T

 

Taboos

“'Imposing social values' is the clunky verb form of the noun 'society'. It is what societies do. And that is what is so frustrating about all of this talk of 'last taboos'. Ultimately a society is a taboo-generating institution. And while it's absolutely true that some taboos are disappearing, we are also constantly generating new ones. What is political correctness if not the Taboo-Industrial Complex of the left?” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"Once upon a time, taboo-breaking entailed saying something incorrect, tasteless or immoral. Nowadays, you horrify an audience by saying something true." -- LIONEL SHRIVER 

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

 

Tactics

“The best way to win a game of chicken is to get into the vehicle visibly drunk and throw the steering wheel out the window.” – HERMAN KAHN (the eminent founder of THE HUDSON INSTITUTE, and he used to be a big deal among “Futurologists”)

 

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

 

“A good plan executed violently now, is better than a perfect plan executed next week.” – GEN. GEORGE S. PATTON, Jr.

 

"If you're not prepared to go completely fucking rogue if the situation demands it, you're just living in someone else's world" -- PATRICK POOLE                                                                                                                  (a guy who’s quite sound on national security and terrorism for PJ Media...)

 

"Take license. They do." -- MARK HELPRIN (I love this one.)

 

“Luck or cunning were the most effective attributes in this world and cunning, though it worked more slowly, was the more reliable.” – DAVID LODGE (rather amusing English novelist)

 

“Tactics don’t have an ideology.” – LARRY O’CONNOR (on 16 Nov 2020, on his radio program)

"You probe with bayonets: if you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you withdraw." -- VLADIMIR I. LENIN 

Taiwan

“Taiwan is Chinese for ‘come back at five and I’ll have a copy waiting for you’.” – PETER BIDDLECOMBE

Talent

“Talent is absolutely luck, and no question that the most import thing in the world is courage. People worship talent and it’s so ridiculous. Talent is something you’re born with, like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is born tall. That’s why so many talented people are shitheels.” – WOODY ALLEN

 

“The iron law of talent – a few have it, some have some, and most have none whatsoever.” – RICHARD BROOKHISER

 

Talk

“Two great talkers will not travel far together." -- GEORGE BORROW (19th century British novelist and travel writer)

 

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

 

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut." -- ERNEST HEMINGWAY

 

“Booze is a great emancipator, freeing us from our obligation to suffer through tedious conversations with some of society's most difficult personalities – not just relatives, but also hipsters, vegetarians, marathon buffs and soccer fans.” – ANDREW STILES (of THE WASHINGTON FREE BEACON)

 

“If there's a podium involved, it's not a ‘conversation’." – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

 

"If other people are going to talk, conversation becomes impossible." -- JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER (the artiste fellow who painted his mom)

 

“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.)

 

"The poorer and less powerful a person, the more expressive." -- MARK HELPRIN

"She discovered that you can talk as long as you ask questions. Making a statement is risky." -- WALKER PERCY 

"If everything you or I said in private were revealed to the world, we could all be made to look awful." -- DENNIS PRAGER

 

"Why do the people who want to 'talk about things' always win? Why don't people who don't 'want to talk about things' ever win?" – DAVID MITCHELL (English comedian, in his TV show "Peep Show" – Series 3, Episode 4)

 

“Everything’s been said, but not everybody has said it.” -- MO UDALL (Democrat congressman from Arizona, and a failed presidential candidate in 1976)

 

“If you talk enough, you don’t feel you have to do anything.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

"If you let somebody talk enough, everything comes out, underside first." -- JOHN UPDIKE      (No, I don't either.)                                     

"We are each of us sealed containers of gaseious fantasies and hostilities, but a factual secret, with its liquid weight, leaks out, if only in the care with which one speaks, as if around a pebble held in the mouth." -- JOHN UPDIKE (eh?) 

"There are two types of public speakers: those that are nervous and those that are liars." – MARK TWAIN

 

“The longer it goes on, the harder it is to say things.” – DAVID NOBBS

 

“I have never liked people making speeches at me – it seems so antisocial. After all, I have things to say too.” – GUY BELLAMY

 

“It always surprised me how much people have got to talk about until I overhear them and discover that they haven’t.” – GUY BELLAMY

 

“Every battle in the war on reality begins with the opening of a new linguistic front. We cannot think because we cannot speak. Having lost the words for things, we lose the things themselves. ” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“I talk a lot, yes, that way I need say very little.” – FAY WELDON

 

“People don’t always say what they always say, is my experience.” – MICHAEL FRAYN (about a guy who always said “I always say...”)

 

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since nobody is listening, everything must be said again." – ANDRE GIDE

 

"As you get older you'll realize that the only conversations worth having are behind people's backs." -- BRYAN FORBES (The great English film director – who made two of my favorite movies: “Whistle Down The Wind” in 1961, and “The Wrong Box” in 1969)

 

“When a man has nothing to say, the worst thing he can do is to say it memorably.” – CALVIN TRILLIN (hmm... “President” Joe Biden comes to mind....)

"Everybody always talks too goddamn much. Everybody. 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) 

"Talk low. Talk slow. And don't say too fucking much." -- JOHN WAYNE      (Advice he gave to a young Michael Caine)

“We are masters of unsaid words, but slaves to those we let slip out.” -- WINSTON CHURCHILL

Talk, (“Small”)

“When someone asks ‘How are you?’ you have to assume your interlocutor is only being polite. Anyone who returns a ball-by-ball commentary about their aches and pains, work-life balance and reduced chances of summer fun thanks to the heat storm should immediately be sent to Coventry for the rest of time.” — RACHELJOHNSON (The winsome Rachel is, of course, Boris Johnson’s sister — and “being sent to Coventry” is Brit-talk for being banished…)

Tardiness

“After a while you're so late for work people think you're dead. You almost hate to disappoint them, which explains some people's driving.” -- JAMES LILEKS

 

"As usual, I am late. But I am not as late as usual." -- ROSS THOMAS (the American thriller writer, in 1967)

Taste

“Good taste is better than bad taste, and bad taste is better than no taste.” – MAX BEERBOHM

"I don't think it helps." -- QUEEN ELIZABETH II     (when asked about good taste by Nicky Haslam)

Tattoos

“In the tattoo parlour, the customer is always wrong” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

"Why put a bumper sticker on a Lamborghini?" -- KIM KARDASHIAN (that this pluperfect nullity makes this compendium just goes to show how comprehensive it is -- and, to boot, she's right!) 

