stop talking about it." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS (the amusing English novelist)

Sex in America

“The United States is the place technologically best equipped and temperamentally best conditioned to find a soulmate – or at least get laid.” – AZIZ ANSARI (the little Indo-American comic thesp.)

“America's obsession with obsessions is for some reason often connected with the nether regions of the body or, in a word, with sex. American sex life knows no peace, only eternal flailing." -- VASSILY AKSYONOV

"The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch. Love comes into it too, of course, but in Europe we tend to see marital love as an eternity which encompasses hate and also indifference: when we promise to love we really mean that we promise to honour a contract. Americans, seeming to take marriage with not enough seriousness, are really taking love and sex with too much. They are romantic in a way that the French are not. They cannot abide cynicism." -- ANTHONY BURGESS

 

Sex, (Phone)

"I approve of phone sex on economic grounds. Whatever the cost per minute, it must be cheaper than years of Freudian analysis -- a similar experience of sitting in the dark and talking dirty." -- DAVID MAMET


Sex, (Writing about)

"It's impossible to write in detail about what people do to each other in bed without sounding laughable or absurd." -- KINGSLEY AMIS

Sexism

“Sex isn’t taboo anymore, but sexism sure is.” – PAUL CANTOR                                                                                                           (English prof at U-VA)

 

"We live in the most non-patriarchal moment in all of American history, if not all of Western history, if not all of human history. And yet so profound is the need to fight this terrible foe that, across the landscape, Donna Quixotes are constantly tilting their lances at mirages of their own imaginations. Why? Well, partly because that is what we teach them to do. Our institutions also reward it." – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

Sex, Oral

“Clinton lied. A man might forget where he parks or where he lives, but he never forgets oral sex, no matter how bad it is." — BARBARA BUSH              (crikey.)
                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Sexual “Harrassment” (and Assault, etc.)                                                                                             

“But sexual etiquette is not a science. It is improvisation in a very imperfectly set-up battlefield. Only at the most extreme end does the law have anything to say. Everywhere else we are talking about the exercise of manners.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY

"The winds of what the New York Postcalls Pervnado continue to gather strength, carving a hole through the beta male worlds of NPR, PBS, Hollywood, the New Republic, Vox, the New York Times, and MSNBC, among others. What emerges from this storm of scandal is a clearer picture of a culture that trained men not to respect women but to respect feminism. In many ways, the Beta Male sexual harasser is the squalid offspring of the unhappy marriage between feminism and the sexual revolution, from whose chaotic household he learned virtue-signaling without virtue. From this sordid bed has come a new creature — the male feminist pig." -- GEORGE NEUMAYR                                      (In the AMERICAN SPECTATOR, in Nov. 2017)

“Sexual harassment is the new term limits.” – PHILIP SCHUYLER (an amusing and conservative fellow on Twitter)

“My considered thesis is that #MeToo is basically affluent, entitled women whining about next to nothing.” – ROD LIDDLE

Sexual Perversion                                                                                                                                  

“There is nothing too transgressive for a progressive.” – MICHAEL WALSH

"If some weirdo at work started talking about sexual options and ideologies with you, they’d be sexually harassing you. Why do we have lower standards for teachers in school when they push their far left sexual agenda on children?" -- ROBBY STARBUCK (Cuban American, candidate for Congress in Tennessee -- said in April 2022)

“Sexual Revolution”                                                                                                                                 

"The sexual revolution, which began in the 1960s, is not libertarian. It is instead neo-puritanical – that is, it is aimed at safeguarding its own body of revealed and developed truths, and at marginalizing its traditional competition.” – MARY EBERSTADT (the author of “It's Dangerous To Believe”)

“The so-called sexual revolution was never about women's liberation – it was about men's liberation: from marriage, from fatherhood, from courtesy, from responsibility, from adulthood.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

Shakespeare

“The most any of us can hope for is to be wrong about Shakespeare in a new way.” – T. S. ELIOT

 

“There’s a lot of stuff in Shakespeare that you could really, you know, do without.” – P. G. WODEHOUSE (Ah, Plum... Actually, he did once say “The art of writing prose is the art of knowing what to leave out.”)

 

“This was a man so good at disguising his feelings that we can’t even be sure than he had any. We know that Shakespeare used words to powerful effect, and we may reasonably presume that he had feelings. What we don’t know, and can barely even guess at, is where the two intersected.” – BILL BRYSON

"Shakespeare was a wonderful writer and he was doing this wonderful verse play about Cleopatra -- how she got wrapped up in the carpet. Shakespeare had been writing this couplet to describe the scene when the snake comes rustling up her undies and begins to start biting into her busty substances. And he's almost finished this magnificent verse couplet, you see, but the only thing is he only had one syllable left to describe the snake, and 'viper' was too long for the snake so he invented the word 'asp', and a very good word it is too." -- PETER COOK (the great English comic, to his great mate Dudley Moore, in "The Dagenham Dialogues" of 1971)

"Shakespeare has become the useful idiot of activists and social engineers." -- LLOYD EVANS     (theatre critic of THE SPECTATOR)

"Shakespeare's plays do have these violent colonial implications. If you're reading his plays and you're not seeing any sexism or racism, then there's a lot of education that I think, as a human being, you need to be looking at." -- MADELINE SAYET (a professor of -- what else? -- English Lit. at Arizona State University, and yet another good Leftist who can't wait to, er, "re-educate" us all....)  

Shame

«You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.» – JESSICA MITFORD (the most Stalinist of all the many cukoo Mitford sisters.)

 

"It's insensible to feel 'guilty" or 'ashamed' about something you didn't do. Claiming that what happened before you were born is all your falut is not only ridiculous. It's vain." -- LIONEL SHRIVER

“Shame never lasts." -- CHARLES McCARRY     (I don't know if this is true, but it's worth considering)

Sharia

“Thank God almighty, I am a servant of sharia.” – RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN                                                                                (in 1994 – and he’s been putting it into action ever since….)

 

"Many women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes." -- HOJATOLESLAM KAZEM SEDIGHI (This genius -- whose scientific aptitude would seem to make him a good candidate for honorable membership in the Congressional Black Caucus -- was personally appointed to be "Official Leader of Friday Prayers" throughout Tehran, by Iranian "Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Khamenei.  Me, I think it's fine - - at least he doesn't blame any earthquakes on fracking.…)

 

Sharpton, Al

“How is it possible to defame Al Sharpton?” – JOEL ENGEL (ex-NYT, LAT journalist, now author of self-help books)

 

Shock

“Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked.... It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal, and that you are a paralytic.” – G. K. CHESTERTON

"Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often." -- MAE WEST

Shopping/Shopping Malls

“I never go window-shopping, unless it’s for windows.” - CRAIG FERGUSON

 "Always when you know exactly what you want, you never find a place selling it." -- J. P. DONLEAVY       (in 1987 -- pre-internet, of course)

“Women in supermarkets always seem surprised when it comes time for them to pay.” – JACK JOLIS

 

“Malls have become a public habitat soaked in slovenly intimacy; its customers step naturally from huddling around television in their living rooms to cruising these boulevards of superfluity, where fluorescent-lit shops press forward temptations ranging from yogurt-coated peanuts to electric-powered treadmills. Elderly women had dressed themselves like kewpie dolls, in pastel running suits that suggested an infant’s pajamas.” – JOHN UPDIKE (in 1996)

 

"Bookstores are a kind of window shopping for the mind." -- JONAH GOLDBERG   (in 2024)

"Like many British towns, it has closed its factories and workshops, and instead is directing all its economic energies into the making and drinking of coffee. There were essentially two types of shop in the town: empty shops and coffee shops. Some of the empty shops, according to signs in their windows, were in the process of being converted into coffee shops, and many of the coffee shops, judging by their level of custom, looked as if they weren't far from becoming empty shops again. I am no economist, but I am guessing that that's what is known as a virtuous circle." -- BILL BRYSON

Show Business

“Everyone wants glamour for nothing but show biz is the most costly way in the world to get a piece of ass." -- J. P. DONLEAVY

"Microphones are like people --if you shout at them, they get scared." -- PAUL McCARTNEY

Shyness

“Shyness is egotism out of its depth.” – HUGH KINGSMILL (English journalist in the first half of the 20thCentury)

 

Sickness/Disease

"That's one thing about being ill -- people can't argue with you/;" -- AGATHA CHRISTIE

 

“The more various cures for an ailment you can find on the internet, the likelier it is that the ailment is incurable.” -- MATTHEW PARRIS

“Hypochondria is the only illness I don't have." -- TONY HANCOCK

"We tell stories about diseases as if they were constant things. Pathologies  evolve and mutate, avoiding the risk of staying the same for too long. Infectious diseases do not replace or make way for each other; they overlap." -- KATE WOMERSLEY (has a masters degree from Harvard in "the history of science")

“Sigfried & Roy”

"Tiger and mullet, tiger and mullet: they go together like finger and gullet." -- JOHN PHIPPS (Neither the category or its quote really belongs in this Compendium, but I so enjoyed Squire Phipps' quip, that I included it. Phipps is an English journalist, by the way)

Signs/Semiotics

"Signage and way-finding are mostly designed for people who never make mistakes." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

Silence

“The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” -- BLAISE PASCAL

 

“They can't hang you for what you don't say.” – CALVIN COOLIDGE (“Silent Cal”)

 

“It's only when the oyster keeps its mouth shut that a grain of sand within may become a pearl.” -- ERIC HOFFER

"Dear sir, only for the moment am I saying nothing." -- J. P. DONLEAVY (from his 1963 "A Singular Man", and this has been often said -- in an ominous tone -- by me, from time to time over the decades since)

“Silence is not golden, it's yellow!” – TERRI HILL (A patriotic lady Tweeter from Texas)

 

“Never miss a good chance to shut up." --WILL ROGERS

“One is the master of what one doesn't say and the slave of what one does.” -- FRANCISCO FRANCO (The old Gallego's full name, by the way, was “Francisco Paulino Hermenegildo Teodulo Franco y Bahamonde.)

"Silence could be so eloquent, silence could work like a rising tide on a sandcastle." – WILLIAM BOYD

 

"Doing and saying nothing are great powers, but they should not be abused." -- TALLEYRAND

 

"If A is success in life, Then A = X + Y + Z.  Work is X, Play is Y, and Z is keeping your mouth shut." -- ALBERT EINSTEIN


“Silicon Valley”

"People here (in Silicon Valley) pride themselves on a kind of militant open-mindedness. It is the kind of place that will severely punish any deviations from accepted schools of thought."-- FARHAD MANJOO

"While sitting behind deeply protected , carefully patrolled borders they dream of a borderless world. For a few days they imagine living in a beautifully curated agrarian idyll and dream of extending the limits of consciousness and understanding. Only for the mudslide of reality to make its inexorable entrance." -- DOUGLAS MURRAY (after the "Burning Man" fiasco of 2023)

"In Silicon Valley your story doesn’t have to be true. It just has to be good." -- ROBERT SPALDING (a good, pro-American "science and tech" guy, on X. In Nov. '23)

“Silicon Valley must be the first place in the history of the planet to have produced nothing of ancillary cultural interest. The trouble with the nerd economy is that it employs only nerds.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

Simplicity

“Simplicity is the highest form of sophistication.” – LEONARDO DA VINCI

 

“Our complexity is much more likely to lead us astray than any simplicity we may follow.” – ROGER KIMBALL

 

“Some say I’m simplistic, but there’s a big difference between being simplistic and having simple answers to complex matters.” – RONALD REAGAN (in 1977)

 

"Everything simple is false. That which is not is unusable." ("Le simple est toujours faux. Ce qui ne l'est pas est inutilisable.") -- PAUL VALERY (French poet and philosopher, 1871-1945)

"The simple is the opposite of the commonplace." -- NORTHROP FRYE (the 20th century Canadian literary critic) 

“Simpsons, The”

"The Simpsons -- good if you're thick (dumb), even better if you're not." -- JAMES DELINGPOLE

"When the shit hits the fan, you need Montgomery Burns more than you need Lisa Simpson. How the fuck is Montgomery Burns the villain of the Simpsons? He provides abundant zero carbon electric power, is the biggest and most forgiving employer in Springfield, has an openly gay man as his closest advisor, and only release his hounds on his own private property.Face it, the real villain of the Simpsons is Lisa. Smug, pious brat who thinks she should be in charge of the whole town because she won the 2nd grade best diorama contest." -- DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE

"Hillary Clinton is Lisa Simpson without the cuteness." -- MARK GUSTAV (a Matire d'Hotel, on the Twoot) 

Sin

“A ‘sin’ is something which is not necessary.” - GEORGE GURDJIEFF (in which case, Mr. Gurdjieff is a sin…)

 

“Yes, envy is one of the seven deadly sins, although I recognize only two as mortal ones, that and avarice. Lust, gluttony, pride, wrath, and sloth. I am rather proud to be guilty of, especially the first and last.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

“But sin only works when it’s, you know, sinful.” -- MICHAEL WALSH

 

"To do away with the sense of sin is to do away with civilization." -- T.S. ELIOT

 

“No one is free from sin, not even an infant.” – SAINT AUGUSTINE (harsh, Augie....)

 

“The volume of sin in the world was a movable feast; like a balloon: squash it there and it came up here.” – FAY WELDON

 

Sin (Original)

“Out of the crooked timbers of humanity no straight thing can ever be made.” - IMMANUEL KANT

 

“Neither conservatives nor humorists believe man is good. But left-wingers do.” - P. J. O’ROURKE

 

“There is far more evidence extant in favour of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin than of Rousseau’s doctrine of Original Virtue.” - CONOR CRUISE O’BRIEN

“Historical shame is not and should not be heritable. It’s hard enough taking responsibility for the here and now without also of on the sins of total strangers in the unalterable past.” – LIONEL SHRIVER


 “There are a great many sins in the world, none of them original.” – RICHARD RUSSO (the American author and screenwriter)

 

Sincerity

“You know, when you come to think of it, it’s a hell of a lot easier to speak well when you don’t believe a word you’re saying.” -- JACKIE MASON

 

“Sincerity is the most overrated virtue in the books.” -- ROBERT HEINLEIN

 

“The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.” – ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH

 

"Self interest is one of the most sincere things in the world." -- RICHARD BROOKHISER

 

Singapore

“Singapore Inc. delivers skilled labor and superb infrastructure, and its illiberality is among its chief corporate attractions. This is Disneyland with the death penalty, the only shopping center with a seat in the UN, a real-life Truman-Show, Asia Lite.” - ERIC ELLIS (SE Asian correspondent for FORTUNE and the Australian BULLETIN)

 

“Singapore is basically an air-conditioned fascist shopping mall with sovereignty.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON (a young hot-shot writing in NATIONAL REVIEW in March 2010)

 

“No one in his right mind would accuse Singapore of being a Third World country. You’d probably be deported if you had the boldness to imply anything of the kind.” – SHIVA NAIPAUL (in 1985)

 

“Sixties, The”

“A great irony that slowly emerged out of the turmoil of the 1960s is that conservatism became the new counterculture – a movement that was subversive in relation to the established liberal cultural order. And, continuing this irony, liberalism became the natural home of timid conventionalists and careerists – people who find it hard to know themselves outside the orthodoxies of mainstream 'correctness'.” – SHELBY STEELE

 

“Bill (Ayers) would do it all again, even though he and his comrades, in his own version, never did it in the first place.” – PETER COLLIER (outstanding author and associate of the great David Horowitz)

“Nothing happened in the Sixties except we all dressed up.” - JOHN LENNON

 

“The ‘Sixties’ didn’t actually begin until the late 1960’s”. - SIMON HOGGART (1964-1974, to be precise. By my own reckoning.)

 

“All that Swinging Sixties. It didn’t do anyone any good, did it? Easy sex and the Pill. Marriages were ruined. I never did approve. I never really enjoyed the sex.” – CHRISTINE KEELER                                                                                                         (Jeez.... Say it ain't so, Christine....)

 

“The summer of ‘69 – the boys all looked like girls and the girls all looked like whores.” – ROBERT HARRIS (through the eyes of one of his Russian characters in his 1998 novel “Archangel”)

"I hadn't been involved at the sharp end of the party business since the sicties when we used to sit on the floor and hope for the best." -- WILLIAM DONALDSON (the English gossip-columnist and playboy, in 1992)

"Myths that no amount of facts can ever destroy -- say, the Rolling Stones being the bad boys of 1960s pop, even though the Beatles were filling their boots with speed and Hamburg prostitutes while Mick Jagger was studying accountancy at the London School of Economics." -- JAMES WALTON (One of the Speccie’s TV reviewers) 

Skating (ice)

“Any activity that includes something called "twizzles" is not a sport.” – JOHN J. MILLER                                                                              (apparently “twizzles” have something to do with “ice dancing” which, like it pedestrian version, is more properly a “social activity” or, at a push, a piece of “performance art” than a “sport”).

 

“It's amazing what ice dancers do, but it's still the aesthetic equivalent of Musak.... But it is the national sport of Foofoostan.” – JOHN PODHORETZ

 

Skepticism

"Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy" -- NAPOLEON

 

Skiing

“I sometimes think about people who ski. It has seemed to me that people who ski don't know how dangerous life is. Life hasn't taught them. So they look for danger on their vacations. They strap pieces of wood on their feet and propel themselves down high mountains full of snow and trees, drops and turns. They consider this invigorating. The rest of us consider it perplexing. The rest of us are trying to take a holiday from danger. -- PEGGY NOONAN

 

“I fear I do not dance very well, because I was never allowed to ski. All skiers are beautiful dancers.” - QUEEN ELIZABETH II (Liz is talking through her royal bum, here, I’m afraid. I ski, and I don’t recommend my dancing. Nor, more to the point, would any of my erstwhile dancing partners…)

 

“Skiing is the most selfish and vulgar of sports.” -- STEVE JONES (a professor of Genetics at University College, London)

 

“A ski trip is not a holiday. It is an exhausting, expensive, dangerous activity that consists of a week or two, or if you’re particularly unlucky an entire season, of falling off drag lifts, sliding face-down across patches of ice at speed, knocking people over while trying to get off chairlifts, followed by inedible meals, sleep deprivation, a spot of frost-bite and never-ending family rows.” - VENETIA THOMPSON

"It is better to go skiing and think of God than to go to church and think of sport." -- FRIDJHOF NANSEN (the Nobel-prize-winning Norwegian polymath, 1861-1930)

“Mind you, skiing is not for old men. I don't know why, but I've been scared witless of falling since the age of 60, something I could not fathom when I was young – I used to take spectacular falls while showing off.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS       (exactly as I – 75 as I write – feel. I used to be a practically suicidal skier, having won the French “Chamois De Bronze”, and now you couldn't get me up on skis at gunpoint....)

 

“I never imagined I’d get to the stage of being pathetic enough for my children to say how well I’m skiing.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS (Yeah, this is, indeed, a terrible moment in the life of every male skier. Maybe every female skier too, I don’t know – but for us chaps, oooo, you don’t want to hear that....)

 

"I now ski cross-country more than downhill, if only because it's such a bore putting the boots on. Even worse is the fear of falling, something I actually enjoyed doing at speed when I was young." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS (he said this at age of 85)

"Skiing is rather unique in that it gets easier -- the faster and more recklessly you allow yourself to go." -- JACK JOLIS

“I remembered that skiing is falling, a surrender to the unthinkable and the fearful.” – JOHN UPDIKE

Skill

"Skilfulness takes time and life is short."  ("Ars longa") -- HIPPOCRATES

Slavery

 “What was special about America was not that it had slavery, which existed all over the world, but that Americans were among the very few peoples who began to question the morality of holding human beings in bondage.” – THOMAS SOWELL (2015)

 

"The phrase 'Legacy of Slavery' is one of the most specious and harmful in America today." -- THOMAS SOWELL

"More whites were brought as slaves to North Africa than blacks brought as slaves to the United States or to the 13 colonies from which it was formed. White slaves were still being bought and sold in the Ottoman empire, decades after blacks were freed in the United States." -- THOMAS SOWELL

“To this very moment slavery continues in parts of Africa and the Islamic world. Very little noise is made about it by those who denounce the slavery of the past in the West, because there is no money to be made denouncing it and no political advantages to be gained.” – THOMAS SOWELL

“If you were to give reparations to everyone whose ancestors had been slaves, I suspect that you would have to give reparations to more than half the entire population of the globe. Slavery was not confined to one set of races.” — THOMAS SOWELL 

“The pagan ancient world was free of the idea that people had equal rights. The idea that people are of equal value, and should be treated as such - regardless of the place in society to which they were born or of the powers which they inherited or were able to acquire - was totally absent from paganism. There was no pagan anti-slavery movement. Even slaves did not advocate the abolition of slavery. The political position of Spartacus, and the leaders of other slave revolts, seems to have begun and ended with their swapping places with their masters.” - ALASDAIR PALMER (British historian and journalist, in 1995)

 

“Slavery has been a universal feature of all societies throughout most of history. Blacks and whites, Africans, Asians and Europeans; Christians, Muslims and pagans - all of them kept slaves. Every person alive today has ancestors who were slaves or slave owners. What makes Europe unique is that it ended slavery. Western civilization alone - the white man alone - decided that slavery was wrong.” - ANDREW KENNY

 

“Colonial slavery (was) modeled on the practice of Muslims and non-Muslim Africans, and was ultimately - and uniquely in history - abolished by those same colonialists.” - FRANCIS X. ROCCA

"The slavery of the east coast (of Africa) was not like the slavery of the west coast. No one was shipped off to plantations. Most of the people who left the east coast went to Arabian homes as domestic servants. And to an African, a child of the forest, who had marched down hundreds of miles from the interior and was far from his village and tribe, the protection of a foreign family was preferable to being alone among strange and unfriendly Africans." -- V. S. NAIPAUL

“We prostrate ourselves to apologize for slavery while forgetting that we also ended slavery, while the Africans cheerfully continued with it.” - ROD LIDDLE

 

“In a film about slavery, the black people will be uniquely good, the whites uniquely bad, conveniently avoiding the issue that black Africans instigated the slave trade and continued it long after we’d been pricked by our honky consciences.” – ROD LIDDLE

“The victims of the Atlantic slave trade were almost entirely enslaved by other Africans." -- ROD LIDDLE

"Slavery was indeed wicked (though the victims of the Atlantic slave trade were almost entirely enslaved by other Africans), but it is scarcely a singularity." -- ROD LIDDLE

“Total profits and labor-saving in the West from slavery were minimal. The only people who got substantially more from slavery than they did from their other available options were probably the Africans who captured and sold the slaves in the first place.” – JAMES C. BENNETT (The author of “The Anglosphere Challenge”)

 

“Socialism is the end of all inventions; it is the happy face of slavery.” – JOHN STUART MILL

"Only 1.6% of US citizens owned slaves in 1960, when slavery was at its peak. So you can stop basing your hatred for the entire white race on the actions of a mere 1.6%." -- MARK LUTCHMAN     (a black guy on X)

“Freedom that requires a lifetime of grateful thraldom to one’s emancipator isn’t freedom. It’s slavery.” – LLOYD EVANS

 

“I'm sick of hearing about Jefferson and (Sally) Hemmings. Who cares if he had slaves? Why, if I could, I’d dig him up and give him six more slaves. That man invented freedom! You'd better not print that. I catch enough hell as it is.” – ALBERT MURRAY                                        (The noted black American novelist, essayist, and jazz critic, speaking to Richard Snow, the Editor of AMERICAN HERITAGE)

 

“What distinguished the English-speaking nations was not that they practiced slavery but that they crushed it.” – DANIEL HANNAN       (the outstanding English MEP, and author of “Inventing Freedom: How The English-Speaking Peoples Made The Modern World”)

 

“Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat!” – MUHAMMAD ALI (In 1974, after the George Foreman fight in the DRC, then-Zaire, when someone asked him what he thought of Africa)

 

"Slavery was not the Holocaust. Evil as it was, its purpose was not the torture and murder of slaves but the exploitation of their labor. It serves no purpose but that of propaganda to pretend otherwise." -- JAMES BOWMAN

 

“More black Africans have voluntarily emigrated to the United States to seek liberty and opportunity than came to America as slaves.” – DENNIS PRAGER

 

“That all civilizations ― including African societies ― practiced slavery means that, at worst, those parts of America that practiced slavery were no better in that regard than other societies. The important moral and historical question, therefore, is not, 'Did society x practice slavery?' They all did. The important question is,'Which societies abolished slavery?' ” – DENNIS PRAGER

 

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

 

“Obama comes from slave-owners (on his Mom's side), and slave-traders (on his Dad's side). The closest he ever got to slavery was picking out a cotton sweater.” – LARRY ELDER

 

“I don't know if slavery was 'one of the worst things ever'.” – CHARLES BARKLEY

"British imperialism takes on an odd complexion in some parts of the world. In East Africa its impetus was neither military nor commercial, but evangelical. We set out to stop the slave-trade. For this reason, and practically no other, public opinion forced on the Government the occupation of Zanzibar and the construction of the Uganda railway. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, zealous congregations all over the British Isles were organizing bazaars and sewing-parties with the single object of stamping out Arabic culture in East Africa." -- EVELYN WAUGH     (in 1930)

"The strangest disease I have seen in this country (what was then merely "Equatoria" and which is present-day Zambia) seems really to be broken-heartedness, and it attacks free men who have been captured and made slaves." -- DAVID LIVINGSTONE (the famous Scottish physician, missionary and explorer -- of "Dr. Livingstone, I presume" fame -- in 1874)

"On visiting the slave market (in Zanzibar) I found about 300 slaves exposed for sale. All who have grown up seem ashamed at being hawked about for sale. the teeth are examined, the cloth lifted to examine the lower limbs, and a stick thrown for a slave to bring, and thus exhibit his paces. Some are dragged through the crowd by hand, and the price called out incessantly; most of the purchasers were Northern Arabs and Persians." -- DAVID LIVINGSTONE

“If any race of people should not have guilt about slavery, it’s Caucasians. The white race has probably had fewer slaves and for a briefer period of time than any other in the history of the world.” -- RUSH LIMBAUGH

"Slavery was never solely an economic proposition. Owning people is fun, once the initial repugnance is overcome." -- RICHARD BROOKHISER

"Slavery was not genocide, otherwise there wouldn't be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain, would there?" -- DAVID STARKEY (the poofter British historian, who caught holy hell, including almost being arrested for this comment -- and for which he apologized, admitting that "damn" might have been a poor choice of word)

"With a tradition of at lest two thousand years of slaving behind the; none of the (African) east coast dealers had as yet dreamed of giving up the trade. Slaving was in the Arab blood, no Arab regarded the trade as any more evil or abnormal than, presumably, a horse-dealer regards as evil or abnormal the buying and selling of horses today." -- ALAN MOOREHEAD (The author of the “White” and “Blue” Niles, speaking of the Arabs of East Africa in the 1850s)

"It was a question, too, as to whether or not you could really abolish slavery in a Mohammedan country since it was a fundamental aspect of the Moslem way of life. And on closer acquaintance it was not all bestiality: many of the slaves did very well for themselves and would not have exchanged their masters for freedom." -- ALAN MOOREHEAD (in eastern and central Africa in the 1880s)

"Slavery is a form, and the very best form, of socialism” -- GEORGE FITZHUGH (From Virginia – the leading pro-slavery writer in America, before the Civil War – in 1854)

 

"The air of England is too pure for any slave to breathe: let the black go free." -- LORD TOM DENNING                     (Baron Denning was a 20th century British judge who was paraphrasing the judgement of WILLIAM MURRAY, 1st EARL OF MANSFIELD, who, in 1772, decreed the end of slavery in England.)

"Everyone was a slave, everyone... We are all descended from slaves. It's just a question of when. Was it more recent or less recent? That's it."-- ELON MUSK

“Condemning America for slavery is like condemning the first country which allowed women to vote, for oppressing women.” – NICOLAS CLAMORGAN (an American “defense industry analyst”, on the Twoot.)

"We (white people) are the only people talked about in the slave trade and yet we're the only ones that actually opposed it and ended it." -- ROY CAMERON

"Slaves cost nothing. They only have to be gathered." -- TIPPU TIP (real name Ḥamad ibn Muḥammad ibn Jumʿah ibn Rajab ibn Muḥammad ibn Saʿīd al Murjabī, a major Arab-African 19th century slave-trader, spoken to Henry Morton Stanley, of "Dr. Livingstone I presume" fame, in 1876)

“The West African slave trade, like the gold trade, demanded no European interference in the mysterious affairs of the interior. Africans needed no permission to enslave their fellows." -- THOMAS PACKENHAM (The author of the colossal 1991 doorstopper, "The Scramble For Africa" -- and a big liberal, I should add.)


""In Central Africa the slave trade was the Fourth Horseman, riding behind War, Famine and The Plague. Philanthropy would never end the slave trade. It needed Livingstone's 'three Cs' together -- commerce, Christianity, civilization." -- THOMAS PACKENHAM

"Imperialism was the only antidote to the East African slave trade." -- THOMAS PACKENHAM (a grudging admission from the liberal historian, in his 1991 tome "The Scramble For Africa")

“The initial repulsion overcome, it is cool to own people.” – RICHARD BROOKHISER     (on the Twoot on 31 Dec. 2019)          

"One could say what happened in Barbados or Brazil was a genocide in the sense that slaves there were literally worked to death. But the black population in the US quadrupled from 1820 to 1860. And it's anachronistic to project our values on people that lived 160 years ago.

I've studied this stuff. Infant mortality among enslaved people in the US was not significantly worse than among the white population. I calculated that the food, clothing and shelter provided to slaves would take a wage of maybe $4.50 (an hour) in today's dollars to buy." -- WARREN PLATTS     (in Feb. 2024)

“In the ancient world slavery was simply a universal fact of life, rather like hunting. Anyone could be enslaved at any time – captured in war or by pirates at sea – and many were born into it: all were the automatic private property of their owners. Few people thought twice about it. Everyone who was anyone had slaves.” – PETER JONES

"Justice requires the confession that the horrors of slave-driving rarely met the eye in East Africa. On the march, the slaves were seldom chained, well fed and little worked. the porters, who were free and who made the long journey down to the coast for the hire of a few shillings, had much the worst of it. Then at the coastal towns a much better life often awaited the slave than the one he had left behind in his squalid and diseased village in the interior." -- RICHARD BURTON (the great British explorer, in 1856)

“The current debate about slavery – which in any case has less to do with slavery than with control of our thought processes.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS (in October 2020)

“The closest mankind can come to a complete community is slavery, and even then we have the differentiated class of the slavers, overseers, nomenklatura, and house servants, with each group forming a community of its own." -- DAVID MAMET

“The mechanics of the transatlantic slave trade were simple: Negroes were obtained by barter with the tribal leaders of West African seabord states, confined in compounds attached to trading posts and then shipped for sale in the West Indies. During the second half of the seventeenth century the commonest items of exchange were cowrie shells, bolts of Indian-manufactured cloth (both local units of currency), copper, iron, tobacco and alcohol. After 1700 some dealers offered muskets which were greatly prized and a form of indirect investment since tribal armies equipped with firearms enjoyed a considerable advantage on the battlefield and could, therefore, capture more prisoners to sell on the coast.” – LAWRENCE JAMES (eminent British historian, writing in 1998)

“Slavery was endemic to the human condition throughout all human history, What was new was when we began to turn against it.” -- RICH LOWRY     (in Sept.2024)


 

Sleep                                                                                                                                                  

“The self-employed and the socially unacceptable (can) spend a lot of time in bed. But you must sit bolt upright before answering the telephone. Your voice sounds different when you are horizontal. They can tell.” - VICTORIA GLENDINNING

 

“What hath night to do with sleep?” ― JOHN MILTON ("Paradise Lost")

 

“He dreamed a great deal each night. It felt like work. Sleeping made him tired.” – DENIS JOHNSON

 

"Get up early is the only advice I have for young people. If you are messed up or wrong in the head, rising early is an easy way to start fixing one's life. The chances are you will go to bed early, rather than staying up late talking nonsense and drinking red wine. If you are middle-aged and plagued by insomnia, this completely vanishes if you wake at four. They say your body clock is at its lowest ebb around four, but I find my brain is most alert in those last hours of darkness. Before the rest of the world wakes up, when all is quiet, I get my best work of the day completed. It is a wonderfully quiet and private time. There are no phone calls, no emails, no person to tap at your window and pester you with demands. You are more likely to make time to get fit . You tend to have a large breakfast and a small supper and so in my experience you lost weight. Apart from dairy farmers and radio newsreaders, most people are unlikely to wake at four, but you still feel like a master of the universe, with a huge competitive advantage over others. Armies stand to arms before dawn because in the history of war this is the most likely time for an attack – but if you have already been up for hours you are prepared for anything and your are going to win the battle." – AIDAN HARTLEY

 

“Sleep was ceding control. While you slept, anything might happen.” – MICK HERRON (the English spy novelist)

 

“We fall into something, falling asleep, not out of things. Dreams are already there, beckoning; were sleep an unpopulated void, as null as a dead television screen or the surface of the moon, no one would want to go there. The great gleaming pond of the night would be full of floating ephemeroids, each clinging in terror to his or her bubble of wakefulness.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

“Wake me if there’s an emergency – even if I’m in a cabinet meeting.” – RONALD REAGAN

"Insomnia is classier than sleep. Only the tragic hero is an insomniac." -- ROLAND BARTHES (????)

"I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?" – ERNEST HEMINGWAY

 

“I wish I had nightmares. It would at least imply that I am getting sleep.” – PETER DEVRIES

 

“Alpha Delts did not pass out, they rested.” – CHRIS MILLER (my ΑΔΦ brother, in his 2006 memoir, “The Real Animal House”)

 

 “Sleep, like some rhythmical, snoring vacuum cleaner, consumed the awful day.” – LIONEL DAVIDSON (the excellent author of the novels “The Rose Of Tibet” and “Kolymski Heights”)

 

“Slippery Slope”

“At every stage, there’s always a next step. It is very hard to put down an incredibly clear moral line to stop step two, three, four and so on.” – DOUGLAS MURRAY

"Liberalism was inevitably displaced by radicalism; radicalism had to surrender to socialism; and socialism could never resist communism." -- ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN      (in his famous 1978 Commencement Speech at Harvard)


"Without ‘Slippery Slopes’, the Left would have died out a long time ago -- in its infancy, in fact." -- JACK JOLIS

Slogans (& Proverbs & Catchphrases)

“'War Is Not The Answer' supposes that the bumper sticker is going to be read by those questioning, in the abstract, the relative benefits of war and peace. The identity of those people escapes me.” – DAVID MAMET

 

“Bumper stickers are never wrong.” – SONNY BUNCH

 

“If it's not a late night punchline, a bumper sticker, or a t-shirt it won't be read.” – ERIC BISCHOFF (An American TV producer)

 

“The art of sloganeering can serve two powerful ends – persuasion or cementing tribal allegiance. Usually you can’t do both.” -- RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“That’s the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody’s going to be against, and everybody’s going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn’t mean anything.” -- NOAM CHOMSKY (the pinko master)

"A good proverb depends on typecasting, disregarding differences. The only new coinages our age of offence seems capable of producing are pointless pleonasms like: 'It is what it is'." -- LAURA GASCOIGNE (in Dec. '22)


“Smart”

"Anything promoted as 'Smart ____' invariably turns out to be painfully, epically stupid. Smart Car, Smart Grid, Smart Power, Smart President." – DAVID “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

Smells

"As the smell of Communism is compounded from boiled cabbage and damp serge so the smell of Capitalism is a combination of the warm scent of popcorn and the sour stench of pizzas." -- GEORGE COURTAULD (what "sour stench of pizzas"?)

"He smelled the grey file:  dust and the vegetable smell of old carbon paper. The true scent of the totalitarian regime." --NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE      (in his 2005 novel "Snowleg")


Smiles/Smiling

"Smiles could be ambiguous in a way that frowns never were." -- GUY BELLAMY

 

Smoking                                                                                                                                            

“If people in offices are so desperate to get away from cigarette smoke and breathe fresh air then they should jump out of the window.” - JEFFREY BERNARD (Now THERE’S the spirit, Jeff…)

 

“It was Lenin who was responsible for the first non-smoking train in history, the one that took him though Germany to Finland after the Russian Revolution. Like Lenin, Hitler was an anti-smoking fanatic; you knew the moment he’d died because his officers started lighting up in the bunker.” -- NORMAN STONE (the eminent historian)

 

“I suspect smoking is one of those indulgences which, bad in themselves, prevent human beings from doing worse.” - PAUL JOHNSON

 "All tobacconists are fascists." -- GEORGE ORWELL (????)

“You ask what we need to win this war? I will tell you. We need tobacco, more tobacco – even more than food.” – JOHN J. PERSHING (“Black Jack” was the commander of American forces in WWI, after having squashed Villa and Zapata down in Messico.)

 

“For all its flaws, nicotine is one of the few drugs which at least does not make its users stupider.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

"Everyone knows smoking is dangerous. There is no healthy level of cigarette consumption. The same goes for fried pickles, Jäegerbombs and men who won't commit." -- KATE ANDREWS

“Smoking enables a somewhat calm and objective judgment in all human affairs.” – ALBERT EINSTEIN

 

“I'm eighty-three and have been smoking since I was eleven. I'm suing the tobacco companies because it promised to kill me and it hasn't.” – KURT VONNEGUT

 

“Smoking cigars is like falling in love; first you are attracted to its shape; you stay for its flavor; and you must always remember never, never, let the flame go out.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

 

“They’ll be telling us this (smoking) is bad for us next. They want to live forever!” -- NIGEL FARAGE (In April 2016)

 

"You'd be amazed how cigars drive away annoyances such as men in sandals, women who make their own jewelry, NPR tote-bag carriers, people who use the word "mindfulness," Prius drivers promoting social justice through bumper stickers, givers of TED Talks, listeners to TED Talks, and vegans who know whether produce is locally grown, organic, GMO-free, and fair-traded but who can't tell hay from straw." -- P. J. O'ROURKE

 

"If I cannot smoke cigars in heaven, I shall not go." -- MARK TWAIN

 

“Obama claimed to have kicked the habit, but that is a claim any smoker or ex-smoker will smile at. Just as there are no ex-Marines, there are no ex-smokers. You may retire from active service, but if you ever smoked, you are a smoker, and always will be. Semper fi.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE (in April 2007)

 

“Like masturbation, smoking is a solitary pleasure, though unlike masturbation sometimes acceptable among others.” – STUART JEFFRIES (veteran British journalist)

 

“It is a custom that is Lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the nose, harmfull to the braine, dangerous to the lungs.” – KING JAMES I (In 1616, when John Rolfe first brought tobacco over from Virginia – the original Bob Newhart “Tobacco” sketch)

 

Smuggling

“Our Sussex and Kent smugglers used to be known as ‘free traders’, which is interesting and – if we have to sneak over an EU tariff wall – entirely appropriate for today.” – CHARLES MOORE (in the SPECCIE on 3 Feb. 2019, just as Brexit was coming to a head.)

 

Smut

“Dirty minds never sleep.” – FRANCOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD (the 17thcentury French wise guy.)

 

Snobbery

“There is a huge difference between snobbery and moral discrimination. Snobbery is about superficial things, and the snob delights in exploiting them for his own pleasure. Moral judgments are about important things.” - S.T. KARNICK (Editor-in-chief of AMERICAN OUTLOOK magazine, in 2002)

 

“Sometimes snobbery is the only legitimate response to self-satisfied philistinism.” - SIMON HOGGART

 

“There’s always snobbery and Puritanism lurking within the British, particularly among the political and bureaucratic classes, the moment they spot someone enjoying themselves.” - MICHAEL VESTEY (British journalist)

 

“I’m not a snob. Ask anyone. Well, anyone who matters.” - SIMON LE BON (the lead singer of the band Duran Duran)

 

“Snobbery is nothing but bad manners trying to pass themselves off as good taste.” - TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

"Scratch a socialist and you find a snob." -- MARY McCARTHY (who was more than a bit of both a socialist and a snob herself -- she wrote this in 1975)

“You are allowed to be a snob about 3 things. After that, you're just an asshole.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

 

“Any display of status anxiety is itself a low status indicator.” – TOBY YOUNG

 

“Everyone hates a snob. Except the French. In France, un snob is aperson who, rather than clodishly giving the world power over him, has taken the time to cultivate an appreciation for the finest.” – JONATHAN V. LAST (in THE WEEKLY STANDARD)

 

"In a post-modern, globalized world devoid of traditional values, the only remaining factor structuring society will be snobbery." -- ALEXANDRE KOJEVE (a French-Russian philosopher who died in 1968, so this was a pretty prophetic pronunciamento)

 

“We must never confuse elegance with snobbery.” ― YVES ST. LAURENT

 

“You may not get much else out of private education, but at least it makes you a snob.” – SIMON BRETT                                (In his Molesworth revival “How To Stay Topp”)

 

"Snobbery -- the profit and joy of invidious comparisons. It's cowardly. Like contempt, it's always directed downward. It comes from lack of experience and lack of generosity. You can think you're superior to others only if you're blind to their inner lives, and, by extension, to your own -- assuming you have one." -- MARK HELPRIN

"It is difficult to be a snob and a tourist at the same time. But a way to combine both roles is to become an anti-tourist." -- PAUL FUSSELL

Snow

"Getting an inch of snow is like winning 10 cents in the lottery." -- BILL WATTERSON (The creator of the not-bad "Calvin and Hobbes")

 

Soccer

“Soccer is organized around the principle of frustration. It is structured around deprivation: a fan’s experience is to wait and wait for a goal that in many matches never comes. Frustration, deprivation, denial.” - BILL BUFORD (author of “Among The Thugs”. Heh.)