Tax Evasion/Avoidance

"The ability to dodge the system acts as a brake on overreach by the system." -- ANDREW STUTTAFORD

 

“Every citizen has a right so to arrange his affairs as not to attract taxes enforced by the Crown so far as he can legitimately do so”. – WINSTON CHURCHILL (actually from the 1920s, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer)

 

“The avoidance of taxes is a primal urge, like sex and patriotism and religion, and lighthearted redistributionists are well counseled to be aware of this.” – WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

 

Taxation

“So there you are, doing good, working hard, making America strong and prosperous, and the government’s getting a third of your pay.  Is the government doing a third of your job?  Is the government doing even a third of your laundry?  If one of you is feeling romantic and the other is tired, does the government take care of foreplay?  When you go to Hooters, is the government tending bar, making one out of three margaritas on the house?” – P. J. O’ROURKE

 

“High tax rates don’t redistribute income, they redistribute taxpayers.” – GEORGE GILDER

 

“High tax rates don’t stop rich people from being rich; they stop everybody else from getting rich. Progressive tax rates don’t redistribute incomes, they redistribute taxpayers… from factories and offices and onto foreign beaches and early retirements.” – GEORGE GILDER

 

“A taxpayer is someone who works for the government, but doesn’t have to take a civil service examination”. – RONALD REAGAN

 

“The government will spend every penny it takes in taxes, and whatever more it can get away with.” – MILTON FRIEDMAN

 

“The power to tax is the power to destroy.” – JOHN MARSHALL (Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court in 1803)

 

“Targeted tax cuts are simply another form of government spending. Like all government expenditures, they consist in paying select citizens to perform contracted tasks – usually stupid, perverse, or humiliating, such as hiring the incompetent or producing ethanol – that they would not do without the payment.” – GEORGE GILDER

 

"There is only one way to kill capitalism—by taxes, taxes, and more taxes." – KARL MARX (Well, I guess the old grouch must have figured out something, all that time holed up in the British Library, wishing he had a girlfriend and scratching his arse....)

 

“The avoidance of taxes is a primal urge, like sex and patriotism and religion, and lighthearted redistributionists are well counseled to be aware of this.” – WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

 

“When the jacobinical fever rages, people don’t care whether they are stifling production with their taxes. All they care about is that the Haves shall have less.” – WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

 

“The energy spent in completing tax forms and avoiding tax exposure, bottled up, could make the Sahara Desert bloom.” – WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

 

"To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical." – THOMAS JEFFERSON

“Higher taxes always divert resources from the more productive sectors of the economy to the less productive ones.” – BRUCE ANDERSON (this is even worse than “redistribution of wealth” – it’s “redistribution of potential, future, wealth”…)

 

“I favor any tax cut, of any kind, no matter how modest or partial — because surely it will do some good. We are not in danger, anywhere in the world, of undertaxation.” – MILTON FRIEDMAN

 

“No reasonably well-informed citizen can understand – or even read – the tax code. So a minimum-wage waitress with a part-time housecleaning business requires professional assistance to file her taxes. That’s a disgrace to a free society. Even the government doesn’t understand the tax code.” – MARK STEYN

 

“There’s no correct answer to the question: ‘How much tax do I owe?’ Go to ten different accountants and they’ll come up with ten different numbers.” – MARK STEYN

 

"If cutting taxes raises government revenues, then you haven't cut taxes enough."– MILTON FRIEDMAN (in counter-intuitive anti-“supply-side” mode.)

 

“There are undreamed-of riches in this country, but the people hide them and do not seek to make them bear fruit; they fear being stripped of them by the rulers. Why do you think the Jews of this country are accused of being  miserly? Because the least expenditure,  the slightest ostentation, puts their fortune and their lives in danger. For the same reason so many of our cities are dying and the kingdom is becoming impoverished.” – AMIN MAALOUF               (in his excellent 1988 novel “Leo The African”, which is about Morocco in 1509 (!!) – which makes the speaker, surely, history’s first Supply-Sider…..)

 

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

 

“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

 

“Your attitude to tax changes completely when you actually have to write it out as a check.” – CHARLES MOORE (Reminds me of my brother James, who in his youth in the 60s and early 70s fancied himself a liberal Democrat, as, a struggling rock musician, he managed to avoid paying any income taxes at all. Eventually he got a proper well-paying gig and his accountant couldn’t keep the IRS at bay any longer – I was there the day he had to write out his first income tax check: It was relatively small, a couple of hundred mid-Seventies $hmundos – but he nevertheless cried out in anguish “What the hell do they do with all this money?!”  To which I answered, “Welcome to the World, bro – that check won’t keep the Feds in paper clips for more than 2 minutes”)

 

"We've got 3.5 million layabouts (in England) on benefits (welfare), and I'm 76 years old, getting up at 6 a.m. to go to work to keep them. I left for eight years when tax was put up to 82 percent. The newspapers said 'Michael Caine's leaving: let him go, the stupid, overpaid, loudmouth idiot, who cares where he goes?' Well, you didn't get 82 per cent tax from me for eight years and a quarter of a billion dollars worth of movies were made outside this country instead of inside it. Now, that is just from one stupid, loudmouth moronic actor. Imagine what happens with companies that disappear." -- SIR MICHAEL CAINE (famous Thatcherite supply-sider, star of two of my top-ten all-time movies*, and all-round splendid bloke) *("The Man Who Would Be King" 1975 and "The Ipcress File" 1965)

 

“To tax one person, class or section to provide revenue for another is robbery.” – JOHN W. DAVIS (the unsuccessful 1924 Democrat Party candidate for President, who lost to Calvin Coolidge. This was the last time the Democrat Party nominated a presidential candidate who could be described as not on the left side of the ideological divide.)

 

“In 1913 there was a $4000 'standard deduction'. The income tax was 1% of the first 50,000; 2% of the next 25,000; 3% of the next; 4% of the next 150,000; 5% of the next $250,000; and 6% of anything over that. If you adjust these tables for inflation, no one making less than $3,000,000 would pay any income tax, and no one making less than $96,000,000 would be in the 6% bracket. -- IVAN NEGODKI (writing in the WSJ, 31 Dec 10)

 

“I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

 

“We don't need more taxes, we need more taxpayers.” – MARCO RUBIO

 

“Who doesn’t want to give unto Caesar as little as bloody possible?” – JAMES HAWES (the English novelist)

 

"Taxes create equality by discouraging the rich from earning income. The nation is not enriched when this happens"- BRUCE BARTLETT

 

"I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible." -- MILTON FRIEDMAN  (he seems to have said this same thing in about at least 3 different forms.... it's alright – it bears repeating...)