 

“The present World Cup is unlikely to be as violent as previous ones, if only because the English, those charming ambassadors of civilized Europe, did not qualify for the competition.” - BILL BRYSON (in 1994)

 

“Soccer football is ruining the country. The young men talk of nothing else. Their intellect all goes into football. They can’t do their work properly for thinking of it. Never saw such a state of affairs in my life.” - CHARLES EDWARDES (English “country” writer and author of “Chester”)

 

"Football is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans win." -- GARY LINEKER (A big English star in the 80s, now a big Leftist commentor on the Beeb.)

 

“For as much as there is a great noise in the city caused by hustling over large balls, from which many evils may arise…” – KING EDWARD II (in 1307)

 

“Soccer was invented by breweries who want people to gather together in public places and be bored.” – KYLE SMITH

 

“Soccer is the perfect liberal sport. It's boring, full of violent jerks, and there's very little scoring.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

 

"Soccer is a game invented by European ladies, so they could stay busy while their husbands did the cooking." – MIKE JUDGE (Actually, he said this through his character Hank Hill, the eponymous “King Of The Hill”)

 

“America’s favorite national pastime is hating soccer.” – ANN COULTER

 

“Soccer- If I wanted to watch a bunch of guys struggle to score for 90 minutes I'd take my buddies to a bar.” – KRIS HUDSON

 

“Football (soccer) is all well and good for rough girls, but it's no good for delicate boys.” – OSCAR WILDE

 

“As many of you know, a relentless crusade to compel hard-working, God-fearing citizens to embrace the sport of soccer has been corroding American values for over 50 years now.” – DAVID HARSANYI (In November 2017)

 

“Just to be clear. I'm  in no way suggesting that there aren't Americans who legitimately enjoy and appreciate the sport of soccer. I'm merely suggesting that those people are bad at being Americans.” – DAVID HARSANYI

 

“Football has got to do with everything.” – ARNOLD BENNETT (well, at least his character “Denny Manchin” said it.)

 

Soccer Hooliganism

"Football has never entirely purged itself of violence. Visit any premiership stadium after a big match, and you'll soon realize you ought to be somewhere else." -- LLOYD EVANS (In May 2020)

 

"Sociability"

“Santa Claus has the right idea. Visit people only once a year.” - VICTOR BORGE

 

“Social”

“Adding the word 'social' to a phrase deprives it of clear meaning.” – FRIEDRICH HAYEK

 

“By the way, have you ever noticed that the modern definition of ‘social’ is ‘not’? Social science is not science. Social work is not work. Social justice is not justice.” – F. H. BUCKLEY (The author of “The Morality of Laughter”)

 

"There does not exist a noun that the modifier 'social' does not diminish." -- JACK JOLIS

 "The 'S' in ESG stands for Satanic." -- ELON MUSK

“Social Democrat”

“A social democrat is a communist that wears Armani suits and drink Veuve Cliquot champagne.” – FABRICIO ARAUJO (a Brazilian fella on the Twoot)

 

“Social Engineering”

“Bloombergism  at a national level is merely Democratic Party liberalism stripped of any concern for public opinion.” – JONATHAN CHAIT

 

Socialism

«Communism’s weak-tea sister. Socialists maintained that we shouldn’t take all the money away from all the people since all the people don’t have money. We should take all the money away from only the people who make money. Then, when we run out of that, we could take more money from the people who… hey, wait! Where’d you people go? What do you mean you’re ‘tax exiles’ in Monaco’?” - P. J. O’ROURKE

 

“There is nothing liberal about socialism, and there never was. High-minded egalitarian ideals are all very well, but in a free society they can only be achieved by social engineering of the most illiberal kind.” - WILLIAM PACKER (a private citizen of London, in August 2005)

 

“To grasp the true meaning of socialism, imagine a world where everything is designed by the post office, even the sleaze.” - P. J. O’ROURKE

 

“The key flaw of socialism is its denial of the ultimate reality of the human condition, which is that we can’t control the future. We can choose the good but we cannot choose the outcome. Reaching for control and certainty, we end up in the embrace of evil.” -- GEORGE GILDER

 

“All socialism is a popular manifestation of the hardwired human desire to live in a tribe, albeit misapplied to national or international politics and economics. It explains why socialism will never, ever go away.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“Not all socialists are totalitarians, of course. But all totalitarians must be socialists.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“In the socialist state, it is the past that is unpredictable.” – SIR PERCY CRADOCK (The British Ambassador to Red China in the '80s)

 

“Rich countries may be able to afford the wastefulness of socialism, but we in Poland cannot.” - RADEK SIKORSKI (Deputy Minister of Defense in Poland, and sometime contributor to the UK Spectator and NATIONAL REVIEW)

 

“Successful countries can survive anything except civil war and socialism.” - ANTHONY BROWNE (a Brit who is the director of something called “Policy Exchange”. In Sept. 2007)

 

“Man was malleable. That was the great socialist faith of the nineteenthcentury. It was a false faith, and after many struggles it dies in the gulags and death camps of the twentieth century. Mankind, in short, proved to be a huge disappointment to the socialist dreamers.” - TOM BETHELL

 

“Socialism can be traced to the dawn of politics in ancient times, and has been part of modern politics since the modern world began with the industrial revolution. Socialists would explain this by saying that socialism speaks to humanity’s yearning for a just and equal society. Those of us who are anti-socialists would argue that it speaks to the yearning of certain officials, academics and journalists to feel morally superior to the rest of us, and tell us how to order lives. Either way, socialism is one of the constants of human nature. The problem for socialists is that the successive ways in which they try to bring about justice - or order us about - have a habit of becoming unpopular with voters.” - FRANK JOHNSON (hence the coercion. From which spring the mountains of corpses.)

 

“Socialism can only be built by socialists.” - HERBERT MORRISSON (the old British socialist - and he’s right. This is the only reason that the ONLY way that socialism can ever work is when it’s VOLUNTARY, which limits it to such weird social constructs as kibbutzes and monasteries and such. All else is INVOLUNTARY socialism, and the only thing that gets built is mountains of corpses.)

 

“One of the strange things about socialism is that it advocates forms of taxation which, if fully implemented, would end up raising no revenue.” - CHARLES MOORE

 

“That exquisite luxury of Socialism.” — E. M. FORSTER

“Socialism is the end of all inventions; it is the happy face of slavery.” – JOHN STUART MILL

 

“Socialism is only Communism with slightly shorter queues.” - JAMES DELINGPOLE

 

“The socialist project was to design a system so perfect that no one would have to be good.” - T. S. ELIOT (Wow. Think about it. Good one, T.S…)

 

“And that’s why socialism never works; it doesn’t have to.” -- PAUL KELLY (a citizen of Delta, Colorado, in a letter to the AMERICAN SPECTATOR in September 2009. And although it’s a cute quote, it actually misses the point - socialism never works because, inasmuch as it goes diametrically against human nature itself, it can’t work. Even creating mountains of corpses in its behalf can’t make it work. Even the most obsessively methodical people of God’s creation, the Germans, couldn’t make it work. And the very notion that an incompetent fool like President B. Hussein Corpesman — much less his successor, the walking dead “China Joe” Bidet — could make it work would be comical if it weren’t so tragic. Speaking of tragic, the tragedy of human nature is that on the one hand it guarantees that socialism will never work, while on the other hand, its capacity for delusion and wishful thinking will guarantee that dangerous idiots will forever keep trying….)

 

"The trouble with Socialism is that it takes too many evenings." - OSCAR WILDE (he would have been a natural “Tea-Party”-er, I guess)

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

“At its core, socialism remains a rationalization for a fundamentally tribal and premodern understanding of economics.” - JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“The trouble with socialism is socialism; the trouble with capitalism is capitalists.” – WILLI SCHLAMM                     (this guy was an Austrian who was a frequent contributor to NATIONAL REVIEW, and, in fact, this was one of Fabuckley's favorite quotes.... and mine as well, whenever big businessmen drive me to “crony capitalistic” distraction.)

 

“The Left embraces Socialism, the herd mentality of slavery, as it offers the, to them, incalculable benefit of freedom from thought. There are, to them, no more disquieting choices, no contradictions, there is only submission to the Group in which the ideas of all (being the same) are equal.” – DAVID MAMET

 

"Socialism is only workable in Heaven, where it is not needed, but not in Hell, where they have it already." -- HAROLD MACMILLAN ("Harassed MacMillions", as the bolshy proto-socialist John Lennon called him in his 1965 book of doggerel "A    Spaniard In The Works", was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1957 to 1963.)

 

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

 

“'All men are created equal says the American Declaration of Independence. 'All men shall be kept equal' say the Socialists.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

 

“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.” ~ WINSTON CHURCHILL

 

“Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then the socialists say we are against equality. And so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.” – FREDERIC BASTIAT

 

“The essence of socialism is for Party A to get Party B to give something to Party C.” – DAVID MAMET

 

“Socialism – you can smell it coming.” – P. J. O'ROURKE

 

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

 

“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 )

 

“How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-Semite?” – ADOLF HITLER (Asking his fellow party members of The National Socialist German Workers Party, in 1920.  And yet, most non-Israeli Jews are socialists.)

 

“Socialism is a rich man’s game.” – ROGER L. SIMON                                                                                                                             (the ex-Hollywood lefty who became the head honcho of PJMedia)

 

"Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it." -- THOMAS SOWELL

 

"Socialism a Philosophy of Failure", J. L. LAUGHLIN                                                                                                                                (in Scribner's magazine, 1887)

 

“If you take the tragedy out of socialism, what remains is farce.” -- JOSEPH SOBRAN

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

“The socialist is not interested in practical details or practical difficulties. What appeals to him are the broad visions.” – FRIEDRICH HAYEK

 

“Communism and liberalism are variant forms of socialism, with this difference: the communists are unsentimental socialists, whereas liberals are sentimental socialists.” – JOSEPH SOBRAN

 

“Socialists are criminals, dupes, bunglers, demagogues, quacks, eccentrics, con men, sectarians, Machiavels and earnest fools, not one of whom has a serious claim to be regarded as a benefactor of mankind to rank with whoever invented the can opener, but all of whom were full of prescriptions for directing the progress of industrial society.” -- JOE SOBRAN

 

“Reforming socialism is like frying snowballs.” – LESZEK KOWALSKI                                                                                                 (Polish philosopher, died 2009 -- quoted to this effect by the lefty Brit writer Tony Judt in his posthumous book “Thinking the Twentieth Century”)

 

"The great thing about France is, if you believe in socialism you call yourself a Socialist and other people are allowed to call you Socialist. Ahem...” – ROB LONG

 

“Socialism violates at least three of the Ten Commandments: It turns government into God; it legalizes thievery; and it elevates covetousness.” – BEN SHAPIRO

 

“Socialism has no place in the hearts of those who would secure the fight for freedom and preserve democracy.”―SAMUEL GOMPERS (American Federation of Labor, 1918)

 

“Socialism makes for the greatest dullness of the greatest number.” -- SAKI

 

“Socialism -- ideas so good they have to be enforced at gunpoint.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“Choice being the one thing a socialist cannot abide.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“Socialism is a pre-existing condition.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“That’s typical of the socialist model of providing scarce goods and services: The things that are free you can’t get, and the things you can get aren’t free.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“Do either Barack Obama or his followers have any idea how many countries during the 20th century set out to ‘spread the wealth’ -- and ended up spreading poverty instead? At some point, you have to turn from rhetoric, theories and ideologies to facts.” – THOMAS SOWELL

 

"The world can only digest a certain amount of socialism before the planet goes broke," – JOHN RUBERRY              (American blogger)

 

"Communism works as long as everyone has the same last name; socialism works as long as everyone goes to the same church." -- PHILIP TISDALL               (A commenter to an article written in the Wall Street Journal in May 2012 about Sweden. And I'd say that the second part is a redundant tautology – socialism is itself a church.)

 

“Why socialism manages to survive one failure after another can be at least partially explained by the simple fact that the relevant question isn't about what works but about what works for whom?” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“If you can't describe – and defend – a true and permanent boundary for the role of government in the peacetime economy, you're a socialist.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

"More people have been murdered in the name of socialism than in the name of any other doctrine, by far, even if you don’t count German National Socialism as Socialism." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“At its core, socialism is not an idea or even a program: It’s a feeling.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“Socialism is the economics of the caveman, or rather that imagined caveman we have called the noble savage (credit Jean-Jacques Rousseau for the idea, though he never actually used the term). All share equally in the provisions of the tribe, because all contribute equally. Never mind that this was never true of actual cavemen—if those who study such things are to be believed. The strong ate first and ate best. Those who could not carry their share of the burden were left behind or killed. Still, there was much more economic equality back then, but only because all were poor and possessions amounted to what you could carry.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“The Socialist thinks a walking stick and an umbrella are the same thing because they both fit in an umbrella stand.” – G.K. CHESTERTON

 

“Waiting is of course the characteristic economic activity in all socialist systems.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

"Violence is always at the end of the socialist enterprise.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“Socialists are not content to live as socialists on their own terms — they insist that you must live as a socialist on their terms, too. (And if it comes down to it, better you than them: If a high-ranking apparatchik enjoys a dacha and an extra ration of caviar, then that’s really, somehow, the will of the people, too!)  – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

"Everything brought forward in favour of Socialism during the last hundred years, in thousands of writings and speeches, all the blood which has been spilt by the supporters of Socialism, cannot make Socialism workable. .... Socialist writers may continue to publish books about the decay of Capitalism and the coming of the socialist millennium; they may paint the evils of Capitalism in lurid colours and contrast with them an enticing picture of the blessings of a socialist society; their writings may continue to impress the thoughtless -- but all this cannot alter the fate of the socialist idea."-- LUDWIG VON MISES (in 1922!)

 

"How can we run a country if entrepreneurs don't hire? And how can we redistribute if there's no wealth?" -- FRANCOIS HOLLANDE (the socialist President of France – and  Tiens! -- en voila une question, Monsieur le Socialiste....)

 

“The only difference between the ideology of the French socialist minister and the Ferguson (Missouri) looter is scale. That and the immensely superior quality of the Frenchman’s comestibles. But the principles which govern both are the same. Eventually you run out of other people’s money and other people’s patience. And that’s starting to happen all over the world right about now.”-- RICHARD FERNANDEZ      (author of the blog "The Belmont Club" column in PJM)

"Everyday reality of socialism: 'You don't even get what you don't want in the first place'." -- NICHOLAS GLAMORGAN    (on the Twoot)

“Socialism, in fact, is the State Family. The old family of the private individual must vanish before it, just as the old water works of private enterprise, or the old gas company. They are incompatible with it. Socialism assails the triumphant egotism of the family today just as Christianity did in its earlier and more vital centuries.” – H. G. WELLS                                                   (in 1906. In the ensuing more than a hundred years, it is ever thus....)

 

“For socialism see also fascism, communism, Islamism: it is in the nature of all totalitarian doctrines to want to detach children from their unhealthy familial bonds and indoctrinate them in the ways of communitarian righteousness.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

 

“More pie-eaters than pie-makers = Eventually everyone begs for crumbs”-- SARAH PALIN

 

"Bolshevism and Fascism were heresies of socialism." – RICHARD PIPES

 

«I wanna see the picture of the death camp run by a party without ‘socialist’ in its name.» -- KURT SCHLICHTER

 

"The only thing socialists produce is debt and self esteem."– DENNIS PRAGER

 

“Any fourth grade history student knows socialism has failed in every country, at every time in history. President Obama and his Democrats are either idiots or deliberately trying to destroy their own economy.” – VLADIMIR PUTIN (because this quote elicited much skepticism when I first found it and passed it on, I did some Google detective work on it and, sure enough, it turns out he did say this, early in the first Corpseman administration.)

 

“A liberal is a socialist with a guilty conscience

A communist is a socialist in a hurry

A fascist is post-socialist socialist» – JACK JOLIS

 

"A liberal is a socialist with a guilty conscience

A social-democrat is a socialist wet dream

A progressive is a socialist pig in lipstick

A communist is a socialist in a hurry

A national socialist is a snob socialist dressed by Hugo Boss

&

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

 

"A major calamity of not teaching history is that new generations emerge to whom socialism seems like a new, even a good, idea -- rather than an old, debunked one." -- JACK JOLIS

 

“Socialism is just weaponized greed with a fancy name.” – JACK JOLIS

"Socialism is the weaponized combination of envy, greed and wishful thinking." -- JACK JOLIS

"The only cure for a 'belief in' socialism is living under it." --JACK JOLIS

 

"If socialists understood economics, they wouldn't be socialists." -- FRIEDRICH VON  HAYEK  (or human nature itself, come to that.... Interestingly enough, von Hayek, who was born in Austria in 1899 and received the Medal of Freedom from Papa Bush in 1991 -- the year the Soviet Union fell! -- and who, along the way, was a founder of the "Chicago School" of free-enterprise economics, was a highly decorated soldier in WWI, in the Austro-Hungarian Army (the "other" side) -- in which he served as an artilleryman and was one of the first ever aeroplane-borne "spotters", in the performance of which duties he was wounded and lost much of his hearing. Damn fine fella.)

 

“Socialism can be put into practice only by methods of which most socialists disapprove.” — FRIEDRICH HAYEK (those were old school socialists, maybe.... by the 21st century, er.... not so much....)            

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

 

“Socialism is a theory inconsistent with human nature and is, therefore, doomed to fail.” – MARK PERRY (professor of economics at the Univ of Michigan)

 

“The goal of socialism is communism.” – V. I. LENIN

 

"The dividing line between socialism and communism has never been very clear. Most of the regimes we refer to as communist actually called themselves socialist. Karl Marx viewed socialism as a stepping stone to the more perfect world of communism." -- JAMES BARTHOLOMEW (in THE SPECTATOR, in June 2017)

 

"I think there's a socialistic impulse, which I hear every day, in every kind of community, that they would like things to be planned according to their needs." -- BILL DE BLASIO (the fucking cretin. And who’s gonna decide people’s “needs”, eh? “Needs” is the ultimate Leftist weasel-word.)

"To 'Millennials', socialism is the belief in social media. Duh. What else would it mean?" -- ADAM MATHEWS                            (a fellow on the Twoot)

 

“The American People will take Socialism, but they won’t take the label.” -- UPTON SINCLAIR

 

“The trajectory of nearly every socialist trajectory: it begins with the dream of a more equal society and ends with people eating their pets. Has there ever been an ideology with  a more miserable track record?” -- TOBY YOUNG

 

“One of the mysteries of our age is why socialism continues to appeal to so many people. Whether in the soviet Union, China, Eastern europe, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia or Venezuela, it has resulted in the suppression of free speech, the imprisonment of political dissidents and, more oftehn than not, state-sanctioned mass murder. Socialist economics nearly always produce widespread starvation.” -- TOBY YOUNG

 

"While democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." -- ALEXIS DE TOQUEVILLE

"Scratch a socialist and you find a snob." -- MARY McCARTHY (who was more than a bit of both a socialist and a snob herself -- she wrote this in 1975)

“Socialists take care of you from the cradle to the grave. They decide if you get to the cradle and when you go to the grave.” -- DR. MARTY FOX (a big conservative cheese on the Twoot)

 

“Socialism is an alternative to capitalism as potassium cyanide is an alternative to water.” -- LUDWIG VON MISES

 

“They tell me that under Socialism all my needs will be supplied. I don't want my needs supplied. I don't want a lot of people messing about with me and doing me good, damn their eyes.” -- W. W. JACOBS (English writer most famously of short stores -- “The Monkey's Paw” was his greatest hit. 1863-1943)

 

“Socialism: The gift that keeps on taking.” -- EVAN SAYET (American non-leftist comedian)

 

"Socialism cultivates obedience through dependency, the promise of ‘free’ goods dispensed by the benevolent state. Of course this is a lie, as every child learns nothing is truly ‘free’. Adults can be induced to forget that lesson." --JOHN HAYWARD (conservative American author, on educational matters)

 

“Socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.” -- ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN

“Socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion." -- ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN

"Slavery is a form, and the very best form, of socialism” -- GEORGE FITZHUGH (From Virginia – the leading pro-slavery writer in America, before the Civil War – in 1854)

“Socialism has not only failed to work anywhere — whether in the old Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asian and African nations, North Korea, Cuba, or Venezuela — but it has also almost always been accompanied by horrendous abuse of power and the unnatural death of many millions.” -- SCOTT  S. POWELL (Senior fellow at The Discovery Institute of Seattle, and Managing Partner of Remington Rand LLC)

 

“Those who proclaim themselves as ‘socialists’ are usually depressing, have no sense of humor, and attended an expensive college. Fate loves irony.” -- ELON MUSK (not all that clever, but Elon's S'uth Ifriken-born, and the richest man in the world -- plus I agree with him -- so in it goes.)

 

"Every socialist is a disguised dictator." -- LUDWIG VON MISES (don't even know how "disguised"....)

 

“Since we are socialists, we must necessarily also be antisemites because we want to fight against the very opposite: materialism and mammonism… How can you not be an antisemite, being a socialist?” — ADOLF HITLER

 

"But if something looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and advocates total government control over the nation's economy like a duck, it is indeed a duck, and probably one with an M.A. from Columbia. A remarkable duck! But still a duck." -- JAMES LILEKS                             (in March 2019)

 

"Maybe people have tappable fears about socialism because it's a miserable idea antithetical to our culture and inevitably ends up with people using revalued currency for toilet paper because actual Charmin hasn't been available since the Ministry of Hindquarter Hygiene nationalized the pulp mills." -- JAMES LILEKS

 

"The socialist society must also forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults." -- ROBERT NOZICK (the American philosopher, and Harvard Philosophy Prof, who died in 2002)

 

"A non-technical definition of 'socialism' would be 'bossy and obstructive and high-handed government, Sweden certainly has a good deal of that." -- DEIRDRE NANSEN McCLOSKEY (Professor at the University of Illinois)

 

“Socialism is the use of the government’s monopoly of physical coercion to force people to do in the economy what they would not otherwise choose to do. Socialism might therefore be called economic coercionism.” – DEIRDRE NANSEN McCLOSKEY

 

"In fact, for Denmark to work, the whole original socialist model had to be reformed in a way that empowered entrepreneurship." -- EDWARD GLAESER (American economist, and Prof of Economics at Harvard)

 

“The American Left are (sic) engaged in a sustained attempt to reintroduce and rehabilitate the word ‘socialism’, in part by prepending (sic) to it a word that has a much better reputation and an infinitely better historical record, ‘democratic’. Voters should not be fooled by the rebranding, for there is no sense in which socialism can be made compatible with democracy as it is understood in the West.” – CHARLES C. W. COOKE (in June, 2019)

 

“At best – and I use that word loosely – socialism stamps out individual agency, places civil society into a straitjacket of uniform size, and turns representative government into a chimera.” – CHARLES C. W. COOKE

 

“You can believe that socialism is wonderful, as apparently many people do, and no one will stop you. You will get plenty of support from the media and academic elite. On the other hand, the whole theoretical basis for the idea was completely smashed a century ago. From a historical perspective, every prediction that socialism would produce nothing but chaos, deprivation, poverty, suffering, and death turned out to be true.” – JEFFREY TUCKER (A director of The American Institute For Economic Research, in June 2019)

 

“Socialism’s functioning, to the extent it functions at all, depends fundamentally on corruption – sneaking around the plan and gaming the system to survive.” – JEFFREY TUCKER

 

“Socialist theory presumes infinite benevolence at all levels of society, even to the point of the transformation of human itself.” – JEFFREY TUCKER

 

“If you love deprivation, constriction, and general limits on material aspirations, plus a tyrannical ruling class that oppresses everyone else, you will love what socialism can and does achieve. Indeed, misery seems to be its only contribution to economic history.” – JEFFREY TUCKER

 

"You can believe that socialism is wonderful, as apparently many people do, and no one will stop you. You will get plenty of support from the media and academic elite. On the other hand, the whole theoretical basis for the idea was completely smashed a century ago. From a historical perspective, every prediction that socialism would produce nothing but chaos, deprivation, poverty, suffering, and death turned out to be true." -- JEFFREY TUCKER

 

“Famine is a disproportionately prevalent outcome of socialist systems.” – BENJAMIN ZYCHER (resident scholar at The American Enterprise Institute, in June 2019)

 

"True socialists do not want a better world, they want a perfect one." -- THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

"Socialism is not only, or even principally, an economc doctrine: It is a revolt against human nature. It refuses to believe that man is a fallen creature and seeks to improve him by making all equal one to another." -- THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

"The handmaiden of failed socialist regimes has always been ignorance of the past and present. And that is never truer than among today’s American college-degreed (but otherwise economically & historically illiterate) youth" -- VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

 

"Socialism has its points, but mass prosperity is not one of them. Private property has its flaws, but mass poverty is not generally in recent centuries one of them." -- BEN STEIN

 

“Socialism is in eternal mortal conflict with basic human instinct. Therefore it must fail.” – JOHN EIDSON (an electrical engineer from Georgia writing in THE AMERICAN THINKER, in Dec. 2019)

 

“Of course, socialism is the national killer par excellence—the historical register is dispositive and unforgiving. Socialism comes in many forms, from hard communism to “social democracy,” but sooner or later the end result is always collapse.” – DAVID SOLWAY (a Canadian poet and essayist, in May 2020)

 

“Democrats praise Socialism but they can’t find one person from a Socialist country to say ‘Let’s bring that shit here’.” – DONALD TRUMP, JR.

 

“When socialists, like progressives, get honest, they admit they do not really want to generate more prosperity. They are done with that. Instead, they prefer that the economy be given a time-out – the economic equivalent of Xanax. Shut down capitalism and perhaps replace it with an old-styled kibbutz for 330 million people. Why? To prevent envy and to drain us of our competitive juices. They believe that competition is cancerous, eating away at our souls and our chances for happiness. If we could just stomp out competition, we could achieve self-realization and bliss. Rather than allowing the New York Stock Exchange to operate, they would rather we dress up like druids and prance around the rocks of Stonehenge in the hopes that it would help us pay our mortgage bills.” – TODD G. BUCHHOLZ (ex-White House “Economic Director” and hedge-fund manager and author)

 

“Socialism is so out of touch with basic biology that it doesn’t work at all.” – LYALL WATSON (The great British scientist and naturalist – he wrote a fabulous book in 1973 called “Supernature” that had a huge effect on me –  here writing in his 1995 book DARK NATURE)

“I think most tribes live in poverty and that’s due to socialism. I see socialism as a failed structure across the country, and on [Indian] reservations." -- MERISSA TURCOTTE (A Saginaw-Chippewa "activist" young lady, in Dec. 2022)  

“Socialism must have a dictatorship, it will not work without it.” -- MAO TSE-TUNG (Of course it does -- it goes directly against human nature, so how could it not?)

“Socialism is just another name for disaster.” – BYRON DONALDS (GOP congressional candidate in Florida’s 19th District – Fort Myers, Naples etc. – and a black fellow, in Aug. 2020)

 

“The average white person may associate socialism with Nordic countries, but to Asian and Hispanic migrants it recalls despotic Left-wing régimes.” – VICENTE GONZALEZ (a Democrat Congressman from Texas, in Nov 2020 – and if he knows this much, he shouldn’t be a Democrat)

 

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

 

“The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.” – NORMAN MAILER (Glib, but wrong. Socialism just spreads the suffering.)

 

"You can vote yourself into socialism but you have to shoot your way out." – C. DENNIS PEEK

"Socialism's answer to poverty is the equivalent of helping wheelchair users by cutting everyone's legs off." -- KONSTANTIN KASIN (in his "an Immigrant's Love Letter To The West")


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

 

"Socialists regard your property as their property, but even more nefariously regard your children as their property." – MICHAEL MALICE (Mr. Malice’s real name is MICHAEL KRECHMER, and he’s a Ukrainian-American author, podcaster, columnist, anarchist and “media personality”.)

"The horror of a command economy is not that mistakes will be made but they they will not be corrected." -- DAVID MAMET

"Real socialism is a barbaric fraud, a totalitarian dictatorship resting upon a foundation of slave labour and mass murder." -- TONY JUDT        (the English historian in his "POSTWAR: A History Of Europe Since 1945", and a guy with a reputation as a Leftist -- so good for him)

“Socialism is never for the socialist—just for everyone else." -- SEN. MIKE LEE (of Utah, in 2023)

“The basic difference between communism and fascism is communism is international socialism, fascism is national socialism.” – NICHOLAS FARRELL (a British journalist who lives in Italy, here in November 2021)

"One person's socialism is another person's neighborliness." -- TIM WALZ        (The "Defund The Police" Democrat Governor of Minnesota, in August 2024. And to which JONAH GOLDBERG, to his credit, commented: “No it’s not. ‘Neighborliness’ is not enforced by the State.”)

Socialism, National (NAZIs)

"I am accused of stealing ideas from the socialists and communists. In fact, I have learned much from them and I have never denied it. The difference between us and them, though, is that while they socialize industries and institutions, we socialize people." -- ADOLPH HITLER (a.k.a. Michael Palin's "Mister Hilter")         (Veeeeeerrrry interethting....)

 

"We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries” – ADOLPH HITLER (speech on 1 May 1927)

 

“Since we are socialists, we must necessarily also be antisemites because we want to fight against the very opposite: materialism and mammonism… How can you not be an antisemite, being a socialist?” — ADOLPH HITLER

 

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

 

"Bolshevism and Fascism were heresies of socialism." – RICHARD PIPES

 

"Nazis are simple, which is very attractive if you also are simple." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

"It is important to realize that Fascism and Nazism were socialist dictatorships. It is of great consequence that the communists have succeeded in changing the semantic connotation of Fascism. Fascism…was a variety of Italian socialism.…Dictatorship and violent oppression of all dissenters are today exclusively socialist institutions. The philosophy of the Nazis, the German National Socialist Labor Party, is the purest and most consistent manifestation of the anti-capitalistic and socialist spirit of our age.…The slogan into which the Nazis condensed their economic philosophy, viz., Gemeinutz geht vor Eigennutz (i.e., the commonweal ranks above private profit), is likewise the idea underlying the American New Deal and the Soviet management of economic affairs. It implies that profit-seeking business harms the vital interests of the immense majority, and that it is the sacred duty of popular government to prevent the emergence of profits by public control of production and distribution.…The mass slaughters (of Jews) perpetrated in the Nazi horror camps are too horrible to be adequately described by words. But they were the logical and consistent application of (socialist) doctrines and policies parading as applied science and approved by some men who in a sector of the natural sciences have displayed acumen and technical skill in laboratory research." -- LUDWIG VON MISES

 

“As far as racism goes, the modern Loony Left seem to forget that Hitler was Left wing." -- MORRISSEY (surprisingly insightful for a pop singer.)

 

"For many, 'You're a Nazi' is nothing more than shorthand for 'I don't like Republicans'." -- DAVID HARSANYI

"There crops up in Russia a particular group of intellectuals unofficially known as the National Bolsheviks -- Natbols for short. The Natbols combine Russian chauvinism with hard-line totalitarian tactics." -- VASSILY AKSYONOV (in 1985, presaging Putinism by a good few dozen years...)

"National Socialism says it on the tin, after all." -- JAMES HAWES (the English novelist and screenwriter who's also written something called "The Shortest History of Germany”, in   the SPECCIE, in September 2018)

 

"That's that's all Fascism/National Socialism was/is: Repressive, statist totalitarianism that enrolls national corporations to keep the economy turning over." -- JACK JOLIS

"Germany today is, next to Russia, the greatest exemplar of Marxian socialism in the world."-- W.E.B. DUBOIS (the supposedly great black avatar -- and strong pro-commie -- said this... in 1936, 3 years after Hitler's National Socialists had come to power) 

Socialism (“Scandinavian Model”)

“I know that some people in the U.S. associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.” – LARS LOKKE RASMUSSEN (the Danish Prime Minister, to Harvard’s Kennedy School, in 2016)

 

"A non-technical definition of 'socialism' would be 'bossy and obstructive and high-handed government, Sweden certainly has a good deal of that." -- DEIRDRE NANSEN McCLOSKEY (Professor at the University of Illinois)

 

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

 

"In fact, for Denmark to work, the whole original socialist model had to be reformed in a way that empowered entrepreneurship." -- EDWARD GLAESER (American economist, and Prof of Economics at Harvard)

 

“The average white person may associate socialism with Nordic countries, but to Asian and Hispanic migrants it recalls despotic Left-wing régimes.” – VICENTE GONZALEZ (a Democrat Congressman from Texas, in Nov 2020 – and if he knows this much, he shouldn’t be a Democrat)

"Sweden has no formalized minimum wage and has abolished inheritance tax. Its education is indeed world-renowned but it allows profit-seeking independent schools in the state sector. The Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom ranks Denmark, Sweden and Norway the seventh, ninth and tenth most free countries, respectively. The United States comes 25th on the list." -- KATE ANDREWS (in June 2024)

 

“Social Justice Warriors” (also see “Justice, Social”)

“No one must put himself forward. Everyone must be the same and have the same. Social justice means we deny ourselves many things so that others may have to do without them too.” – SIGMUND FREUD (He said this approvingly, and quite apart from all the other criticism this moral idiocy fairly invites, one is tempted to wonder what, exactly, were the “many things” that old Siggi denied himself so that “others could do without them too”. Also, I reckon this is the first-ever use of the bogus term “social justice”.)

 

"Oh, little justice warrior snowflakes, when did you all become grandmothers and society matrons, clutching your pearls in horror at someone who has an opinion about something, a way of expressing themselves that's not the mirror image of yours, you sniveling little weak-ass narcissists? The high moral tone from social justice warriors is always out of scale with what they are indignant about. When did this hideous and probably nerve-wracking way of living begin transforming you into the authoritarian language police, with your strict set of little rules and manufactured outrage, demanding apologies from every little thing you don't like?" -- BRET EASTON ELLIS

 

“The core beliefs of the members of this social justice movement cult certainly seem to play the same psychological role as the central tenets of the world’s major religions. What’s distinctive about members of the social justice left is not that they don’t believe in magic – they clearly do – but that the supernatural forces that govern their universe are all malevolent. Theirs is a religion bereft of a divine being. There are only white Devils.” – TOBY YOUNG (in January 2019)

“The woeful lack of anything passing for analysis (probably a colonial tool of oppression, like brunch) on the SJW side..." -- JULIE BURCHILL

"In order to qualify as 'intersectional feminist' and present yourself as a victim of 'systemic inequality' you need to be a member of the ruling class. One of the distinguishing characteristics of 'social justice' activists is that they tend to be rich, high-achieving young women who have been to elite universities which is why they're such ripe targets for satire." -- TOBY YOUNG (in March 2019)

 

 

“Social Media”

"It’s never been so easy to pretend to know so much without actually knowing anything. From various social media feeds, we come perilously close to performing a pastiche of knowledgeability that is really a new model of know-nothingness." -- KARL TARO GREENFIELD (A journalist and the author of the novel “SubPrime”)

 

"Twitter, like alcohol, doesn't change you; it only reveals you." – JIM GERAGHTY

 

“It occurred to me that social media almost never matter at all. And the few times they do matter, they matter for the worst reasons.” – DANIEL FOSTER (in NR, Jan. 2017)

 

“Facebook alone has, without quite meaning to, evolved into the most powerful publisher in the history of the world. Zuckerberg is William Randolph Hearst to the power of ten.” – NIALL FERGUSON

 

“Complaining that someone’s take notice of what you’ve posted is like a flasher complaining to the police about voyeurs. Over-privileged western half-wits being upset by pronouns, fussing over Facebook snooping is a real insult to the billions of people around the world who really are monitored and manipulated. They want the freedom we have and all we can do is fume over breaches of our pathetic privacy, as if we’re Mariah Carey surprised in the bath. Here’s a handy hint: if you don’t want attention for doing nothing, why not get off Facebook and do something that you’ll enjoy getting attention for?” --JULIE BURCHILL (in September 2019)

“One of the pleasures of my life is not owning an iPod, a BlackBerry, a Kindle or any contraption that has anything to do with Facebook or Twitter. I own a mobile telephone that I use only when on board my boat, otherwise I am mercifully free from these ghastly inventions that are turning modern life into a technological nightmare. Can you imagine flirting with a girl by texting her? Or by emailing her that you love her, or that you no longer love her for that matter? Not to mention the morons that zig-zag down our streets, their eyes riveted to the ghastly gimmick in their hands, oblivious to their surroundings, slaves to a technological god that has turned the dumb into robots and the unimaginative into zombies. Until last week I was unaware that all this crap is called 'social media', until I read an article by this guy who is supposed to be a famous writer, Jonathan Franzen, that declared that he was sick to death of hearing social media disrespected by cranky 51-year-olds. Add 23 more years, substitute disrespect with the word closest to bowel movement, and you've got little ole me, moron Franzen.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS            (Age 80. At least when he wrote this. Amongst much else, he was NATIONAL REVIEW's “Vietnam correspondent”)

 

“No one ever reared Torquemada or Savonarola as much as they fear the Twitter mob.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

“LinkedIn is an Escher staircase masquerading as a career ladder." – ANN FRIEDMAN (writing in The Baffler)

 

"Social media is the sheepdog of the new, crowd-loving (society). It is the beast which manipulates minds and concentrates attention on a few favoured places, ideas, products and cultural works at the expense of others. No one discovers anything any more; it is all discovered for us. Social media works on the latest obsessive-compulsive disorder in us; the voice in us telling us we must do or see something because everyone else is telling us to." -- ROSS CLARK (In the SPECCIE, in 2014)

 

"We now inhabit a planet where the majority of the population is constantly staring downwards, entranced, twiddling like carpenter ants. Do pickpockets know they’re living in a second renaissance?" -- PATTON OSWALT (A big lib, but a funny guy nevertheless. Memorably played, among much else, the gormless "Spencer Olchin" in "The King Of Queens". On giving up his “social media” for a month in 2014, as an “experiment”.)

 

“Twitter is a battlefield, but its compressed language, more nuanced than that outmoded bore text language, invites exploration.” – DOT WORDSWORTH

 

“Social media, the Internet's slow-witted progeny. It's a perpetual-motion machine of anger.” – SONNY BUNCH       (Managing Editor of THE WASHINGTON FREE BEACON)

 

"Being famous on Facebook is like being rich in Monopoly." -- GILLES HAGEGE (A Parisian veterinarian, in 2015)

 

“If there is hope, it lies in the 'Comments' threads.” -- JOHN DERBYSHIRE

 

“Twitter is a chance to turn the volume up on yourself.” – DAVID BADDIEL (the quite funny British comic and TV guy...)

 

"Twitter shows in real time how the hivemind operates." – STEVE SAILER

"I am not a member of the WhatsApp group as I don't have a mobile phone. I have to be contacted separately when a drink is in the offing. Indeed, if I'm going to be hones, I'm not sure I know what a WhatsApp group actually is." -- MARCUS BERKMANN

“Twitter was once like a rowdy pub conversation, but lately the level of bile has made it more of a bar brawl.” – HENRY JEFFREYS

 

“I'm impressed with anyone who can follow all the skirmishing on Twitter and still maintain the same level of creative output and general well-being. I, however, prefer not to maintain a state of simmering irritation and disgust throughout every waking hour.” – NED BEAUMAN (a novelist – a Brit, I think)l

 

"Twitter is a good way to understand media opinions, but not average Americans. Always remember this." -- MOLLY HEMINGWAY

 

“Most social media has only three modes of emotional expression: smug, soppy and nasty. An abridged version of the ten trillion or so words on Facebook would simply read: 'Look at me!', 'Gosh, isn't this terrible!', and 'Go fuck yourself!'.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

"Social media is not a new problem but merely makes an existing problem worse. The net effect of this language distortion field is that your dog probably has a more realistic appreciation of his own life than you do. Right now your dog is happy in the moment, not stuck in a suburban bedroom  looking at highly edited selfies of other dogs." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

"Skype spent decades without ever crossing the threshold of non-crappiness, as Zoom finally did." -- RORY SUTHERLAND (in May 2021)

 

“Too many tweets make a twat.” – DAVID CAMERON (in 2009, the year before he became Prime Minister)

 

“It's a fact that girls who use the most social media are the most likely to experience depression. But which came first: the blues or the ill-advised retreat online?” – MARY WAKEFIELD

 

“I read, in an academic paean to text messaging, that emojis have added back into texted life a sense of the fun and individual  character that handwriting once allowed. This is clearly cobblers. Emojis make any message not more different but more horribly uniform. Those nasty little faces impose their own distinctive character on a text, obscuring the sender, and in my book they’re borderline demonic.” – MARY WAKEFIELD (In May 2021)

“The more hours a day a teen spends on social media, the more likely it is that he or she is depressed." -- MARY WAKEFIELD

"Social media have turned the whole country into a nation of small-town gossips, prying and judging, clucking and tsk-tsking people they’ll never meet for not agreeing with them or because they’re not living the right way." -- MEGAN MCARDLE (in BLOOMBERG)

 

“Insofar as there is a problem with Facebook, it is that it is run by amoral busybodies who have proven themselves susceptible to precisely the sort of selective centralizations that we were told the Internet would help avoid. Cowed by the purveyors of fads, and marinated in what Mark Zuckerberg openly describes as a ‘left-leaning’ culture, Facebook has bought into expansive concepts such as ‘fake news’ (the term was originally used by progressives before Donald Trump hijacked it) and ‘hate speech’, and is on the road toward agreeing to purge anything that contravenes today’s definitions of either.” – CHARLES C. W. COOKE

"People will not revolt. They will not look up from their screens long enough to notice what's happening." -- GEORGE ORWELL (“1984”) 

"There are no rules. Not at Twitter, not at Facebook, not at YouTube. Their pretend rules are utterly malleable and dependent on the target." -- BEN DOMENECH (the founder and publisher of THE FEDERALIST)

 

"The original thought process behind Facebook and Instagram was ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible? And that means we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. The aim is to create a social validation feedback loop that exploits a vulnerability in human psychology’." -- SEAN PARKER (A founding president of Facebook, who left the company in 2005)

 

"We've never had 100 human animals viewing hundreds of their friends having fun without them." -- TRISTAN HARRIS       (an ex-Google "design ethicist".)