 

 “Businesses never pay taxes, they only collect them.” – RONALD REAGAN

 

“The question is not how much the state should tax us, but for what purposes.” -- JOSEPH SOBRAN

 

"Here's a handy economic heuristic: Tax what you don't want, not what you do want." -- JAMES PETHOKOUKIS (Oil, anyone? Employers? By the way, a "hueristic" is, more or less, a self-discovery.)

“Tax bills only matter to those who pay them.” – LAUREN KIRLICHIK (A woman commenting in the WSJ in 2012)

 

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

"Taxes exist to fund those things everyone needs but that no individual can pay for." -- FRIEDRICH HAYEK (like streetlamps and nuclear bombers)
 

“It is a paradoxical truth that the soundest way to raise the revenue in the long run is to cut the rates of taxes now. And economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance our budget, just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits.” – JOHN F. KENNEDY (“Profits”? “Balance the budget”? Yeah, they spoke like this back then – even some Democrats    did... Anyway, JFK said this in 1962, and he did it, and the economy responded accordingly. That's     right, John F. Kennedy – the supposedly sainted Democrat icon....)

 

“Every dollar released from taxation that is spared or invested will help create a new job and a new salary.” – JOHN F. KENNEDY

 

“Every citizen has a right so to arrange his affairs as not to attract taxes enforced by the Crown so far as he can legitimately do so”. – WINSTON CHURCHILL (actually from the 1920s, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer)

“Any one may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which will best pay the Treasury; there is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes.” -- JUDGE LEARNED HAND (As best I can tell, he said this some years before Churchill said his  -- see above. Naughty Winnie....) 

"The lottery is my favorite form of taxation: A voluntary tax on the stupid." – MICHAEL GRAHAM

 

“The reason I like a mugger over a tax collector is that a mugger never acts like you're supposed to thank him.” -- FRANK J. FLEMING (outstanding NY POST columnist. Also a novelist  and  a contributor to the genius BABYLON BEE.)

 

“As my father-in-law once said, when they talk about taxes it’s always for teachers, firemen, and police – but when they spend your taxes, it always seems to go to some guy in a leather chair downtown you never heard of.” –GLENN REYNOLDS (a law prof. At the Univ. Of Tennessee, a.k.a. “Instapundit”)

 

"The larger the percentage of the national income taken by taxes the greater the deterrent to private production and employment. When the total tax burden grows beyond a bearable size, the problem of devising taxes that will not discourage and disrupt production becomes insoluble." – HENRY HAZLITT

 

“Suppose I hire you to repair my computer. The job is worth $200 to me and doing the job is worth $200 to you. The transaction will occur because we have a meeting of the mind. Now suppose there’s the imposition of a 30 percent income tax on you. That means you won’t receive $200 but instead $140. You might say the heck with working for me – spending the day with your family is worth more than $140. You might then offer that you’ll do the job if I pay you $285. That way your after-tax earnings will be $200 – what the job was worth to you. There’s a problem. The repair job was worth $200 to me, not $285. So it’s my turn to say the heck with it. This simple example demonstrates that one effect of taxes is that of eliminating transactions, and hence jobs.” —WALTER WILLIAMS (the late professor, author, columnist, sometime replacement for El Rushbo, and, er, black fella)

 

“The State cannot get a cent for any man without taking it from some other man, and this latter must be a man who has produced and saved it.” – WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER (19thcentury American author, economist, Yale Professor and one of the first “sociologists”)

 

“Look, we play the Star-Spangled Banner before every game – you want us to pay taxes, too?” -- BILL VEECK (The long-time owner of the Chicago White Sox, justifying his dubious – but legal – practice of    counting his players as assets for tax purposes, and depreciating them each year)

 

«What exactly is your 'fair share' of what someone else has worked for?» – THOMAS SOWELL

 

"If Thomas Jefferson thought taxation without representation was bad, he should see how it is with representation."~ RUSH LIMBAUGH

 

“Let's face it, taxation is a form of state theft, so the smart ones will always find ways to ensure that the state steals the minimum from them.” -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

“All taxes are is a gangster shakedown." -- BEN SHAPIRO

 

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

 

"The art of Taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to get the most feathers with the least hissing." -- JEAN-BAPTISTE COLBERT (1619-1683)

 

“Aside, perhaps, for national parks, Americans can point to virtually nothing in their daily lives that their federal tax dollars buy. The purely redistributive model leads understandably to resentment.” -- LIONEL SHRIVER

 

“With progressive taxation, there's no getting away from the fact that many western democracies now expect about half the country to foot the bill not only for themselves but for everyone else – fundamentally to buy everything twice.” -- LIONEL SHRIVER

 

“My American tax return is two inches thick, and I don’t even live there.” – LIONEL SHRIVER

 

"The window tax was in some ways the perfect tax. You could avoid it if you needed to, but you couldn't hide the fact that you had." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

 

"Paying taxes is voluntary."-- SENATOR HARRY REID (when he was Senate Majority Leader, in 2008 – if you don’t believe me, go onto the internet, you  can see the Youtube interview for yourself)

 

“The Inland Revenue. Very sinister people. They watch out for people who have been earning money and come round and take it. That’s why a lot of people don’t bother to work any more. You can keep it if you’ve stolen it or won it or conned somebody, but if you’ve earned it, they take it.” – GUY BELLAMY

 

“Why should businesses pay tax at all? That’s a provocative but forlorn question. Business pays corporation tax on profits because that’s what voters expect, partly because many are conditioned to believe profit is a sin and partly because all would prefer to pay less tax themselves.” – MARTIN VANDER WEYER

 

"A tax system or a tax-policy debate that is primarily moralistic in character is an invitation to grubbiness: 'How much of the wealth of those people we don’t like very much can we pry away for people like us?'" --KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

Teaching (-ers)

"And once you enter the teaching business you quit the learning business." -- LLOYD EVANS

 

“Teachers are overwhelmingly left-wing and will continue to complain about ‘cuts’ even if school spending doubles again.” – TOBY YOUNG

 

“One of the most significant benefits of teaching is that it forces you to learn your subject.” – WALTER E. WILLIAMS

 

“Teachers are the engineers of the soul.” – JOSEPH STALIN (crikey....)

 

“Teaching is easier than learning.” – JOHN UPDIKE (This might at first seem provocative – but give it half a thought and you see that it’s self-evidently true.)

"Your best teachers aren't always your friends. Sometimes your best teachers are your mistakes." -- DAVID MITCHELL    (this bit of inscrutability was by the serious comic novelist -- not the comic actor of the same name)

"He had never been to school, and thought of teachers of a species of male nun." -- MARK HELPRIN (in his 1991 novel “A Soldier Of The Great War”)


 “That trait of all inadequate intellectuals who have become schoolteachers that they might puff out their slight talents with the authority of their position.” – JAMES ROGERS (in his 1987 novel “Dog’s Life”)

"Teachers are, to the Left, a protected class, which is only common sense:  they are purveyors of the essential service of indoctrination." -- DAVID MAMET

"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) 

Teachers’ Colleges

“(George Bernard) Shaw said ‘He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.’ Shaw forgot to add: ‘Those who can’t teach, teach teachers’.” – RICHARD LITTLEJOHN (the columnist for the UK “Sun”, in 1995)

  

"Education schools teaching how to teach: it's one of the great non-subjects -- second only to sociology. Teaching other people how to teach attracts all the loonies, frauds and pompous nits in the academic world." -- PHILIP THODY (the late eminent British professor of French and French Studies)    

  

    

Teachers Unions  

 

Teamwork

“Team-working is a group of 12 people all doing what I say.” – RUPERT MURDOCH

 

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

 

“Tea Party, (The)”

"There are a whole lot of people in the Tea Party that I see in these polls who don’t want any compromise. My presumption is they have unhappy families." -- STENY HOYER (D-MD) (This doddering dunderhead was the #2 Democrat in the House of Representatives when he said this. The Frogues have a particularly apt description of this kind of delusional fatuity: "Con et content de l'etre", which translates, more or less, as "an asshole, and happy to be one", or, as we used to call them in ADPhi, "happy assholes".)

 

“Tea Partiers are less concerned with the size of government than with its character. They are worried less that government welfare will be generous than that it will be undeserved. They remind us that the business of government is not to help anyone's profit margin but to protect the natural rights of individuals from intrusive, meddlesome majorities.” – MATTHEW CONTINETTI (in the WEEKLY STANDARD, April 2012)

 

Technology, (technologies)

“Technology is bullshit-neutral”. – DANIEL FOSTER (a writer for NATIONAL REVIEW, in June 2012)

 

“The thing about high-tech is that you always end up using scissors.” – DAVID HOCKNEY   (the famous and oh-so-trendy British “artiste” from the 60s)

 

"Where do you put the bayonet on the damn thing?" – LT. GEN LEWIS “CHESTY” PULLER (USMC. On being shown his first flame-thrower, in WWII)

 

“Thanks to technology, the need to know has been replaced by the ability to find out.” – LARA PRENDERGAST                                                                          (an English journalist, in the SPECTATOR in August 2016)

 

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

 

“Almost all technological advances are first supported by the spendthrift rich – cars, electric light, plumbing, home-computing, washing machines, television, Teslas.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

"Unfortunately, technology is a bit like Hitler: it doesn't know when to stop." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

“Consumers have learned that when buying anything with a plug, it pays to wait.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

«Almost all technology is designed by introverts for introverts. If you are slightly on the spectrum, most technology is much more exciting than if you are wildly sociable.» – RORY SUTHERLAND

"The experience of adopting any new technology is the opposite of having children. Children are a massive pain to begin with, but 20 years later they finally become entertaining and useful; technology is often entertaining and useful to begin with, but 20 years later it becomes a massive pain." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

“We live in an age when technology has replaced honor.” – TIM CAHILL            (in 1997)

 

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” -- ARTHUR C. CLARKE (his "Third Law", actually)

 

"Every technological advance seems to make us convinced that our children, if they take advantage of it, will go mad. It is never true." – ROD LIDDLE (radio, TV, rock'n' roll, the internet, smartphones, etc..Except from my vantage point in 2021, ...     they are mad).)

 

“What has our technology, that boasted its intention to reconstruct paradise, shown itself to be but an insidious spreader of poisons?” – JOHN UPDIKE    (in 1974, yet.... I like John Updike, but I think he’s, in the words of Terry-Thomas, full of beans, here. I happen to think that technology is our friend and, in many cases, savior.)

“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)  

“Every technological advancement goes mainstream by first gaining acceptance by the perverts and the freaks.” – JESSA CRISPIN (the American feminist author and journalist – in Dec. 2021)

 

Teenagers                                                      

“It requires huge balls, massive intellectual security and bravura precocity for a teenage to articulate genuinely right-wing positions, because the current of the culture is so against them.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE

 

“As a group, teens, of course, aren’t immoral or irremediably broken, just unfinished and slightly unbalanced – awkwardly oscillating between incomprehensible immaturity and unearned confidence, and between impulsiveness and irrational anxiety. Incentivizing elected officials to pander to the fleeting whims and mercurial idealism of people who have been known occasionally to ingest detergent pods is national suicide. Sixteen-year-olds have good excuses for their lack of judgment: an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, a dreadful public-school system, and coddling parents. Those who want to empower kids to chime in on war and peace and marginal tax rates when they still have to ask their parents for permission slips before going on a class trip, however do not.” – DAVID HARSANYI (writing in NY in May 2019)

        

                                                                                                                 

Telephone, The                                                                                                          

“Goddamn, man – I get way too many phone calls for someone with no fuckin’ money.” – ULYSSES H. “MALICK” SMITH (My Nigeria-based business partner, a black “force of nature”, originally from Tennessee.)

                                                                                                                                                      

"Perhaps Judgment Day would be something like this: There would be no trumpet blasts to raise the dead. Telephone calls instead. You'd either get a call or you wouldn't." -- STEVE TESICH

“In hell, all the messages you ever left on answering machines will be played back to you.” -- JUDY HORACEK (The Australian cartoonist and author)

“When someone leaves a message instructing you to call at once, it is certain that the matter in question is of more importance to him than it is to you, and it is equally sure that he will soon telephone again.” – W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

"Most of my telephone conversations these days are with answering machines. When I do talk to a person, I am reminded of how vague, long-winded and time-wasting they can be. Lfe would be much simpler if they just beeped at you and then listened to what you have to say. Machines are of course much better at listening than people." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS    (in 1993)

"It's disturbing when a dead person's phone rings." -- NELSON DEMILLE (!!!)

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

"If we talk on the telephone, the chances are we'll misunderstand each other. You can talk a friendship away, on the telephone." -- NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE (In 1993. And this is even more so on email and by texting.)