 

“We live in a truly odd time where nobody can be fired for actually being inept at their job but everyone can be fired for a clumsy social media post.” – DENNIS MILLER (In January 2019)

 

“Social media, like art, isn't real life; just a distilled representation. Most of us get along with each other offline. The distillation, however, makes us all that much more... whatever we are. It is what we are. It isn't a mask - it is the removal of masks.” – RON COLEMAN (A prominent American lawyer, on the Twoot, in February 2019)

 

“Users of Facebook trust me, the dumb fucks.” – MARK ZUCKERBERG

 

“Twitter, that vast lagoon of hastily jabbered nonsense.” – ROD LIDDLE

 

"As you know I'm not on SnapFace and all that. I'm not really too worried about what they put on InstantChat, or whatever it is." – BILL BELICHIK (the God-King of the New England Patriot football team)

 

“Twitter is bad, but Facebook is worse. Twitter tells you random strangers are obnoxious assholes, Facebook tells you your friends and family are.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

 

"Let's face it, the only products that make sense to advertise on social media are bullhorns and Xanax." -- DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE

"Girls are more harmed by social media than boys because they're more likely to buy into the three great untruths of social media: The first is that they are fragile and can be harmed by speech and words. Next, that their emotions, and especially their anxieties, are reliable guides to reality. And finally, that society is one big battle between victims and oppressors." -- JONATHAN HAIDT (an American social psychologist and author, and prof at NYU)

"Social media is a bit of a misnomer. It's no longer about connecting people, but performing on a platform." -- JONATHAN HAIDT

"Text messaging is the bastard child handed to us by the absence of reading." -- WERNER HERZOG    (the legendary German movie-maker, in his memoir "Every Man For Himself And God Against All")

“Like any thought that takes 12 seconds to think, I put it on Twitter.” – FRANK CHIMERO (An apparently famous NYC “designer”.)

 

“Social media platforms are perfect examples of socialism. You get it for free, the quality sucks, you have no say in how it works, the guy who runs it gets rich, you have no privacy, there’s no real competition, and if you say something they don’t like they shut you up.” – KAMBREE KAWAHINE KOA

 

"The hatred on social media is, sometimes, exhausting. Some people, I'm afraid, have been driven almost literally mad by the events of the past couple of years, deranged by disappointment, unhinged by fear. In person, luckily, almost everybody is pleasant. We are not Americans yet." -- ANDREW MARR (A Brit sort of Jake Tapper, in January 2021 -- and his last crack is why this is also under "anti-Americanism")

“You can’t opt out of the politicization of social media. And once you’re in these febrile circles, every online is actually about something else.” – JAMES BALL (Brit author and journalist, in May ‘21 – and we all know that with the Left, “it’s” never about what “it” purports to be.)

“It may sound bonkers, but on Tik-Tok all thinks are possible (except criticism of the CCP).” – SAM RUSSELL                         (the podcast producer of the SPECTATOR, in June 2021)

"The point of policing the borders of respectability (which is what social-media 'social justice' warriors spend their days doing) is to draw the lines in such a way as to put your enemies outside of them. It doesn’t have to make sense morally or politically, which is why the Taliban is welcome on Twitter while Donald Trump isn’t. The Taliban doesn’t matter to progressives, and Donald Trump does." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON (on 2 Nov.2021)

“You think someone is hopeless 'cause they can't use an i-phone? Maybe the one who's hopeless is the one who can;t stop using an i-phone." -- BILL MAHER

“Once you’re on WhatsApp you’re entangled in a seemingly unlimited morass of people strangling each other with the tentacles of their most banal ideas.” – MELISSA KITE

“Social media made y’all too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it.” – MIKE TYSON                                                  (I like Mike Tyson, but he has a strange affinity for nifty “punched in and about the face” quotes – see under PLANS. I wonder why.)                                                                      

“Social Network(ing)”

“Facebook is looking into buying Twitter for around $10 billion. If all goes as planned, the company hopes to combine the two companies, creating the biggest waste of time the world has ever seen.” – JAY LENO

 

“Social Science”

“There is no such thing as a "social science" and if there were, it wouldn't be economics.” – J. P. MULHERN                                (a reader of NRO in March ’11)

 

"Social science is rarely dispassionate, and social scientists are frequently caught up in the politics which their work necessarily involves . The pronounced 'liberal' orientation of sociology, psychology, political science, and similar fields is well established." – DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN (Senator from Noo Yawk, and one of only two Democrats I ever voted for – the other being the delightful poofter Ed Koch for Mayor)

 

“Most social scientists fall into one of two warring tribes. One seeks a genetic explanation for everything, another refuses to to acknowledge a genetic explanation for anything.” – -- RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“When an academic 'discovers' what ordinary mortals have known for eons, it's called social science.” – ILANA MERCER (the South African-born libertarian columnist)

 

Social Security

"Social Security is an investment the way the lottery is a retirement plan." – KURT SCHLICHTER

 

“Social Work”

“Social workers never joke.” - JOHN McVICAR (a famous Brit hoodlum and then ex-con/writer/pundit/”personality”)

 

“Think of the world of ‘social workers’ and a world of misery opens up at your feet: a depthless cavern of stupidity, political correctness, a willful waste of your own money, tendentious sociological bollocks, tortured grammar, words which have no real meaning, propaganda and social engineering.” -- ROD LIDDLE

 

"The mistakes of social workers may not outnumber other people's, but they generally matter far more." -- JAMES WALTON (in the SPECCIE)

 

"He who undertakes for a wage to be compassionate for 40 hours a week will soon be so for no hours a week." – CLIFFORD ORWIN (a "political scientist")

 

"I put to myself the question whether the removal of all social workers, preferably by execution squads, wouldn't do everyone a power of good. You had to do something about ill-treated, etc., children all right, but you could see to that without behaving like a sort of revivalist military policeman." -- KINGSLEY AMIS

 

"You couldn't have good social workers, because the only kind of chap who'd make a good one was also the kind of chap who'd refuse to be one." -- KINGSLEY AMIS

 

“Socially Liberal, Economically Conservative”

“ 'Socially liberal, economically conservative' in America is little different from saying 'a typical rich person'.” – MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY

Society

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

 

"They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours." - MARGARET THATCHER

 

“When criminals feel there are no consequences, the moral is they will break the law. When our society says that children know best, the moral is that adults have no authority. When we tell people they cannot succeed because of elitism, poverty and inequality, the moral is that there is no point in trying: someone must do it for you. When we encourage people to blame society for everything, then they need never take responsibility for their own actions. When we teach people to hate authority and despise the police, then breaking the law becomes a good thing to do. Society has become one big moral hazard and the brakes on human behavior are off.” – SIMON MARCUS (the founder of The Boxing Academy in Tottenham, London, and a member of the panel of experts to make recommendations following the 2011 riots in London.)

 

“We tolerate, even promote, many things we once regarded as evil, wrong, or immoral. And then we seek 'explanations' for an act that seems beyond comprehension. Remove societal restraints on some evils and one can expect the demons to be freed to conduct other evil acts.” – CAL THOMAS

 

The real story is that our social safety net was supposed to be like one of those 'Take a Penny, Leave a Penny' tills that depend on the honor and neighborliness of a community. And we don't have that community. What we have is a fragmented mess of givers and takers who are not the same people.” – DANIEL GREENFIELD

 

"A social order doesn't fail when the kids revolt; it fails when the kids realize that their elders have already given up on it." -- ROSS DOUTHAT

 

“Societies are emergent properties full of other emergent properties.” – JONAH GOLDBERG 

 

“In fact, there was no such thing as society: just a collection of little self-contained boxes, roped untidily together and set adrift to float aimlessly in the waters of time, the occupants of each box convinced that theirs was the most important box, heedless of the claim of the rest. Success did not consist in getting into the box where most power was exercised: there were many people who were powerful and unhappy. Success consisted in determining which box would be most pleasant for a time, then you could make it as comfortable as possible until you could get out.” – DAVID LODGE (the amusing English novelist)

 

"Society as it was constituted -- its forces all in constant motion, the intricate underwebbing of interests stretched to its limit, the battle for advantage that is ongoing, the subjugation that is ongoing, the factional collisions and collusions, the shrewd jargon of morality, the benign despot that is convention, the unstable illusion of stability -- society as it was made, always has been and must be made." -- PHILIP ROTH

 

"But we don't do stigma anymore. It is not considered inclusive." -- ROD LIDDLE

 

“We are social animals. And being social animals, this is where the trouble starts. I find socialising a total pain – from publishers( launch parties where everyone is boasting, to queues in the Post Office, where I am behind imbecile old ladies. Once two or more people are gathered together there’ll be fundamental power struggles, jostling, upmanship, competition, conflict and stress.” – ROGER LEWIS

"It's sick out there, and getting sicker." -- BOB GRANT  (the "tagline" of this great early conservative talk-radio "shock jock" of the 70s on WMCA in Noo Yawk)

"Sociology"

“Sociology is a scientific way of telling us what we know already.” - MICHAEL VESTEY (and I’m not so sure about the “scientific” bit - have you actually been in a “sociology” class lately? Or ever? Crikey, what a loada twaddle....)

 

“When an academic 'discovers' what ordinary mortals have known for eons, it's called social science.” – ILANA MERCER (the South African-born libertarian columnist)

 

"When you're generalizing with accuracy, that's called sociology." -- ROBBY SOAVE                                                                          (an Editor at REASON magazine)

 

“Sociologists, it is well known, are humourless, left-wing purveryors of nonsense or truisms.” -- NIGEL BARLEY (the noted anthropologist)

"A sociologist is a man who spent thirty thousand pounds trying to find his way to a whorehouse." -- PHILIP THODY (Prof. Thody is British) 

"Sociology is tendentious, haf-baked, spuriously scientific, politically-biased and -- frankly -- of no use to man or beast. Much like the altar at which it worships, Marxism, it is a creature of the 19th century and the desperate wish firstly to provide a 'holistic' view of everything and secondly to replace religious faith with science." -- ROD LIDDLE

"Anthropology is almost as big a racket as 'Sociology' is." -- JACK JOLIS


"Sociology as a school subject is a soup of half-baked old-left apologist propaganda, daft pub conspiracy theories, self-defeating second-wave feminist rants and an actively denied undercurrent of western Christian superiority." -- ROERT ADES     (it's Adès with an accent-grave, and he's an English psychology teacher)

Solitude

“It is astonishing what foolish things one can temporarily believe if one thinks too long alone.” – JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES (pity the old poof didn't get out and about more often....)

 

"The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude." -- ALDOUS HUXLEY

 

“There's no traveling side by side in the narrow places. In the narrow places you climb alone. It has to be enough to believe there's somebody behind you.” – DENIS JOHNSON

 

“When solitary, be not idle. When idle, be not solitary.” – DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON

"Living and dying is all about being alone. Other people are like the noises we hear in a city or the reflection of flames on the wall of a cave -- a distraction that can seem like the main event." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS (the comic English novelist, being not so funny here.)

 

“The right to be left alone – the most comprehensive of our rights, and the right most valued by civilized men. To protect that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amerndment.” –  JUSTICE LOUIS D. BRANDEIS (in Olmstead vs. US, 1928)

"Being alone for a while is dangerous. It's addicting. Once you see how peaceful it is, you don't even want to deal with people anymore" -- TOM HARDY (the actor -- who was so great in the underrated 2015 movie "Child 44")

"We need a witness to our lives. The best past of a view is somebody to share it with." -- GENEVIEVE GAUNT     (an English actress -- one of the Harry Potter ones, I believe...)

Somalia

“Somalia is so bad that making a mess improves the place.” - P. J. O’ROURKE

 

“It was hard to imagine creating anything in Somalia.” – A. JAMES PANOS                                                                                         (my great friend, the US diplomat-troubleshooter, in 2021)

 

Sontag, Susan

“Susan Sontag – this needy, unreadable, voluntarily difficult, overrated, under-read individual whose (diminishing number of) admirers (in the orbit of the New York Review of Each Other’s Books) mistake incomprehensibility for profundity.” – STEPHEN BAYLEY (The art critic of the UK SPECTATOR)

 

Sophistication

“Simplicity is the highest form of sophistication.” – LEONARDO DA VINCI

«No one is born sophisticated.» -- PAUL ANKA

"But I'm a sophisticated guy. I've owned a Cadillac. In fact, I've owned two Cadillacs." -- ABDUL RASHID DOSTUM      (the great, and wrongly-maligned Uzbek warlord and our ally in Afghanistan -- to J. R. Seaman, of the CIA's "Team Alpha" in 2001.  And it reminds me of my old pal Jean-Bedel Bokassa, of the Central African Republic, who in the early 1970s was given 2 Cadillacs as a gift by the US State Department -- which he promptly traded-in for one Mercedes 600.)

 

Soros, George

"George Soros -- he's like the Devil's handyman here on earth" – DEBBIE ALDRICH (my great pal, from the Twoot, 5 YouTube interviews, and a day squiring her around Brussels. A thoroughly excellent lady.)

"George Soros is the most effective anti-soul private citizen in the world. He's King John reneging on the Magna Carta and going after the little guys so they have no rights. Recognizing the soul within people means recognizing their rights. The man's basically a devil." -- ROY CAMERON

"George Soros is the leading, most effective Anti-American 'private citizen' in the entire world." -- JACK JOLIS (I actually used "private citizen" before my pal Roy did...)


South Africa

“What does it matter if you want to drown me in muddy water or in clear water?” – R.F. “PIK” BOTHA (one-time R.A.F. Battle of Britain hero, long-standing S’uth Efrikan Foreign Minister, and noted, er, “social” drinker. A good guy.)

 

“South Africa is like a zebra. If you put a bullet into a black stripe or the white stripe, the animal will die.” – ROELOF “PIK” BOTHA

 

“Under communist rule, South Africa will become a land of milk and honey." -- NELSON MANDELA (at the "Rivonia Trial", 1963-64)

 

"I am not corrupt, I have been corrupted by corruptees" -- JACOB ZUMA (outgoing president of Souse Efrika, in Jan. 2018)

 

"Education is not as important as everyone thinks. Africans have survived thousands of years without it. It is not for Africans, it came with the whites.” – ANGIE MOTSHEKGA (South Africa’s “Basic Education Minister” and also the head of the ruling ANC Party’s “Women’s Wing”)

 

"The trouble with South Africa is not that the oppressed tribes are black. It is that the tribe doing the oppressing is white." -- MILES KINGTON (in 1989, when I would regularly travel there. 4 years before the end of "apartheid".)

"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)

"Nobody in recent South African history deserves three cheers; but the Afrikaners deserve two." -- MATTHEW PARRIS      (Sept. 2024 — the "wet" poofter Conservative ex MP, who was born in Rhodesia and in this matter actually knows whereof he speaks)

South Dakota

"Who calls a city 'Pierre'?" -- DONALD WESTLAKE

South, the U.S.

“There is one area of life where a drawl won’t hurt you: the military. It might even help. While the West is known for rugged individualists (save for California, which provides wine, women, and tap dancers), the Midwest for solid citizens, and the Northeast for industrialists, intellectuals, and ethnic sham artists, the South is the land of grunts and generals.” - DAVE SHIFLETT

 

“The South is the rest of America… what we’ve had all along in this bizarre, slightly troubling, basically wonderful country - fun, danger, real friendliness, energy, enthusiasm, and brave, crazy, tough people… Put us all together and we’re the biggest, baddest, best sons of bitches anywhere… Nobody’s eating roughage , running marathons, and taking yoga classes down there. People still drink, still smoke, still have guns, and still believe in a personal god who listens to them. They’re not worried about the future. This country didn’t come from people who worried. It came from people who whipped the future’s ass.” - P. J. O’ROURKE

 

“Maybe soon I really will go back down south. Where I remain in good standing a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. All such a waste of time north of the Mason-Dixon Line claiming to be anything anymore in life. Get away out of this uncivilized suburbia. So what if salamanders crawl up and down the curtains in the Carolinas and give Northerners the heebie jeebies, and bugs bite the shit out of one. But where men stand to respectful attention when a lady enters the room. And they really do try to click their heels.” – J. P. DONLEAVY

 

“I don't think it's about more gun control. I grew up in the South with guns everywhere, and we never shot anyone. This is about people who aren't taught the value of life.” – SAMUEL L. JACKSON

 

“Say what you will about slavery, you’ve got to love the houses.” – JULIA GRANT                           (Ulysses’ wife, as quoted by Everett Ehrlich in his entertaining “Grant Speaks”, in 2000. So this quote is almost certainly an invention, but I put it in here because it’s too good not to.)

"Since southerners have spent so much of the past century talking about how much they hate Yankees, Yankees have learned to hate them back." -- JOE QUEENAN (who's from Philadelphia, and lives in the Hudson Valley)

"If there is such a thing as a Southern way of life, part of it has to do with not speaking of it." -- WALKER PERCY     (who was originally from Alabama, went to school in North Carolina, and lived in Louisiana.)


“All beer is Yankee beer, real Southerners drink whiskey.” – ALEX BERENSON (in his 2008 novel “The Ghost War”)

“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.” -- FLANNERY O'CONNOR      (the lady novelist, 1925-1964)

"Enlisting in the Confederate Army was the natural, human thing for Father to do. Like so many others, including Robert E. Lee, who neither owned slaves nor approved of slavery, Father felt his first allegiance to be to his adopted state." -- BERNARD BARUCH      (1870-1965)

"All they (southerners In DC during the secession winters) had to offer was bad manners, bad politics, poker and treason." -- HENRY ADAMS       (1838-1918)

“The bourbon flavor made him wince. No wonder the Confederates lost the fucking war, I thought sourly.” – CHRIS MILLER (see above. And this here is my ΑΔΦ brother, from his 2006 memoir “The Real Animal House”)

Sovereignty

"Why is it so hard to see that defense of the Westphalian sovereign nation state system that is based on secure borders is as critical for others as it is for our own country?" -- CLARE LOPEZ

Soviet Union, The

“The Soviet system was nothing more than an experiment which wasted everybody’s time”. - BORIS YELTSIN (…well…yes,… although of course there was also the small matter of dozens of millions killed…)

“The fall of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.” -- VLADIMIR PUTIN (remember this, “conservative” apologists….)

“It was good to be back in the Soviet Union, where the factories still produce pollution and very little else. What the foreign optimists forgot, when the Soviet Union fell apart, was that the Soviet Union was not merely a political regime but an entire civilization: one without virtue or charm, but a civilization nonetheless. The life expectancy of Soviet males was only 59, thanks largely to vodka. The Soviets were undoubtedly magnificent missionaries for the cause of drunkenness.” - THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

“‘Soviet’ is to ‘Russian’ what ‘disease’ is to ‘human.’” -- ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN

"The Soviet Communist Party's systematic extermination of its enemies, real and imagined, all of its own countrymen, by the tens of millions, through an enormous, methodical, bureaucratically-controlled human sewage disposal system." -- ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN 

"In the Soviet Union, the future was known; it was the past that was always changing." -- DENNIS PRAGER              (Recalling an old Soviet joke)

 

“The Soviet Union was the most criminal regime in history.” – EMIL CONSTANTINESCU                                             (President of Romania, 1996-2000)

 

“The Soviet Union is a gangster government whose cruelty is exceeded only by its duplicity.” – ARNOLD BEICHMAN            (1913,2010 – the feisty ex- and then anti-Communist author and scholar. I knew the guy a bit — he was a friend of my parents — and trust me, he was a real pistol.

 

“In the Soviet Union 90% of what you are told is a lie, but the lies are more familiar than the truth, so it is the truth that seems unbelievable.” – ROBERT MOSS                                                                                                                                                                    (the English co-author, with the Belgian Arnaud de Borchegrave, of the seminal cold war, liberal-bias novel “The Spike”.)