Telephones, Cell & “Smart”

“You see, the modern smartphone is a rubbish idea. It's a spork. It is a slab of glass combining two entirely different functions – that of a telephone and that of a tablet-shaped connected media device. Combining both makes no more sense than merging a television with a toaster.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“Smartphones are like alloy wheels or Russians: they only look good for a couple of years.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“Perhaps it will be a blessed relief when the next generation loses the power of speech entirely in favour of their iPhones speaking for them. At which point, Apple will officially run the world, and good luck to them. They're welcome to it.” – MELISSA KITE

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

“Smartphones today are zapping dates, dinners, conversations and spontaneous meetings so everyone can disappear into his own independent iFog.” – KYLE SMITH (in America’s only newspaper, the NY POST, in May 2016)

 

“In this smartphone-enabled and metadata-enriched world, complete knowledge of human affairs is becoming increasingly possible.” – SIMON INGS

"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

"There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get significant market share. No chance." -- STEVE BALLMER (Microsoft CEO... in 2007)

"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")

"Barbarians with electronic devices are still barbarians." -- THOMAS SOWELL

"These black mirrors of ours are the most efficient conformity engines ever invented." -- JONATHAN HAIDT     (in his 2024 "The Anxious Generation")

"The smartphone and texting are the Devil’s work, and quite possibly the end of civilization as we have known it since the Renaissance. ... Conversation is rapidly becoming a lost art, and the emoji is replacing literature as a form of expressing feelings. ... As we move to a paperless society, I am seriously wondering if our descendants will know if there was a civilization after 2000. I can imagine some anthropologist by 2224 saying, “It is amazing that they could leave artifacts on the moon without having a written language.” -- GARY ANDERSON    (of George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, in January 2024) 

"To measure her own beauty against Snow White's, the wicked queen had to visit a particular mirror in a specific room in a single castle. Today's smartphone users carry their mirrors in their pockets and consult them an average of 80 times a day." -- GRAHAM HILLARD                                                (An English prof at Trevecca Nazarene University, in aug. 2018)

 

"The progressive invitation to 'think globally' has long been an insufferable cliché. In the era of smartphone, it is closer to a curse, sentencing its practitioners to the particular misery of knowing everything while lacking the patience (thanks in large part, to technology) to analyze events properly." -- GRAHAM HILLARD

 

“When the telegraph was invented, a journalist wrote, ‘There is no more elsewhere. Everything is here.’ Once the smartphone became universal, there was no more here, everything was elsewhere.” – RICHARD BROOKHISER

 

“The modern primitive is no less primitive for having a smartphone.” -- KEVIN T. WILLIAMSON

 

“The smartphone version of Scrabble is the best argument yet against the internet existing at all.” -- JEREMY VINE   (English TV’s version of Jerry Springer)

 

«This is the allure of I-Phones: People who are ordinarily thought to be idiots are brilliant on them and people who are geniuses are helpless on them.» -- DENNIS MILLER

 

"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

"These people will not revolt. They will not look up from their screens long enough to notice what's happening." -- GEORGE ORWELL    (in, naturally,"1984", published in 1949) 

"The i-trap has tentacles in every cranny of your cerebrum. It offers relief from the stress it creates." -- MARY WAKEFIELD     (in her March 2024 article entitled "How To Cure Your Phone Addiction")

“Why spend, you know, an hour on a smartphone a day doing what? Doing nothing. Nothing that’s going to help me. I don’t even remember what I just did,”   -- STETSON BENNETT (The star University of Georgia quarterback on why he, like me, uses an old-fashioned “flip-phone” instead of a “smart-phone” -- in Jan. 2022

 

Television

“Here in Nigeria we could easily put on our own version of the show (“Big Brother”). All we need is get some prostitutes on the streets and lunatics and they will go naked for nothing.” – WOLE SOYINKA (dude won the Nobel Prize for Lit. in ’86)

 

“Television is for being on, not looking at.” – NOEL COWARD

 

“When everyone’s on TV, who’ll be left to watch?” – BUCK HENRY (from his screenplay for “To Die For”)

 

“No, the trouble is not what Americans were like. It is what television, Hollywood and political correctness have turned them into. Never, not even in Greece, has a race of people gone so quickly from the sublime to the ridiculous. A race of white, Anglo-Saxon, family-oriented and god-fearing Christians has now turned into a nation of voyeurs spending their waking hours watching the rancid and demeaning trash which soils the television airwaves. This abomination, coupled with the national religion of egalitarianism, has done the trick.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

“The overwhelming impression I get from practically any TV fiction I catch: This is girl stuff. When nothing much is happening in the show, which is rather often the case, it is because the women are talking, talking, talking, about how they feel, how you feel about how I feel, how we feel about how they feel, how she feels about how he feels about her feelings for him – talking the way a lady talks when a gentleman wants to go to sleep.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE (he was actually discussing the phenomenon of “Ally McBeal”, here, which he’d only belatedly –in Feb. 2006 – stumbled upon, typically, some dozen years late, as befits a true conservative.)

 

“There is no weapon in the armory of nothingness more lethal than television.” – ROGER SCRUTON

 

“Television is only as deep as its flickering and frenetic images. Although there are programmes of quality on television, finding them is like going on a wild-boar hunt: where is the damn thing?” – MICHAEL VESTEY (the English radio critic)

 

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

 

“Television is for appearing on, not for watching.” – GORE VIDAL (the shameless old pinko poof – he stole this from a politically much sounder poof, Noel Coward)

 

“There is no anger that comes close to the anger of an American that cannot get television.” – SEN. CLAIRE McCASKILL    (a gormless Democrat wanine from Missouri.  Totally no gorm.)

 

“Many of us parents call on a psychopath to babysit our children and his name is television.” – JOHN SMITH (and not just ANY old “John Smith” – this particular one is an Australian preacher who happens to be the “founder of the evangelical chapter of the Hell’s Angels”. I swear.)

 

“The truth is this: the more television there is, the less any of it matters." – JEREMY PAXMAN (Well, he ought to know – Big Beeb Mouth that he is….)