 

“You can't make an omelette twelve time zones wide without breaking 50 to 60 million eggs. It's even harder when you purged half the chickens for not informing on the rooster who failed to greet the dawn with sufficient enthusiasm on May Day.” – JAMES LILEKS

 

“Half of Russia did time in the camps; the other half sent them there.” – MARY DEJEVSKY                                                          (a British journalist and one of the country's foremost experts on the old Soviet Union)

 

“The Soviet system drove more and more people to drink, of worse and worse quality.” – BRUCE ANDERSON                         (so that by the end they were reduced to glugging bootlegged jet-fuel)

 

"The Soviet Union was a nation of bus stops." -- ROLAND ELLIOTT BROWN (reviewing a book called "Soviet Bus Stops")

 

“The chief demerit of the Marxist program was its point-by-point defiance of human nature. Bolshevik leaders subliminally grasped the contradiction almost at once; and their rankly Procrustean answer was to leave the program untouched and change human nature.” – MARTIN AMIS

 

"In the Soviet Union, there's no angling around for your male midlife crisis. It is brought to you and it is always the same thing. It is death." -- MARTIN AMIS ("House of Meetings")

 

"In the Gulag, it was not the case that people died like flies. Rather, flies died like people." -- MARTIN AMIS

 

"Only in the west do you find real communists. In Russia they would be in labour camps. The Party could not permit them." -- ALAN JUDD

 

"In Siberia, death had always been the one commodity that met its quota." -- ROBIN WHITE (in his thriller "Siberian Light")

"The Soviet Union didn't die, it moved -- to American colleges and universities." -- CHRIS PLANTE (on 22 March 2019)

 

“The only real Soviet money is vodka. Vodka is the only state monopoly that really works.” – MARTIN CRUZ SMITH (in August 1991)

 

“The two earliest habits of apeman were cannibalism and painting himself red. Soviets are the only ones who still do it.” – MARTIN CRUZ SMITH

 

“The city was unchanged in the past forty years. The advantage of the Soviet model was that construction and upkeep were kept to a minimum, so Soviet memories tended to be excellent.” – MARTIN CRUZ SMITH

"You can't live in the Soviet Union -- especially after having lived in the United States -- and not realize it's the wrong side." -- ROBERT LITTELL 

“The more I know about the Soviet Union, the more it sounds like one endless gang war.” – MARTIN CRUZ SMITH (This all reminds me of a very telling anecdote: When I first went to just-ex-commie Russian in Feb. 1992, our affable “gofer” was explaining the Russian “gangster state” to us: “Far sieventié five years, they tellink us zet kiepeeteliski are gengksteris. Saw now, all sadden, VE are kepeeteliski – saw, hav corse, ve are oll gengksteris! Logic!”)

"For ruthless inhumanity, the Bolsheviks were unbeatable." -- ANTONY BEEVOR (in his "Russia: Revolution And Civil War") 

"I know everybody I met in Russia outside the Communist Party goes in terror of his liberty or his life." -- ETHEL SNOWDEN     (a British socialist and feminist/suffragette, writing in 1920)

“Sixty-six million people were killed in the USSR between 1917 and 1953 – shot, tortured to death, starved, frozen or worked to death. Others say the true figure is a mere forty-five million. Who knows? Neither estimate, by the way, includes the thirty million now known to have been killed in the Second World War. To put this loss in context, the Russian Federation today has a population of roughly 150 million. Assuming the ravages inflicted by communism had never occurred, and assuming normal demographic trends, the actual population should be about 300 million. And yet – and this is surely one of the most astounding phenomena of the age – Stalin continues to enjoy a wide measure of support in this half-empty land.” – ROBERT HARRIS (the novelist, in 1998)

 

"This whole huge empire, think of it, run out of some vodka-soaked back rooms by a few beetle-browed men." -- JOHN UPDIKE

 

“No nation can confess as magnificently or as completely as those in the Soviet Union.” – PETER USTINOV (in 1957)

 

Space (Outer, + Space Program)

“It takes a big reason to go to the Moon, because, quite frankly, it’s a lousy place to be.” - EDWIN “BUZZ” ALDRIN (I shouldn’t have to say this, but I probably do - the second man on the Moon.)

 

"Why don't you fix your little problem and light this candle?" – ALAN B. SHEPARD JR. (During 4 hour delay, sitting atop his Redstone rocket in 1961 while Houston dicked around with some SNAFU)

 

"There is just one thing I can promise you about the outer-space program - your tax-dollar will go further." – WERNHER VON BRAUN

 

“I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.” – ELON MUSK

 

“Anyone who sits on top of the largest hydrogen-oxygen fueled system in the world, knowing they're going to light the bottom, and and doesn't get a little worried, does not fully understand the situation.” – JOHN YOUNG (American astronaut and second-to-last moon-walker, in 1972, who died in Jan. 2018)

 

"Cathedrals were the space programs of their day (‘The Knights Templar were the first Space Force’: Discuss). Cities and nations constantly competed to see who could build the tallest Cathedral — which is why most are built on the tallest ground available. The idea was both theological and political. Theologically, the idea was to get as close to God as possible. Politically, it was a desire for, well, national greatness." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“‘It’s not rocket science’. Actually, rocket science is quite simple: One simply lights the blue touch paper and stands back. A day or two later one or two of your best chaps find themselves on the moon.” – CRAIG BROWN (who writes the famous satirical column for the UK DAILY MAIL)

 

“Broadcasting our position to the universe might be the equivalent of shouting in a jungle.” – MARTIN RYLE (the former British “Astronomer Royal”)

 

“The reason we have very little idea of what it feels like to go into space is that no astronaut so far can write.” – MARTIN AMIS

 

“Astronomers hate manned space flight, since it’s a very expensive way of finding out very little.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

"I think a future flight should include a poet, a priest and a philosopher.....we might get a better idea of what we saw." -- MICHAEL COLLINS (Astronaut, Apollo 11 Moon Mission)

Spain

“It is not for nothing that that the Spanish national anthem has no words: it is, instead, a political necessity.” - ROD LIDDLE

 

“I have never known the Spaniards do anything much, less do anything well.” - THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON

 

“Spain is a cold country, with hot sun.” – CHRISTOPHER HOWSE (a writer for the UK Telegraph)

 

“Spanish is the language of inarticulate anger.” – A.A. GILL

 

“There are too many Spains – that's why it needs me.” – FRANCISCO FRANCO

 

"You cry like a woman, for what you didn't defend as a man" -- AIXA  (The mother of the last Muslim king of Spain, Muhammad XII of Granada, known to the Spanish as "Boabdil", to    her son after his final defeat at the Battle of Granada, in 1492 -- his surrender to King Ferdinand and Queen   Isabella, by the way, was attended by, amongst many others, Christopher Columbus)

 

“Spaniards do not tear down their past. Their monuments stand tall. I know that there is now a controversy here about the vast monument to Franco at the Valle de los Caidos. But I blame that more on modern politics than on the Spanish conception of life. Franco led the Nationalists in the civil war against the Republicans whose ranks were infiltrated by communists. Today’s socialists want to exploit the propaganda that came with the civil war and has been perpetuated by them. Yet, I take comfort in knowing that if Franco had lost the war it is not inconceivable that the Mediterranean Sea would have been a Soviet lake. Then how might the Cold War have come out? And how does one explain the huge and modern monument that the Spanish have erected to Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the New World? What is more, we have the Spanish bullfight.” – R. EMMETT TYRRELL JR. (in May 2019)

 

“Spain shambles through history, but can reach up and touch the sky.” – ANTHONY CARSON (the literary pseudonym for Peter Brooke, a British journalist and humorous travel writer. He wrote this in 1960.)

 

Spanish Civil War (the)

"The Spanish Republic, for which so many left-wing intellectuals and activists had fought in the 1930s, had been turned into a totalitarian police state by Moscow and the Spanish Communists, and would have become a People's Republic had it survived. Life under the commissars would have been a worse fate than life under Franco."  -- RON RADOSH        (the ex-radical communist agitator, in his excellent 2001 memoir "Commies")

Special Forces/Special Operations

“Let me remind you that you must never think of yourselves as an elite. You are something more distinguished, with a special strategic role which is probably unique among all the armies of the world. Hence the need for you to keep a low profile, for reticence, and for the practice of security at all times.” – COL. DAVID STIRLING (The young founder of the British S.A.S. during WWII, here addressing his troops.)

 

“Special operations are to intelligence collection as a string quartet is to a marching band.” – WILLIAM HOOD (the American spy writer)

 

“Are you tough? If so get out. I need buggers with intelligence.” – ROGER COURTNEY (“Jumbo” Courtney was the founder of the British “Special Boat Service” {SBS}, and this was actually a little sign he had sitting on his desk.)

 

Speculation

“In my experience, when enough people speculate somebody always gets it right.” – TERRY HAYES (sounds a LOT more insightful than it actually is....)

 

"It is never inappropriate to speculate: it is the means by which, as the evidence builds up, we struggle our way to conclusions." -- ROD LIDDLE

 Speech

"Still write it down, it might be read -- nothing's better left unsaid." -- KEITH REID (Procol Harum's nonpareil lyricist, in his "In Held Twas In I", and words that I used as an epigram in my first novel, "Firmly By The Tail", in 1976)


"Everything needs saying. That's why they had the Declaration of Independence, for Christ's sakes." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS (the very amusing English novelist, channeling Squire Reid, above.)


Speed

 “Horseback riding was the fastest a human could go before the railroads.” -- DAVID ANTHONY (an archaeology prof at Hartwick College, NY state)

"Speed is a function of fear." -- JACK JOLIS

Spelling

“Nothing you can't spell will ever work.” – WILL ROGERS

 

"If I didn't have typos I'd have nothing." -- KURT SCHLICHTER (23 March 2022)

Spending, Government

“We have a budget process that works as well as a pub that opens its doors to a pack of fraternity brothers and tells them the drinks are on the house.” - STEPHEN MOORE (American economist; ex- of the CATO Institute and the Club For Growth. Did something useful in the Trump Administration. He was once kind enough to write me to agree with my proposal to move IRS Filing Day to coincide with Election Day. Damn good man.)

 

“Great nations are never impoverished by private, though they sometimes are by public prodigality and misconduct.” - ADAM SMITH

 

Big government is expensive, and the American people didn't enjoy being forced to pay, through high taxes, for the pleasure of being pushed around.” - PEGGY NOONAN

 

“Regardless of the popularity of spending restraint in general the particular beneficiaries of spending will fight to the last ditch to retain their jobs. As a matter of fact, the more useless and unproductive the spending, the harder it is to cut. You can cut defense spending, which actually imparts new capabilities and reduces the likelihood of war. But try to cut subsidies for performance artists. People who have nothing else they can do except go on the stage and smear themselves with excrement will fight to the last ditch to retain their subsidies. They have no choice.” - GEORGE GILDER

 

“Governments don’t invest, they spend.” - TOM BETHELL (don’t EVER let that “invest” bullshit go unchallenged, you conservative debaters…)

 

“It is not greed which disinclines us to offer more dosh to inner-city social services or education departments, but the belief that it would be wasted.” - MATTHEW PARRIS (“dosh” is Brit for “dough”)

 

“As a simple but surely effective measure for achieving cuts in spending, might I propose that anyone with any of the words ‘Diversity’, ‘Equality’, and ‘Outreach’ in their job title be immediately relieved of their ‘duties’? This would be win-win as, apart from the vast savings, there would undoubtedly be a benefit to the sum of human happiness.” - PHILIP BROOKSBY (a good citizen from Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan, Wales, writing to the Spectator in November 2008)

 

“These programs are not wrong because they’re unaffordable; they’re unaffordable because they’re wrong - they’re not the proper role of government.” - MARK STEYN

 

“There is no more persistent and influential faith in the world than the faith in government spending.” - HENRY HAZLITT (in 1950. Imagine what he’d think now….)

 

“People can be careless with other people's money, but you can be sure they will be careful with their own. If their own is in the pot with mine, they will be sure to appoint a suitable recipient for it.” – PLINY THE YOUNGER (61-112 A.D.)

 

“Borrowing less money by taking more does not solve the problem of overspending.” -- JIM TARANTO

 

"Stimulus by spending won’t fix the economy any more than morphine will fix a broken arm." -- VERONIQUE DE RUGY (the French-born naturalized American supply-side economist)

 

“Shrinking government, like enforcing immigration laws, is like broccoli to the political class, whereas getting more revenue is, along with amnesty, the dessert ― our representatives will eat as little of the broccoli as they can get away with to clear the way for dessert.” – MARK KRIKORIAN

 

"Every bet looks good when you're gambling with somebody else's money” – FRED THOMPSON

 

"Let’s pass a bill to cover the moon with yogurt that will cost $5 trillion today. And then let’s pass a bill the next day to cancel that bill. We could save $5 trillion." — PAUL RYAN  (the genius Republican congressman from Wisconsin, in November 2011)

 

“The federal government is here saying we're giving you a boatload of money. There are no - there's no matching funds requirement. There are no extraneous conditions attached to it. It's just a boatload of federal money for you to take and spend on poor people's health care. It doesn't sound coercive to me, I have to tell you.” – ELENA KAGAN (The“Wise Latina” who infests the Supreme Court)

 

“Obama said in Florida that more government spending is a ‘better way to make economy stronger.’ Sure. Like using bricks from walls to make the roof stronger.” – FRED THOMPSON

 

“When the desirable jobs are spending other people's money, reporting on spending other people's money and lobbying to spend other people's money then you know that the society is fucked.” – TIM WORSTALL (the English author, economic blogger, contributor to TCS and occasionally the Philadelphia Inquirer, and, would you believe, Press Officer for UKIP. He lives in Portugal)

 

“I don’t know why Republicans keep saying we have to cut spending to save these entitlements for our grandchildren. We have to cut spending to save these entitlement programs for 45 year-olds. On our current spending rate, 45 year-olds will not receive any Medicare.” – ANN COULTER

 

"The last official act of any government is the looting of the treasury." – GEORGE WASHINGTON

"The last time Congress called me in to confer on the national budget, I became truly exasperated. 'Gentlemen', I exploded, 'how many times have I told you that you will never get anywhere in this matter until you purchase seven glass jars and label them (neatly) UPKEEP, INTEREST ON DEBT, RUNNING EXPENSES, SAVINGS, NATIONAL DEFENSE, SEEDS FOR CONSTITUENTS, and INCIDENTALS. If you distribute your tax intake into those jars each month, you will have the beginnings of a workable budget -- and not before!  While the entire legistlative body sat stunnd under the sting of my words, I took my hat and stlked out, with the sergeant-at-arms behind me, kindly urging me to the door." -- W.C. FIELDS

“A government big enough to save $400m in ink by changing fonts is big enough to not give a shit about saving money” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

 

'”The cost of commodities is diminishing. Under such conditions the cost of government ought not to be increasing." – CALVIN COOLIDGE

 

“What would you think of a person who earned $24,000 a year but spent $35,000? Suppose on top of that, he was already $170,000 in debt. You’d tell him to get his act together ― stop spending so much or he’d destroy his family, impoverish his kids and wreck their future. Of course, no individual could live so irresponsibly for long. But tack on eight more zeroes to that budget and you have the checkbook for our out-of-control, big-spending federal government.” – JOHN STOSSEL

 

“Has Obama ever in his life used the word 'investment' to refer to something other than government spending?” – MARIO LOYOLA (an outstanding Texan from the Institute Of Policy Studies, in Jan '15)

 

“The assumption that spending more of the taxpayers' money will make things better has survived all kinds of evidence that it has made things worse.” – THOMAS SOWELL

"Politically, it's easier to write the cheque (sic) and forget about the long-term sick." -- FRASER NELSON (the Editor of the SPECTATOR, in May 2023)

"Everything is done well in Britain save that which is done with public money." --SIR ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH ("Q", pronounced "Quiller-Cooch" -- 1863-1944)

“Keep your eye on how much the Government is spending, because that is the true tax." -- MILTON FRIEDMAN

“Spirituality”

“‘Spirituality’ is a mostly bogus category created for people who want to feel good about themselves without having to get up early on Sunday or give up activities to which they’re partial but most churches aren’t.” - MARK STEYN

 

Spite

“The problem with political obsessives is that they instinctively judge ideas not according to their effectiveness but by the extent to which they annoy their opponents. A policy is judged not by how well it works, but by the degree to which it reduces the contentment of those social groups whose statues you most want to see fall in relation to one’s own.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“Even though you no longer exist, we still hate you.” – JEAN ANOUILH (“Vous avez beau ne plus exister, nous vous haissons encore!”

"Spite is a very underrated motivator. It's revenge's little brother." -- JACK JOLIS

"Spite is the Tabasco in the Bloody Mary of life, and it often does the recipient good." -- JULIE BURCHILL

Spoilsports

“No, the American car industry was not destroyed by its cars. The American car industry was destroyed by the Fun-Suckers. You know the Fun-Suckers. You may be married to one. The Fun-Suckers go around saying how unsafe this fun thing is and how unfair this fun thing is and how unhealthy that fun thing is and how unfair, unjust, uncaring, insensitive, divisive, contagious, and fattening every other thing that’s fun is.” - P. J. O’ROURKE

 

Spontaneity

“What the weight of historical evidence shows us overwhelmingly is that almost everything good in the world has sprung up by accident, and almost everything bad is the (largely) unintended consequence of utopians with too much power trying to plan the world into a better state.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

 

Sports

“Next to politics, there is no vocation whose members use more words to say less than athletes.” - MATT LABASH (he was referring to famed left-wing gasbag, and one-time professional basketballist Democrat Senator, Bill Bradley at the time…)

 

“Team spirit is an illusion glimpsed in victory.” - STEVE ARCHIBALD (reputed to be a Sottish footballer which, if t rue, makes him an uncommonly eloquent footballer)

 

“American sport seems to be populated by people with no brakes, psychologically speaking, and cars indeed to match.” - RUSSELL DAVIES (I don’t know what this pompous ass of a Brit “commenter” means by this, but it is indubitably scurrilous…)

 

“No, the race is not always to the merely swift. Sometimes it goes to the unutterably bloody-minded.” - MICHAEL ATHERTON (a great ex-English cricketer and captain of the national team.)

 

“Without fear, sport is nothing, for without fear, there is no relief.” - SIMON BARNES (no relief? That was the Red Flops last year. Anyway, this guy is what passes for The (UK) Spectator’s sportswriter….)

 

“In America, millions of men, especially those in the television age of under-50, have nothing to say on any subject other than sport. They know nothing else, they are interested in nothing else. They read, watch, talk and think about nothing else. The rest of the world and all its being is nothing more than a blip to these men. Millions of American men can name every member of the Dodgers’ team that won the World Series in 1988 but couldn’t remember the names of five men who signed the Declaration of Independence. They could give you the scores of every Lakers’ game for the last five seasons but they couldn’t put their finger on Germany on a map of the world. They could list all the times Arnold Palmer won the US Open but they couldn’t tell you how many times Franklin Roosevelt was President.” - NEIL LYNDON (an English journalist and author and supporter of “Male Rights”, here surveying California in 1995)

 

“Seriousness about sport is both inappropriate and essential. And you cannot help but groan at the self-importance of sport and its people. It is a mighty absurdity.” - SIMON BARNES

 

“All proper sports should have the potential to hurt. Every sport should require a little bit of physical courage even to take part.” – SIMON BARNES

 

“Sport is like love: it can only really hurt you if you care. Or, for that matter, bring joy.” – SIMON BARNES

 

“Like religion, sport can take any amount of passion in its stride. It's indifference that's the killer.” – SIMON BARNES

 

“Sport is the world's most accessible adventure.” – SIMON BARNES

 

“Sport is trivial – that's kind of the point – but the quest for perfection can never be meaningless.” – SIMON BARNES

 

"Sports is the toy department of human life." – HOWARD COSELL

 

“In war you cheat; in sports you don’t.” – JACK JOLIS

 

“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)

 

“Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life. Football begins in the fall, when everything's dying. Baseball is a nineteenth-century pastoral game played in a park. Football is a military-technological struggle for territory played on a gridiron in a stadium. In baseball you make 'errors'. In football you get 'penalties”.” -- JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“I have often thought that the greatest pro-mental health program in the nation, maybe in the world, is the television broadcasting of top-notch sporting events. Even the most powerful and insightful therapist cannot provide the release from tension and the escape from anxiety that watching sports does for most men and some women. All of those sports shows probably keep tens of millions of American men from serious mischief against themselves or others.” -- BEN STEIN

 

“Sport teaches us more about losing than about winning, simply because so many of us don't win.” -- J. M. COETZEE (The famous and over-rated South African novelist, and although this sounds at first blush quite profound, upon the most cursory thought it reveals itself to be the most banal of self-evidences....)

 

“International sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred. There are quite enough real causes of trouble already, and we need not add to them by encouraging young men to kick each other on the shins amid the roars of infuriated spectators.” – GEORGE ORWELL

 

“Literary awards go to hacks, academic promotions to humbugs, journalism awards to toadies, and, too often, big business scores to sharpies. And let's not even talk about politics. But sports may be our last meritocracy. Who you know is of no utility between the lines. Daddy, the PR Department, or the League of Women's Voters can't help you sink a free-throw with the game on the line. Being on someone's fast track won't help you hit Mariano Rivera's cutter in the ninth. There are no affirmative action touchdowns (yet). No social promotion three-pointers.” -- LARRY THORNBERRY (a self-described 70-year old couch potato sports fan parked in Tampa)

 

“Sport revolves around bragging to those closest to you.” -- FREDDY GRAY (Managing Editor of the UK SPECTATOR)

 

“The old distinction between a sport and a game: A sport is something a gentleman can do while smoking. Hence fishing, shooting and even golf are sports, but football and tennis are games.” -- JOHNNY LEAVESLY (a letter-writer to the UK SPECCIE from Staffordshire, England, and I daresay he's right – although where that leaves my late Uncle B's squash-playing, which he could accomplish with surprising agility not only with a cigarette in his mouth, but with a tumbler of Scotch in his free hand – I'm not too sure....)