 

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

 

“Modern television sets are poorly designed. If one needs to adjust one’s set, one has to get down on all fours with magnifying glass, instruction manual, and a torch between one’s teeth, and virtually make love to the thing. I am also horrified by remote controls. The smallness and mysteriousness of the symbols irritate me. For keen-eyed ten-year-old children they are fine. But for elderly dukes they are a maddening, unfathomable mystery.” – PRINCE PHILIP  (THE DUKE OF EDINBURGH)

 

“If you want to change the temper of the nation, tinker with the television. Above all else, it's what we see on our screens that influences public morals and tastes.” – ALAIN DE BOTTON

 

“Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised.” – MARILYN MANSON (the somewhat bizarre not to say eccentric rock artiste who, let us not forget, is actually a chap,   i.e., a bloke from Canton, Ohio, called Brian Hugh Warner.)

 

“Women use the remote to see what's on television. Men use the remote to see what else is on television.” -- JERRY SEINFELD

"Is there something in the lucrative accidie of television presenting -- its mindlessness, its specious gravity and the bestowment of fame -- that makes such a comparatively large proportion of its practitioners display weird sexual peccadilloes and perversions?" -- ROD LIDDLE (in June 2023)

“Me and the idiot box: I get so enraged at being clubbed over the head by the politically correct dwarves of death who inhabit that poxed machine in the corner that I stamp around and make everybody miserable with my ranting. Not just the news programs, either, although they're the worst.  Every program these days has those dwarves hammering away with cudgels at your head, frantic to get their fatuous agenda fastened deep inside your skull. There is never an alternative view.” -- ROD LIDDLE (in September 2017)

 

"When television is bad, nothing is worse." -- NEWTON MINOW                                                                             (the head of the FCC in the '50s – of “vast wasteland” fame.…)

 

«In fact, I had gone from watching a bit of everything on four channels to watching precisely nothing on 604 channels.» – MELISSA KITE (THE SPECATOR’s «Real Life» columnist, on 7 March 2020)

 

"Of all animals, the only two species which can watch television without extensive training are humans and dolphins. If you show a chimp a TV picture, they are completely bemused, and it requires some effort to get them to learn that images are depictions of reality. The vastly more intelligent dolphin grasps the concept immediately: 'Ooh, that's interesting -- what's he doing with that fish?'" -- RORY SUTHERLAND

 

"The tall don't do well on television." -- JOHN UPDIKE

"It's a nice question as to who are the greater idiots:  those who appear on the goggle-box or those who watch it." -- WILLIAM DONALDSON (the English gossip-columnist and playboy)

"The haunted fish-tank." -- FRANK MUIR (part of his 1963 script of his comic English TV show "Whacko!")

“The ‘magic box’ is the ghost in the corner of the room.” – GRAEME THOMSON (the author of biographies of Elvis Costello and Willie Nelson)

 

Television (“Reality”)

“Reality shows bear the same relationship to reality as sugar puffs do to wheat.” – SIMON HOGGART

 

Television vs. Movies

"Films now sit in that awkward middle ground between YouTube cat videos on the one hand and epic 24-hour (cable TV) masterworks on the other. The television industry, in its wider sense, is now engaged in a magnificent creative battle to produce complex works that are sufficiently intellectually rewarding to warrant an extraordinarily large investment in a viewer's time. Hollywood, by contrast, has a business model which demands the kind of film that induces 11 million vapid teenagers from Topeka to Taipei to patronize an overpriced popcorn stand with a cinema attached." – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“As latex-clad superheroes jump from one exploding city to the next, cinema has become a largely empty, dispiriting experience. For intelligence, warmth, emotional honesty and intellectual challenge, television is the only place to be.” – ANTHONY HOROWITZ (Brit TV and film writer, director and producer – wrote “Foyle's War”)

 

Temper

“A temper ought not to be lost, but deployed.” – ROGER KIMBALL     (the long-serving editor of THE NEW CRITERION)

 

Temptation

“Don't worry about avoiding temptation. As you grow older, it will avoid you.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

"God does not allow the same warfare and temptations to this generation as he did formerly, for men are weaker now and cannot bear so much." - ST. ANTHONY THE GREAT (Egyptian monk, 251-356 AD) 

Tennis

“But enough about a silly game (tennis) which was invented by French courtiers hitting potatoes at each other.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS (who actually is a tennis champ himself, big time – played on the Greek national team, I believe, in the Davis Coup as well as the Olympics….)

 

“Wimbledon is the Talladega 500 for the androgynous wealthy.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

 

“Tennis is like disco music. A fad from the 70s that they only play in Slobovia.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

 

"Eighty percent of the top 100 women are fat, lazy pigs who don't deserve equal pay." – RICHARD KRAJICEK (The Czech-Dutchman who won Wimbledon in '96. And after he pissed off all the world's bien-pensants with this statement, he “amended” it by saying “Well, I may have been exaggerating, it may not be 80% – more like 75%”)

 

“Tennis is best played with a wooden racket on a shady lawn somewhere close to Dorking (England). There is no need for trainers, an umpire or a scoreboard. No need for rules at all.” – DAISY DUNN (An English lady writer who lives near Wimbledon)

 

“Tennis remains perhaps the only sport in which incompetence is more endearing than talent.” – DAISY DUNN

 

“For reasons which I've never quite understood, tennis is the most Social Justice Warrior-y of all the major sports. Diversity and equality and feminism and progressivism are baked into it at some molecular level. And a big part of the liberal orthodoxy of tennis is that the women players are just as good as the men.” – JONATHAN V. LAST

 

"Unlike many sports, tennis only gets more interesting as you age because, along with baseball, it is the most philosophically beautiful sport. It combines the athleticism of basketball with the mindfulness of golf and the viciousness of boxing -- with a dollop of Olympic patriotism, for measure." – JONATHAN V. LAST


"My theory is that if you buy an ice-cream cone and make it hit your mouth, you can learn to play tennis. If you stick it on your forehead, your chances aren't as good.” -- VIC BRADEN (tennis instructor)

 

Term Limits

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

Terrorism

“There is no terrorism threat.” – MICHAEL MOORE (in 2003, if you would please believe….. And this wasn’t a partial quote or taken “out of context” or anything like that… he just flat-out said it.  I suppose people like me should be grateful for “opponents” of this caliber…,)

 

“They celebrate death, making a mission of murder and a sacrament of suicide. Yes, for some reason – for some reason, only young followers are ushered down this deadly path to paradise, while terrorist leaders run into caves to save their own hides.” – PRES. GEORGE W. BUSH                               (Dec. 31 2001)

 

“My personal opinion is that one man's terrorist is another man's terrorist.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

 

“Hezbollah is nothing more than the Iranian Army in Syria.” – RUSH LIMBAUGH (then they went next door and took over Lebanon.)

 

“Terrorist groups are simply organizations composed of people who live to die.” – STANLEY KURTZ (of the Hoover Institution and National Review Online, in august 2006)

 

“The danger is that attempted explanations can easily resemble attempted excuses.” – NICOLAS SARKOZY

 

“We are frozen with concern over instruments of potential destruction rather than agents of destruction.” – WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

 

“‘Root cause’? The root cause of terrorism is terrorists.” – JONATHAN RAUCH (a sort of OK poofter author who’s certainly sound on his Terrorism 101, here…)

“It doesn't matter a whit if these manqué human bonfires are doctors, shepherds, bureaucrats or street vendors – this is what they do, and they do it because they like it. They are fanatics, subsumed in a crippling theology that fosters self-hatred and murder. Their economic conditions are irrelevant. The Left doesn't get this of course because Marxist materialism denies belief systems altogether, so they therefore must assume that all human behavior is derived from economic determinism.  These monsters wish to inflict as much pain and death on as many innocents as they can because… because they’re evil and they’re crazy. And it’s not pretty to say so, but the only reasonable and effective defense is to kill them first.” – MICHAEL LEDEEN

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

"Hamas is a progressive movement. It has progressed from extremism to terrorism." -- JAMES JAY CARAFANO     (of The Heritage Foundation, in April 2024)

“Because terrorism is such an enormous problem—it takes place constantly, all over the world, in conflict zones and in big cities, in more and less developed countries—one can find an example of just about every anti-terrorist tactic working (or failing to).” --  NICHOLAS LEMANN (a Columbia journalism prof)

 

“'Witnesses' do not deter terror. They are instead a requisite for any successful terrorist operation – stay out of our way, say the terrorists, or we'll kill you too.” – LEE SMITH (an editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD in Dec. 2011)

 

"Let me give you a very clear message. I don't see Hamas as a terrorist organization." -- RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN

 

“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)

 

"Terrorism's great achievement isn't hijacking jetliners, but hijacking the debate. Successful terrorism persuades the terror-stricken that he's conscience-stricken." – GEORGE JONAS                                       (writing in THE NATIONAL POST of Canada)

 

“Terror is naught but prompt, severe, inflexible justice. It is therefore an emanation of virtue.” -- MAXIMILIEN DE ROBESPIERRE

 

"I will never surrender my rights to your terror!" -- MARCUS LUTTRELL (“The “Lone Survivor” himself – and his quote is double cool, because of its double-meaning”)

 

“We have no compassion. We shall not make excuses for the terror.” – KARL MARX

 

“'Nothing to do with religion'? It has something to do with religion. After all, impoverished and unemployed Christian Congolese, of whom there are many in Belgium, are not blowing themselves up in the airport and the metro.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

“At this moment bombs are being planted in the trains in Algiers. My mother could be on one of those trains. If that is justice, I prefer my mother.” -- ALBERT CAMUS (for which, of course, he was reviled by his fellow literati on the left)

"They just don't want to state in public the truth that you can have compliance with the law, or you can have agents and fight terrorism effectively -- but not both." -- ALASDAIR PALMER     (a British journalist, here pinpointing the problem inherent in "penetrating" enemy and/or terrorist organisations. When I was in the old Outfit, we'd joke about how the only other people who knew the skills we were being taught were criminals)

"There is no such thing as lone wolf terrorism." -- DR. SEBASTIAN GORKA        

 

"There is no such thing as Lone Wolf Terrorism, it's a concept designed to make Americans stupid."-- SEBASTIAN GORKA

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

"You want to put the fear of God in somebody, you roust 'em in the middle of the night." -- G.M. FORD (The Seattle-based mystery-writer) 

“Success breeds terrorists. And nothing succeeds quite like an attack on the American homeland.” -- DANIEL SILVA (in his excellent novel “The Black Widow”)

 

“Sometimes a live terrorist is better than a dead one. A live terrorist can tell you things, such as where and when the next attack will occur.” -- DANIEL SILVA

 

"If you have the guts to keep killing people for long enough...then you are no longer a terrorist but a statesman and Nobel Peace Prize winner. This will not remain unnoticed by Hamas, nor the IRA..." -- VLADIMIR BUKOVSKY (My dad’s old pal and ex-colleague, in his very-belatedly-published in English book "Judgment In Moscow")

 

"Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into the pig tate's stomach! Wild!" -- BERNARDINE DOHRN (The unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist girlfriend -- now wife -- of unrepentant terrorist -- now professor -- Bill Ayers, speaking at the time of the Charles Manson murders of Sharon Tate and company -- and the reference to Sharon Tate's stomach is that she was pregnant at the time --- these, by the way, are Barack Obama's great friends in Chicago...)

 

"They are children when they are Palestinian. They are violent young men when they try the same thing anywhere else." -- ROD LIDDLE

 

“Just as there is nothing rational about terrorism, so there is nothing rational about counter-terrorism" – CHARLES COGAN (ex-big deal in the CIA, later a professor at Harvard. A liberal – natch – and I think he’s wrong here – both terrorism and counter-terrorism can indeed be perfectly “rational” – but it makes for a nice aphorism)

 

"Terrorists tend to regard themselves as monks in the business of providing burnt offerings to the one God, but most are horny young men who can hardly wait for the seventy-two virgins that service martyrs in paradise." -- CHARLES McCARRY

 

"There were more terrorists per square mile in Colombia than in Iraq and Yemen combined, and no matter where they lived or which splinter cause they served, they all knew about one another and did one another favors as if they were a new unique nationality." -- CHALRES McCARRY

 

“That which produces the general good is always terrible." -- LOUIS ANTOINE DE SAINT JUST (the young true-believing friend & right hand of Robespierre’s, he was Robespierre’s Che Guevara)

 

“We insist, whenever terrorist incidents occur, that the attack was ‘nothing to do with Islam’. And yet we are not consistent in this belief. The way in which we treat the perpetrators later always contains a genuflection toward the suggestion that these people are in some way enemy combatants on account of their faith. They are afforded imamas, they are quartered with other Muslims, they are sen on deradicalisation programmes where Muslim community elders address their violent, er, shortcomings. Why do any of this? If we are serious that these attacks have nothing to do with Islam then let us apply some consistency to this apparent conviction.” – ROD LIDDLE

 

"Terrorism will only end when scripture is not taken literally." -- ED HUSAIN

“We must have the courage to object when they use that term 'radical Islamic terrorism'." -- KAMALA HARRIS 

Texas

“If I owned Hell and Texas, I’d rent out Texas and live in Hell.” – GEN. PHILIP SHERIDAN (of course, being an invading Union Gen., he might be excused the rudeness…)

 

“There exists a visceral John Wayne kinship between Israelis and Texans,” – KINKY FRIEDMAN

 

"You may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas." – DAVY CROCKETT (To his fellow Tennesseeans after they failed to re-elect him to Congress in 1834. He would, of course, die at the Alamo, as recorded by John Wayne….)