 

“Sports is the only thing that you can invest your entire passion in without consequence.” – RUSH LIMBAUGH

 

“I have been told by members of my own family that there is no use or value in sports. Of course there is little point to sports. But, at the risk of depressing you, let me add two more cents. THERE IS LITTLE POINT TO ANYTHING.” – SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA (the author of a “cricketing novel”, if you can believe such a thing, called “Chinaman”)

 

"The game doesn't count, but it mattered." -- DON SURBER (retired newspaperman, author of “Trump the Press” and “Trump the Establishment”)

 

"If it has a 'twizzle sequence', it's not a sport." -- JOHN J. MILLER (about some new... event at the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea)

 

"You know you are watching the wrong sport when you find yourself wondering what the point of it is. You know you are watching the right sport when you wonder what the point of everything else is." – MOLLY WATSON (in THE SPECTATOR in May 2018)

 

“There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.” -- ERNEST HEMINGWAY

"There is only one sport: Combat. Every other sport is combat in drag." -- JOE MALLEIS (my Twoot-pal "Gadsden Jazz", refining Papa — see above…)

"My understanding was that if you could drink during a recreational activity, it's a game. If not, it's a sport." -- TOMMY MACDONNELL (A Dublin resident, answering Hemingway's contention that only if someone can get killed doing it is it      considered a sport.)

“Sport is woven into almost everything else we do and it is about something much larger than merely chasing or hitting a ball, for it is bound up with playing the game, enjoying the land, sensing the liberty, respecting contestation, valuing home, showing a bit of heart, recognising it in others, knowing that not everyone is political, or has to be, that not everyone knows what they think or to say it, and understanding above all that sport is an enduring part of our liberty.” – ROBERT COLLS                 (in his book “This Sporting Life”, and obviously this was all pre- the BLM madness....)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

“Like all fans he was frustrated by the knowledge that the best he could do, even in a pinch, would be to run onto the field and cause some kind of illegal trouble, then be hauled off by guards while the crowd laughed.” – HUNTER S. THOMPSON

Sports (U.S., post-BLM)

“When you spend money on professional sports you are giving money to people who hate you.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

 

Sports Writers (& Sports Reporting)                                                                                                     

“By going behind the scenes we look for secrets where none exist. The secret of sport is that there is truth, no secret.” - SIMON BARNES

“Listening to the commentators on the Sports Channel makes one wonder why anyone bothered to invent anesthesia.” – FATHER GEORGE RUTLER          (a prominent conservative New York City priest, in 2010)

 

“Sportswriters lead lives of staggering ennui.” – RUSSELL BAKER                                                                                                        (the old New York Times columnist)

 

"Sports writers are... a rude and brainless subcultureof fascist drunks," – HUNTER S. THOMPSON (that was a long time ago. Cute but obsolete.)

 

“The not-so-secret truth is that liberal sportswriters increasingly hold the culture that produces athletes and their fans in contempt.” – MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY

 

“American sports news broadcasting – a constant, half-shouted narration of nothing.” – JOHN PHIPPS (Oxford-educated English freelance writer)

 

“Spring Break”

“First-rate bodies from third-rate schools." -- LAURENCE SHAMES (writing, not surprisingly, about Florida)

Springsteen, Bruce

“Bruce Springsteen, the white minstrel show.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

"Got a car on a dark street with rain and there’s a girl my dreams are all dead and I’m dancing in the doorway because my dreams are in the car and it’s a dead end job in a dead end town and I got a dream and wearing a leather jacket I went to high school and I got a dream." -- KURT SCHLICHTER

 

“Spygate”

"We had people that are at the highest levels of our law enforcement ... saying that they were going to stop a duly elected president of the United States. That sounds an awful lot like a coup and it could well be treason," – LIZ CHENEY (in May 2019)

 

“Robert Mueller could have ‘concluded’ that President Trump obstructed justice without citing formal charges. But Mueller did not.” – NEWT GINGRICH

 

"What the hell is this, folks? They exonerate Hillary because they think she didn’t intend to do what she did. They can’t find that Trump did anything, but they think he intended to do what he didn’t do, and so we need to impeach him." – RUSH LIMBAUGH

 

“ ‘Not guilty but not NOT guilty’ is a preposterous thing for a prosecutorial inquiry to say.” – KYLE SMITH

"Obama knew. Clinton knew. Biden knew. Comey knew. Brennan knew. McCabe knew. Strzok knew.Clapper knew.Schiff knew.FBI knew.DOJ knew. CIA knew.State knew. They all knew Trump was innocent but they smeared and spied on him. Worse than Watergate. Trump is a crime victim!" -- TOM FITTON (in March 2023) 

"It was counterintelligence as a pretext for a criminal investigation in search of a crime; a criminal investigation as a pretext for impeachment without an impeachable offense; an impeachment inquiry as a pretext for rendering Donald Trump un-reelectable; and all of it designed to straitjacket his presidency." -- ANDREW C. McCARTHY

 

Squash (the sport, not the vegetable)

“I have a pretty hazy grasp of the rules of squash. When I played the idea seemed to keep the ball in the air for a few minutes and then award the points to the person who seemed to need them most.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS

 

“Stability”                                                                                                                                       

“So there'’s a global war, we’re the main target of the aggressors, and our leaders don't see it and therefore have no idea how to win it. Any serious attempt to understand what'’s going on has to begin by banning the word ‘stability’, much beloved of diplomats and self-proclaimed strategists. If anything is fairly certain about our world, it’'s that there is no stability, and there isn't going to be any.” -- – MICHAEL LEDEEN

 

Stalin

"It was Stalin who first realized how effective it was to turn the enemy into a fascist.” – ERIC ZEMMOUR (the iconoclastic anti-politically correct conservative French writer, in 2014)

 

“Stalin never loved a human being. He was incapable of feeling pity for man or beast. And I never knew him to cry.” – IOSEB IREMASHVILI (Stalin’s boyhood/schoolboy friend)

"He was a moral and spiritual monster." -- -- SVETLANA ALILUYEVA PETERS (née SVETLANA STALINA)

“Killers could be frightened, like anyone else, perhaps more than anyone else. Stalin lived half his life in a state of terror – scared of aeroplanes (sic), scared of visiting the front, never eating food unless it had been tasted for poison, changing his guards, his routes, his beds – when you murdered so many, you knew how easily death could come.” – ROBERT HARRIS (the novelist in 1998)

 

Stamina/Strength

“El que se cansa, pierde.” “He who tires, loses.” -- LEOPOLDO LOPEZ (the great Venezuela opposition leader)

 

Standards (and Double Standards)

“Behind every double standard is an unconfessed single standard.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

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

 

"If Obama had issued same travel ban, it would’ve been upheld." -- ALAN DERSHOWITZ (Referring to the series of attempted restrictions on Muslims entering the US by incoming Pres. Trump, which liberal judges nixed as fast as they could...)

 

"Your speech is violence, my violence is speech" -- DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE

 

“Whenever I am accused of maintaining double standards, I wistfully wish that there were only two.” – FRANK NEUVILLE (a guy on the Twoot, with no further ID, on 30 May 2018)

 

Starmer, Keir

"The United Kingdom is the land where everything is policed except crime. Under Scotland Yard and Britain's other woeful constabularies, convictions for reported rape and robberies are at all but statistically undetectable levels. But thoughtcrime the Starmtroopers can hunt down with ruthless efficiency..." -- MARK STEYN      (in August 2024)

Stars, The

“The stars were the fathers of speculation, of philosophy.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

State Department (The U.S.)

“Struggling U.S. allies can make progress in direct relationship to the distance they put between themselves and the State Department” - THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (Editorial, 23 May 2008)

 

"I’m afraid that too often when State Department types go into negotiations with envoys from Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Iran and similar places, it’s like me sitting down to play Texas Hold ‘Em with guys named ‘Doc’ and ‘Slim.’" -- CLIFFORD D. MAY

"Of all 'Deep Staters' none are Deeper than the 'gone-native' anti-Americans of our State Department -- and this has pertained at least since the 1930s." — JACK JOLIS

"I have no issue with (the) CIA -- they never let me down. But US diplomats have not allowed me to act against the Taliban." -- ABDUL RASHID DOSTUM      (the great, and wrongly-maligned Uzbek warlord and our ally in Afghanistan -- to Toby Harnden in 2020)


Staten Island

“As even the moon has its virtues, so too does Staten Island.” – MARK HELPRIN

 

“But except in declarations erupting from the crooked faces of politicians, the borough of Richmond was no more a part of the city than Mars is a part of Earth.” – MARK HELPRIN

 

“Staten Island is a very odd place. It’s one of the five boroughs of New York City, but it has no subway, no skyscrapers, and there are great expanses of it that are just scrubby weedy fields. It has slums, because every place has slums but the slums don’t look like New York City slums, they look like Poughkeepsie slums or the back part of Belleville, Illinois. It’s really a collection of little towns, separated by countryside and woods. there’s St. George, where the ferry lands, and Port Richmond and Howland Hook, and New Dorp and Eltingville, and Pleasant Plains and Richmond Valley, and Bull’s Head and New Springville and Annavale.” – DONALD WESTLAKE (in 1965. Things have changed since then, of course... but not all that much.)

 

Statesmanship

“I never kill women.” - RAMZAN KADYROV (the pro-Moscow puppet Muslim “Prime Minister” of Chechnya, in Oct ’06, upon being accused of having something to do with the murder of a lady Russian journalist. This is one of the GREAT quotes, but I didn’t know where to file it - I couldn’t fit it under “liberals”, so “Statesmanship” it had to be…)

 

States' Rights (Federalism)

"States' rights have since given the Left an essential foothold from which to advance once-outlandish policies on abortion, drugs, marriage, and immigration. The notion that competition binds states to good sense and conservatism is naïve wishful thinking." – CHRIS POPE (of the Manhattan Institute)

 

Statism

“America has never had a large-scale movement to nationalize or collectivize any sizable sector of the economy. For many decades, the watchword of the American left has been, ‘Don’t nationalize, regulate!’”. - RICHARD GRENIER (American journalist and author of the terrific novel “The Marrakesh One-Two”. I once bumped into him, literally, on Lexington Avenue. Nice fella.)

 

“A man’s admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him”. – ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

 

“If the government was in charge of food and water, we’d all be dead.” – MARK LEVIN

 

“Replacing free enterprise with state control does not do away with failure and mismanagement, but merely removes from it the possibility of self-correction.” -- DAVID MAMET

 

“All of us owe the government; we owe it for everything we have – and that is the basis of obligation – and the government needs it. The government can assert its right to have all the taxes it needs for any purpose, either now or at any time in the future.” -- SENATOR ALBERT BENJAMIN “HAPPY” CHANDLER (Democrat, needless to say, of Kentucky, in 1943. And this has got to be one of the most depressing entries in this  entire compendium. Incidentally, the miserable “Happy” Chandler went so school at someplace called Transylvania College, and served as the Commissioner of Baseball from 1941-19512)

 

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

 

“Communism, the New Deal, Fascism, Nazism are merely so-many trade-names for collectivist Statism, like the trade-names for tooth-pastes which are all exactly alike except for the flavoring.” – ALBERT JAY NOCK (the elitist libertarian pioneer – 1870-1945 –who influenced Bill Buckley and is a bit of a hero of Jonah   Goldberg's)

 

“The words 'industrial' and 'strategy' ought never to appear in the same sentence.” – SAJID JAVID (a UK Conservative Party bigwig, in 2016. He went on to become Chancellor of the Exchequer)

"Pessimism is the hand-maid of statism." -- MATT RIDLEY 

“I wonder how many in America would know that Communism, the New Deal, Fascism, Nazism, are merely so-many trade-names for collectivist Statism, like the trade-names for tooth-pastes which are all exactly alike except for the flavoring.” – ALBERT JAY NOCK (Author of "Our Enemy, the State", 1870-1945)

 

Statistics

“The connection between statistics and mischief is indissoluble.” – ANDREW FERGUSON

"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts... For support rather than illumination." -- ANDREW LANG (Scottish anthropologist, 1844-1912)

"Word to the wise: never trust immigration figures. those are only the people the government knows about." -- LIONEL SHRIVER

 

Statue of Liberty

“‘Give me your rude, your boor, your coddled asses yearning to be on TV’.” – JIM HANSON (President, of “The Security Studies Group”, on the Twoot)

 

“The Statue of Liberty was a gift from France to commemorate the centenary of American liberty, not American immigration. Notwithstanding that woman’s subsequent fund-raising poem, it had nothing to do with immigration – it’s called the Statue of Liberty, not the Statue of Immigration.” – MARK LEVIN (in March 2021)

 

Status

"If people stopped caring about the status and networking benefits of attending the Ivy League, the Ivy League would be as relevant as the Hanseatic League. All things being equal, people crave status more than they crave wealth. Indeed, after a certain baseline, much of the desire for wealth has less to do with the material comforts delivered by it than by the status derived from it. This is why so many studies find that being rich isn’t nearly as likely to confer happiness or satisfaction than being richer than other people." -- JONAH GOLDBERG  (as my late brother Alan used to say when he was about 4: "instating")

"How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone," -- COCO CHANEL


Steinbrenner, George

“George is only interested in one thing, and I don't know what it is." – LUIS POLONIA        (Luis Polonia was a sometime -- he was traded away 3 times -- Dominican outfielder for the Yanks, intermittently from 1989 to 2000) 

                                                   

"There is nothing in life quite so limited as being a limited partner of George Steinbrenner." -- JOHN McMULLEN    (a minority owner of the NY Yankees)


STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math)

"A lot of boys have an early interest in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math), because they're all about building stuff, blowing up stuff, and building stuff that can blow up stuff." -- JAMES LILEKS

 

Stereotypes

“The statements we have called stereotypes in the past have become true.” - KENNETH TOLLETT (an “education” professor, presumably black, at Howard University - a black college).

 

“There is some reason why there’s racial stereotypes.” – CHARLES BARKLEY

"Stereotypes are very useful things. Psychologists will tell you that they are invaluable shortcuts whcih we use while navigating our way through life, enabling us to spare our brains lots of processing time. They are also broadly accurate. The problem we have at the moment is that in denying this modicum of truth we replace it with a viston of society which is wholly untrue. We lie to ourselves in order to perpetuate myths which are crucial to the liberal agenda." -- ROD LIDDLE 

“Stereotypes get a lot of heat, these days, but sometimes they're very comforting.” – DANNY BAKER (My favorite BBC Radio 5 Live “presenter”, on Saturday morning, 6 May 2017. Got sacked for political incorrectness)

 "Though there are many exceptions to them, stereotypes are based on real, observed behavior -- and to denounce and denigrate them is not only stupid, but results in handicapping our successful passage through life" — JACK JOLIS

"Without stereotyping, judging and (yes) discriminating (v. - to recognize a distinction; to differentiate), we're all reduced to a helpless mass of aimlessly bobbing corks on the ocean of life... which is EXACTLY what the Cultural Marxists want us all to be reduced to." -- JACK JOLIS


Stoicism(-ics)

“There are few personal problems which cannot be solved with strong drink and stubborn silence.” - JULIE BURCHILL (attago, Julie! Who is, by the way, a self-described Trotskyite feminist - she’s certainly my favorite “Trotrskyite feminist”, that’s for sure…)

 

“I wouldn’t want to do it again. But it was part of the experience of my life. Life is sort of an adventure. Sometimes, the adventure gets out of hand.” -- ROBERT J. FLYNN (US Navy Commander, on being a prisoner of the Red Chinese for 5 1/2 years. The reason why he was a prisoner of the Chicoms is that he was shot down in 1967 by Red Chinese MiGs near the North Vietnam/Red China border, where he had gone in his A-6 Intruder to evade enemy SAM missile fire on a bombing run over North Vietnam.)

 

"What cannot be avoided, must be welcomed." -- WILLIAM BOYD                                                                                                      (well, an African rebel chief in his 1990 novel "Brazzaville Beach" says this.)

 

“The thing that matters is not what you bear but how you bear it.” – SENECA (the, er... Stoic.)

 

“Stolen Valor”

"When an American wants to do something for his country, he joins the service. When a Democrat wants to do something for his country, he clams to have been in the service." -- PHILIP SCHUYLER (a venerable conservative Twootster, in October 2020)

 

Stories (and Story-telling)

"Storytellers rule the world." – PLATO

 

Strategy

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

 

"Even though he was my enemy, I had to admire his strategy: first he punched me, then he kicked me, then he punched me again." – JACK HANDEY (the American “humorist)

 

“'Industrial strategy must be added to the collection of phrases which automatically lower the spirits. Others include 'replacement bus service', 'all the toys' and 'smart casual'. There is literally no need for any government to have one – what industrial strategy built Silicon Valley? – and it is literally impossible to remember, when one has been announced, what it is.” – CHARLES MOORE

 

“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

 

"Strategy was nine tenths reaction. Study any situation too long, you can think yourself into paralysis." -- MICK HERRON

 

Strength

“But good or bad, a strong man causes trouble.” – DENIS JOHNSON

 

"Better to be strong and wrong than weak and right." -- BILL CLINTON (I understand – and even sympathize – what he's saying, here, but the way he says it is slightly fascistic)

 

“Hard times create strong men, strong men create easy times; Easy times create weak men, weak men create hard times. Many will not understand it, but you have to raise warriors, not parasites.”  – SHEIKH RASHID IBN SAEED AL MAKTOUM (the founder of modern Dubai)

Stress

"The best cure for post-traumatic stress is new stress." -- NELSON DEMILLE

 

“Stress is just the polite word for low-grade, long-term fear.” – JAMES HAWES

 

Stubbornness

“Of course, being stubborn is a good thing, if you're right.” – WILLIAM LEITH (The English journalist)

Students

“There is no difference in the ways in which the mentally deficient and university students amuse themselves.” - THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

“It is less surprising that students are stupid, which they have always been, than that university authorities kowtow.” – MAX HASTINGS (former editor of THE DAILY TELEGRAPH and author of “The Secret War”)

 

“The 'Stepford Students' might look like students, dress like students, smell like students. But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform.” – BRENDAN O'NEILL (a SPECTATOR writer)

"My students don't know how lucky they are. They think the world consists of a loop from Plattsburgh to New York. If I ever get out of here (the Congo) I'll goddamn tell them otherwise." -- LARRY SHAFFER    (professor of animal behavior at SUNY Plattsburgh)

“Studies”

"It is a rule: any academic discipline with 'studies' in the name is bad, or will quickly become so." -- RICHARD BROOKHISER


Stupidity

“Stupidity is now like greatness: some are born stupid, some achieve stupidity, and some have stupidity thrust upon them.” - THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

“Stupidity is a luxury and you will find time and time and time and again that those who are overwhelmingly on the left are those who can afford to be.” – EVAN SAYET (conservative commentor, who began as a liberal with Bill Maher)

 

“Stupidity is our unwavering safeguard.” – P. J. O'ROURKE

 

“When I was barely-out-of-diapers-young, one of my favorite books was a collection of jokes for kids. The big finish — the joke they just had to save for last — was a simple riddle: ‘What’s big and red and eats rocks? A big red rock eater.’ Since then, I’ve read the poetry of Jim Morrison; the columns of Maureen Dowd; the backs of countless boxes of Boo Berry Cereal; the 1988 Libertarian, Republican and Democrat political platforms in their entireties; the works of various Brontë sisters; particularly heartfelt lines from love letters I wrote to my high school sweetheart; I even read George Friedman’s The Coming War with Japan —which he wrote in 1991.These are the credentials you need to know when I tell you: In the 38 years since I learned to read, I have read some really stupid shit.” – STEPHEN GREEN                            (The “VODKAPUNDIT”)

 

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not so sure about the universe.”-- ALBERT EINSTEIN

 

“Stupidity is more difficult to control than evil.”” – LORD ARNOLD ABRAHAM GOODMAN                                                                        (the UK Labour Party grandee)

 

“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” -- BERTRAND RUSSELL

 

“When you are dead, you don't know that you are dead. It is difficult only for the others. It is the same when you are stupid.” – PHILIPPE GELUCK (the Belgian comedian and cartoonist.)

 

“Life is full of surprises for the stupid.” – P. J. O'ROURKE

 

“Life is hard; it's harder if you're stupid.” – JOHN WAYNE

 “When you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes." -- MARTIN VANDER WEYER (The Economics columnist for THE SPECTATOR)

“Which came first, the chicken or the dumbass?” – KURT SCHLICHTER

 

"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." -- GEORGE CARLIN

 

“Inflicting unnecessary stupidity on the world is a sin.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

«Stupid has become the new clever.» – JAMES DELINGPOLE

 

«Unresisting imbecitlity.» – DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON

 

“The best way to exploit American stupidity is to flatter American intelligence.” – ROSS DOUTHAT

 

“Stupid people are always certain.” – IRVINE WELSH (the Scottish writer, author of “Trainspotting”)

 

"The difference between humans and animals..... Animals would never allow the dumbest of the herd to lead." -- JOHN SEEMAN (a guy on the twoot who claims he "escaped from New Jersey")

"There are no stupid questions. Only stupid people." -- CARL GOTTLIEB

“Avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance” -- CHARLIE MUNGER

Style

“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.” - SARAH STANDING (n English journaliste, September 2009….)

 

"The festival requires style. If those of modern times have lost their cultural value, it is because they have lost style." -- JOHAN HUIZINGA (the Dutch historian, in 2014)

 

“Substance is ephemeral but style is eternal, which may not be a solution to the realities of life but it is a workable alternative.” – TOM STOPPARD

 

"Style alone can keep the writer from being bored with his own work." -- EVELYN WAUGH

"The style here was so hideous it amounted to a masterpiece." -- LIONEL DAVIDSON (referring to a lady's flat in his 1978 "The Chelsea Murders")

"The first -- and practically the only -- condition for good style is having something to say." -- ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER (This is actually such a banality that if it had been uttered by a lesser "bighead" than Schopenhauer it wouldn't be in here.)

Subconsciousness

“In that blind country of the mind.” – LIONEL DAVIDSON (the great spy novelist)

 

Submission

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

 

“Sub-prime mortgages” mess

“If you buy a debt you own a liability but it appears on your balance sheet as an asset.” - LLOYD EVANS (the theater critic of the UK SPECTATOR, and it’s a hell of a thing when it takes a theater critic to describe in one   simple sentence what whole rain-forests of written crap by economists have not been able to adequately explain to the Joe Sixpacks of the world…. Brave Mr. Evans….)

 

“I hear your (the “Occupy Wall Street”ers’) complaints, some of them are totally unfounded. It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp. Now, I'm not saying I'm sure that was terrible policy, because a lot of those people who got homes still have them and they wouldn't have gotten them without that.  But they were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent, if you will. They were the ones that pushed the banks to loan to everybody. And now we want to go vilify the banks because it's one target, it's easy to blame them and Congress certainly isn't going to blame themselves. At the same time, Congress is trying to pressure banks to loosen their lending standards to make more loans. This is exactly the same speech they criticized them for." – MICHAEL BLOOMBERG (quite literally the only thing I've ever run across said by this poison dwarf of a NYC mayor that I wholeheartedly agree with. The illustration of the “Stopped Clock Syndrome” if ever there was one.)

 

Subservience

I will not cede more power to the state. I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power, as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth. That is a program of sorts, is it not? It is certainly program enough to keep conservatives busy, and liberals at bay. And the nation free.” – WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.

 

Subsidies

“Complexity is a subsidy.” – MARY KATHARINE HAM (Explained by Jonah Goldberg thusly: “Again, it's not a new idea, but I think it's an extremely useful and pithy description of a very complex argument. The more that financial success depends on high IQ; the more demand there is for lawyers, lobbyists, and accountants; the more onerous regulations become for men-with- strong-backs to find work or for entrepreneurs to start businesses -- then the more we move towards a society where the government rewards people based on their ability to navigate paperwork or fulfill quotas on a political to-do list. Complexity benefits statists because increasing complexity allows statists to claim we need more government to help people navigate through these complex times. In the process of helping, they make the government more complicated, creating new services for "fixers" of all stripes to solve problems the statists created in the first place. The more you look around at spots where society and government intersect, the more you can see how pervasive and pernicious this dynamic is. The more rules you have, the more power you bequeath to the people well-suited to make or manipulate the rules.”)

 

“About 3.2 million American are employed in agriculture. If Republicans are as interested in the soccer-mom demographic as they claim to be, they might start by asking why they are spending billions of dollars in soccer moms' taxes every year to make those soccer moms' grocery bills higher while ruining their Volvos' performance with ethanol.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

Subtlety

“Subtlety is a mark of intelligence.” – PETER USTINOV (Good insight. Though I  persist in believing that the prime prerequisite for intelligence is... curiosity.)

 

Suburbs, The

“The tribal customs of the suburbs were as worthy of study as the totems and taboos of the Aborigines of Australia’s Northern Territory. The stories of the suburb, the tales that gave suburbians the right to their homes were, in their way,  as substantial as the creation myths of the Eskimos.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS (just as the great novelist John Updike has been America’s premier chronicler of suburbia, so the amusing Squire Williams, in his series of “Wimbledon” novels, has been for Great Britain)

 

Subversion

“Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society” -- ANTONIO GRAMSCI                                                                                     (founding member of the Italian Communist Party)

Success

“To succeed in this world it is not enough to be stupid; one must have good manners as well.” - VOLTAIRE

 

“Success is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” - WINSTON CHURCHILL

 

“'A' students work for 'B' students. Or not even. A businessman friend of mine corrected me, 'No, P. J.', he said, '”B” students work for “C” students, “A” students teach'.” – P. J. O'ROURKE

 

"To succeed in life you need two things: ignorance and confidence"-- MARK TWAIN

 

“Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.” – GEN GEORGE S. PATTON JR.

 

“I couldn't wait for success, so I went ahead without it.” – JONATHAN WINTERS

 

“You don't have to be big. You have to be remarkable.” - JOE PULIZZI (American business “consultant” and author)

 

“Whoever said it's tough at the top is talking absolute shite.” – CONOR McGREGOR                        (The Irish MMA champion, in April 2017)

 

“The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter." – F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

 

“In fact, there was no such thing as society: just a collection of little self-contained boxes, roped untidily together and set adrift to float aimlessly in the waters of time, the occupants of each box convinced that theirs was the most important box, heedless of the claim of the rest. Success did not consist in getting into the box where most power was exercised: there were many people who were powerful and unhappy. Success consisted in determining which box would be most pleasant for a time, then you could make it as comfortable as possible until you could get out.” – DAVID LODGE

 

"Success? At best, it's idiots liking your work. Otherwise, it's idiots pretending to like your work." – TIBOR FISCHER (in his novel "How To Rule The World")

 

"I don't know how to succeed, but I know how to fail -- just try to please everybody." -- BUDDY HOLLY (to his friend, the singer Dion DiMucci --  of"Dion and the Belmonts" -- who quoted him.)

 

"Like most busy and successful people, they lived as if the past had never been." -- ALAN JUDD

Sudan, The

“Darfur is a catastrophe that could and should be solved in an hour or so. The killers largely operate from helicopters and small fixed wing aircraft. We could destroy them all in an hour or so.” - MICHAEL LEDEEN

 

“The Sudan's always been a nutty joint.” - MARK STEYN (Good old Steyn, an old colonialist like me – refers to THE Sudan, THE Lebanon, THE Chad – or Tchad – THE Congo(s), THE Gambia and so forth....)

 

“Sudan – a country that ceased to exist in 2011 – is or was one of the last untouristed wildernesses on earth. And for good reason: while it still existed it was the biggest country in Africa, a mainly flat and unhabitable wasteland, mostly brown, with barely a mountain or a bosky valley to its name, unbearably hot, unhealthy, poor and full of every sort of trouble. It has almost limitless capacity for brutal self)harm.” – RICHARD WALKER (In the UK SPECTATOR, reviewing a book by James Copnall about the Sudan – both of 'em – called “A Poisonous Thorn In Our Hearts”

 

“The Sudan was always an invented country. Maybe we should invent it again.” – RICHARD WALKER (writing in the UK SPECTATOR in May 2014)

"Sudan is the super-bowl of terrorism." -- COFER BLACK      (the Director of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center, quoted by Toby Harnden)


Suffering

“Wisdom comes through suffering.” – AESCHYLUS

 

“Suffering takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along. Everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster.” – W. H. AUDEN

 

"Suffering is God's megaphone." -- C. S. LEWIS

 

Sufficiency

"Enough is-a too much." -- CHICO MARX

“More will mean worse.” – KINGSLEY AMIS

Suicide

“War, be it remembered, reduces the suicide rate famously.” - THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

“The man who kills himself kills all men. As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.” – G. K. CHESTERTON

 

“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.” – E. M. CIORAN (the Romanian philosopher)

 

“For if anything is not to be allowed, surely that must be suicide. For if suicide is allowed, then anything is allowed.” – WILLIAM BOYD (in his 1995 short story, “Transfigured Night”.)

 

“Suicide is a dude thing. Attempting is a woman thing: They’re more than twice as likely to try that. Completing is a man’s thing. They’re more than twice as likely to to do that. There’s only one day in the year when it’s safer to be male. Mothere’s Day. Mother’s Day suicide are the women who skipped the kids.” – MARTIN AMIS (in his short novel “Night Train”)

 

"What on earth was the point of committing suicide when life was so short anyway?" -- GUY BELLAMY

"Suicide is wasted. It avails nothing, proves nothing, solves nothing, poses no questions let alone answers questions, does nobody good. It is no more than an exit, a getting up and going out, a closing of a door." -- WALKER PERCY

"Suicide is nothing but a trick one plays on the calendar." -- TOM STOPPARD

 

"It is the future that bears down on the suicide -- all the time, waiting." -- WILLIAM BOYD

 

"Leaving problems behind is one of the best reasons for going." -- ALAN COREN (normally, he’s funnier than this)

 

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

"Englishmen don't commit suicide - they move to the USA." -- IAN HUNTER (The English leader/singer of Mott The Hoople, who's still rocking in his 80s... and who lives in New Milford, Connecticut) 

“You can’t sell suicide.” – JOHN CALE (the singer)

 

Summer (and Summer Camp)

“Summer camp was an exercise in doing things we didn’t want to do with people we didn’t know. A nature hike with a bunch of strangers was a lot like going to work.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

 

“What does summer serve up? Mosquitoes, heat, humidity, grown men wearing shorts in public, sweat, grime, black stink of slowly boiling asphalt, and – worst of all – Shakespeare In The Park.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

Sun, The

“The sun is pure communism everywhere except in cities, where it's private property.” – MALCOLM DE CHAZAL (writer and painter 1902-1981)

 

“Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily.” – FRANCOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD (1613-1680. The famous Frog writer of maxims. Nice work if you can get it....)

 

Superficiality

“You must remember, it’s not what you are that counts but only what people think you are.” – JOSEPH P. KENNEDY (the crooked patriarch)

 

“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”-- NEIL POSTMAN (in his 1985 "Amusing Ourselves To Death")

 

Superstition

“The only people more superstitious than men in combat are professional gamblers and baseball players on a hitting streak.” – DANIEL J. DANELO (in his excellent book on the Iraq War, “Blood Stripes”)

"I'm not superstitious but I am stitious." -- MINDY KALING                                                                  (The writer of the 2007 "Ben Franklin" episode of THE OFFICE, in which those words are spoken by Michael Scott)

"Am I superstitious?  Not super -- just stitious." -- LUKE WEAVER     (NY Yankees relief pitcher — and somebody copies somebody, see above…)

Supreme Court, The U.S.

“The Court has made it clear that the Constitution means whatever five justices at any given time say it means, and Congress has not objected to that presumption. Until it does the Court will continue to go its way.” - TOM BETHELL

 

“The candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vial questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.” - ABRAHAM LINCOLN

 

“But Supreme Court justices are supposed to decide what the written law requires, not pick winners and losers based upon some sense of noblesse oblige. That’s why all of those statues of Lady Justice show her standing blindfolded, not bent over kissing the boo-boos of the unfortunate and the downtrodden.” -- JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“It is  not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.” -- CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS                  (In this, at least, he's sadly all too right....4 November 2008 was indeed the beginning of the end of the United States -- I said so at the time, and nothing has caused me to change my mind since.... Where the hell was he when he refused to consider the case of Pennsylvania in the stolen 2020 election?)

 

“Whoever hath an absolute authority to interpret written or spoken laws, it is he who is truly the lawgiver to all intents and purposes, and not the person who wrote or spake them.” – BENJAMIN HOADLY (The Bishop of Winchester, to King George I, in 1717)

 

“I don't assess the nation's mood, I assess my own. And I'm feeling good.” – JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA (the late. He was feeling good, until he wasn't.)

 

“When you make Justices into monarchs, it's no surprise confirmations fights become a game of thrones.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“You have replaced advice & consent with search & destroy.” -- JUDGE BRETT KAVANAUGH                                                             (in Sept. 2018, to his Democrat attackers in the Senate)

“The Supreme Court functions as a Greco-Roman mystery cult, complete with ceremonial robes and occult knowledge available only to initiates.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

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

"Judge Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.” -- PRESIIDENT ANDREW JACKSON

Surprise

  "Surprise happens so often in history, that the surprising thing is that we're still surprised by them." -- PAUL WOLFOWITZ (W's Deputy Secretary of Defense, after 9-11, and he recalls Rummy's "known unknowns"...)

Surrender

"It's hard to hold the hand
Of anyone
Who's reaching for the sky
Just to surrender." – LEONARD COHEN

 

“First of all, you're not allowed to despair. You're not allowed to surrender. Hannah Arendt wrote once, you know, that there's certain kinds of surrender that's not to be tolerated in the presence of the young. And one of them is that you don't surrender your country and you don't surrender your culture.” – WILLIAM BENNETT

"The chiefs of the people, if they surrender, are shot by the people they would shoot for surrendering." -- MARK HELPRIN 

Surveillance

"When they send someone to interrupt a private conversation, it means that they weren't able to eavesdrop." -- NELSON DEMILLE

"When two or more people are left alone in someone else's office, just assume you're on the air." -- NELSON DEMILLE



Survival

"You cannot save the planet. You may be able to save yourself and your family." - CLINT SMITH

 

“I believe that the lamb can lay down with the lion, providing you've got a lot a spare lambs.” – ERIC PICKLES (the rotund British Conservative MP and Minister for Local Government, in April 2011)

 

"I've had lots of experience calculating the odds of survival, and as we used to say, any odds better than 50/50 were too good to be true." -- NELSON DEMILLE

 

"Another word which has gained a new meaning in the present decade, along with 'vulnerable' and 'diverse': survivor. Once it meant a person who had been transported to Auschwitz but somehow came out alive. Or a person who had been involved in a terrible car crash but had escaped with only a broken neck. Today it means someone whose nipple was perhaps gently tweaked by a light entertainment star 40 years ago. Or someone who was mildly and almost certainly justifiably bullied at school." – ROD LIDDLE

 

"Who talks of victories, when to survive is all?" -- RAINER MARIA RILKE (1875-1925 -- Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist)

 

“We received instructions on survival: ‘Empty your shoes in the morning before putting them on – scorpion stings can be nasty!’ Also, ‘When confronted by a tiger, don’t look at it straight in the eye, the tiger will interpret this as a challenge.’ Fat chance. I wonder how a tiger interprets a backside disappearing into the distance at a great rate of knots?” – BILLY CONNOLLY (The famous Scottish comic, in the Himalayas in 1986)

"Throughout my life, I've adopted a basic rule of thumb that any wisdom imputed to the denizens of Atlantis, Kathmandu or Machu Picchu must be viewed with extreme skepticism, because if these folks were so goddamn smart, how come they didn't hang around longer? Look at it this way: Pizarro invades Peru on Sunday, and by Tuesday night he's conquered a nation of 12 million people. How do you lose your entire continent to a couple hundred grungy conquistadors when the odds are that heavily in your favor?" -- JOE QUEENAN


"It is not recommended to run away. Once you start to act like prey, you may get attacked.  Make yourself large and in charge. Wave your arms. Shout loudly. Try to look inedible."-- PAUL JOLIS (on not getting eaten by mountain lions in the California hills)

Suspicion

“People with well-polished shoes generally have something to hide, just like those with ostentatiously firm handshakes and those who spend too long looking you straight in the eye.” – CRAIG BROWN (famous London columnist)

 

Sweden

“Eating in Sweden is really just a series of heartbreaks.” – BILL BRYSON

 

“That curious mix of socialism and joyless sex, of Volvo and Abba, that made up the much-vaunted and widely-emulated Swedish 'model' of the latter-day Twentieth Century. – ADAM ZAMOYSKI (Writing in the UK SPECTATOR in July 2005)

 

“Mr Persson (Swedish Prime Minister, 2004) says the purpose of the European Union is that ‘it’s one of the few institutions we can develop as a balance to U.S. world domination.’ Sweden was famously relaxed about Nazi world domination and Soviet world domination, but even in the chancelleries of Stockholm there comes a time when the threat is so unspeakable you have to get off the fence.” - MARK STEYN

 

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

 

“A large Sweden is a contradiction in terms. It cannot be done, and the more determinedly you try to do it, the more you will preside over a ruined wasteland. The road to hell isn’t paved at all, and the street lamps went out long ago.” – MARK STEYN

 

“A Swede was never happy unless he was keeping some tidy misery to himself.” – JAMES LILEKS (a fellow who knows – he's from Minnesota....)

 

“Only barbarism is genuinely Sweden. All further development has been brought from outside.” – FREDRIK REINFELDT (an ex-Prime Minister of the place, for fucks' sakes. Man, Sweden is one étrange place....)

 

“Sweden – the world’s leader in uterine transplants – is anxious to reclaim the title of the world’s most batshit crazy nation, which the Canadians and that simpering idiot Justin Trudeau currently have in their grasp.” – ROD LIDDLE

 

"The Swedes go along with their government too much, sometimes because they assume too easily that whatever is widely agreed must be right." -- DEIRDRE NANSEN McCLOSKEY

 

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

 

“Sweden is what in the 1950s the world of the future was going to be like; but it never happened – except in Sweden.” -- MATTHEW PARRIS (in 2020)


Swimming

“Many people cycle or swim to keep trim. But if swimming is so good for the figure, how do you explain whales?” – CHARLES SAATCHI (the famous English advertising guru-tycoon and supporter of Margaret Thatcher)

 

"As long as you're not drowning, you're swimming." -- DANNY BAKER (Very funny and likable presenter on BBC Radio 5 Live. Sadly, sacked for political incorrectness.)

 

Switzerland

“The first thing to learn about Switzerland is never to invoke what happens there in an effort to prove any point about any other country. Switzerland breaks all the rules, gets away with it; is a wonderful country with, unhappily, a bad drug problem.” - WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR (who had a second home, for a long time, in the Swiss Alps, and, boy was he right about their drug problem - you wouldn’t believe the Hiyeronymous Bosch-like scenes at the needle park on the banks of the Zuriche Zee….)

 

"Switzerland is the antechamber to heaven.” -- WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

 

“Only in Switzerland and America did the theory and practice of popular government survive into the modern world. But note: they survived because they were planted in an older, hybrid pre-Enlightenment roots.” - ANGELO CODEVILLA

 

“The Swiss, my dear fellow, are a people of quite extraordinary stupidity and immorality. A very rare combination which only a long experience of democratic government could have produced. As Swiss agent is the perfect type of Shakespeare’s Second Murderer.” - GEOFFREY HOUSEHOLD

 

“Switzerland is a country in which every able-bodied man has an assault rifle as a result of compulsory military service, and there is no crime. Ernest Hemingway called Switzerland 'more upside-down than sideways'. I call it God's country.” – TAKI THEODOCOUROPOLOS

 

“The Swiss love regulating each other.” – ERIC MIDGELY (the British Ambassador there, in 1973)

 

“Everybody has been there, (Switzerland), but nobody knows anything about it.” – ERIK VON KUEHNELT-LEDDIHN

 

“In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." – ORSON WELLES (19915-1985) and the famous speech he improvised for his character Harry Lime in the Third Man (1949)

 

“Switzerland is an island without a sea.” – CHRISTOPH BLOCHER (Swiss conservative former MP and “elder statesman”)

 

“Money’s the religion of Switzerland. But at least they keep their trains clean and seem to control their beatnik problem.” – IAN FLEMING (in his 1963 “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”)

 

"Switzerland was nature's version of Valium. It was the best country in the world for natcissistic introspection." -- MARK LAWSON

"Patriotism with brains is what you have in Switzerland, where nobody thinks of attacking any other countries or proving anything to anyone. They simply live better than anyone else in the world, and that's it." -- YURI SHEVCHUK (the Russian rock singer from St. Petersburg, leader of the group DDT)

Sympathy

“Perhaps, when viewed from a suitable distance, perplexity translates itself as sympathy.” – SHIVA NAIPAUL

 

“Practicality is kinder than sympathy.” – STEPHEN FRY

"Sympathy is a word between 'shit' and 'syphilis' in the dictionary." -- ARTHUR "MAL" MALONEY (a legendary WWII infantry officer whose wounds eventually sent him to the CIA where he became an equally legendary paramilitarry officer)


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

Syria (and Syrian War)

"The Syrian war is like a positive feedback loop of migration and misery, with alienated second-generation Muslim immigrants leaving Europe to fight jihad in the Middle East, which in turn ruins the lives of middle eastern Muslims, who are forced to settle in Europe."-- ED WEST (in the UK SPECTATOR, Sept. 2015. And I ask you honestly -- even after hundreds of years of the murderous depredations of Utopian socialism and all its communist and fascist off-shoots, has mankind ever suffered through a greater maelstrom of hideous dysfunctional lunacy than Islam?)

 

“Offensives in this war are 1,000 people. Anybody who actually had the numbers they claim would be able to capture the whole of Syria.” – TOBIAS SCHNEIDER (A German “military analyst”, in 2016)