 

“What would Texas look like after secession? Imagine Dubai with football, liquor and strip clubs.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

 

“Texas is Australia with the handbrake off.” – TIM BLAIR (the conservative English super-blogger)

 

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

“I have never known anyone from Texas, no matter how far they go or what they do, who isn’t proud of being from Texas.”- - VAN CLIBURN 

"Houston is about the size of Canada and it's 10,000 degrees all the time." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

"Texas can make it without the United States, but the United States cannot make it without Texas." — SAM HOUSTON

 

"I like chili, but not enough to discuss it with someone from Texas." -- CALVIN TRILLIN

«Perhaps I can best give you some idea of the extent of Texas if I tell you that it is very considerably smaller than Australia and British Somaliland put together.» – ALEX ATKINSON                                             (1916-1962, an English journalist, novelist and playwright)

“If you insist on going by appearances you’d be better off in some place like Texas.” – HUNTER S. THOMPSON

“Texians, being entirely a military people, not only fought but drank in platoons." -- FERDINAND ROEMER                                                                           (German geologist and traveler to Texas, in 1852)

"In Texas, people are happy, chipper, and armed. You can pack in Texas without a permit. This is the land of no sudden moves. Maybe this contributes to the general vibe of politeness. And you do not see hordes of criminals rushing into stores to loot." -- KURT SCHLICHTER                                                           (in Dec. 2021)

Thailand

"It's (the situation in Thailand) not going to be much fun until the King passes -- and that's not going to be much fun." -- GEORGE KENNING (my grate pal himself: the King of Round-Eyes in Thailand. Not to mention Cambodia and Laos)

 

“In Thailand gambling and golf are the chief pleasures of the rich, and licentiousness is the main pleasure of them all.” – SIR ANTHONY RUMBOLD          (The British Ambassador there, in 1967)

 

“Here’s a tip about Thailand: Never reveal that you have not been to school, since the Thais have more respect for diplomas than skill, and like to see a bit of paper.” – RICHARD WEST

 

“Thailand is full of people who would rather steal than be servants.” – SUPA SIRISINGH (a Thai lady writer who wrote under the pseudonym of “Botan”, and this insight sounds rather     universal, to me, but what the hell... how many Thai writers have I got in this thing, anyway?)

 

Thanksgiving (& Gratitude)

"I feel a very unusual sensation – if it is not indigestion, I think it must be gratitude." -- BENJAMIN DISRAELI (The 19th century Jewish-born British prime minister who, as far as I know, had exactly 0 to do with Thanksgiving, but from what I've read of him would have been a treat at any Thanksgiving dinner. His chief contribution to history seems to have been to prick the pompous balloon of his long-time rival, the great Prig and Bore William Gladstone. He -- Disraeli -- also wrote novels in his spare time, and once when he was asked what he thought of some current best-seller replied  “When I want to read a book, I write one.")

"There’s no cheaper, tackier sentiment than a pinko rich chick from Brentwood calling Thanksgiving 'a celebration of genocide' and whinging on about how those mean old settlers conquered the continent back in the olden days of the 1940s or something – as if she’s ready to pack up her condo and move back across the ocean with 325 million other folks." -- KURT SCHLICHTER

"Thanksgiving, from the Dutch culinary term tenks gijvens, meaning turkey giblets. It has always been customary for incoming settlers to try to hunt American fauna to near-extinction (buffalo, local Indians, elk, freemasons, etc.) -- the turkey is the only beast, unaccountably, to have escaped this fate. Thanksgiving Day, as it is now called, is the day set aside every year on which Americans have another go at exterminating the turkey. It has never worked yet." -- MILES KINGTON (English author, journalist and humorist)

"Thanksgiving is one of the only times of the year when libs are forced into conversation with people who might not see the world the same way they do, and the mere thought of it sends them into paroxysms of dread. There's no safe space on Thanksgiving, other than the kiddie table." -- JIM TREACHER                                                (Jim Treacher, whose real name is Sean Medlock, lives in Indianapolis, whose real name is Indianapolis.)

Thatcher, Margaret                                                                                                        

“Two words about Mrs. Thatcher: She fought. She fought them at every turn, with toughness and wit and steel and humor — by any means necessary. She never wavered from doing what she thought was right, never lost a moment of sleep over it, and never relented in her pursuit of her goals. She did not seek to reach across the aisle unless her enemies were already on their knees, disarmed, with their heads bowed in surrender.” – MICHAEL WALSH


“And I don't want any more trouble from this fucking, stupid, petit-bourgeois woman.” – PETER (LORD) CARRINGTON                                           (Maggie's first Foreign Secretary, and then later Secretary-General of NATO)

“Everyone wants to be immortal. Few are. Mrs. Thatcher is.” -- MAURICE SAATCHI                       (The Lord Saatchi; or Baron Saatchi, if you prefer. The ex-advertising wizard who made gazillions and was a big supporter of Maggie. Went on to become the Chairman of the UK Conservative Party....)

“I came as close to friendship as I can to anyone without a sense of humour. My sole assessment of the value of a friend is the capacity for laughter. But hers was zero.” – ALGY CLUFF                        (British North Sea oil tycoon, mining pioneer and ex-owner of THE SPECTATOR)

“It was never enough to dislike her. We liked disliking her.” – IAN McEWAN                                                         (the luvvie poofter actor, and the “we” says it all, doesn't it....)

Theatre

“The grander the set, the less anyone has to say upon it.” – JEREMY PAXMAN (the loudmouth obnoxious British TV interviewer)

 

“The truth is that the theatre isn’t an instrument of learning but an instrument of prejudice. We bring our culture to it. We don’t take our culture from it.” – LLOYD EVANS (the theater critic of THE [UK] SPECTATOR, of course)

 

“Spectators don’t cough because they’ve got a cough. They cough because they’re dissatisfied. It’s booing without the bad manners.” – LLOYD EVANS

 

“One of the theatre's key functions is to contain and placate the neuroses of charismatic drop-outs who disguise their mental-health problems by affiliating themselves with a pressure group called 'the acting profession'. An audience's task is to release the energies of these charming maniacs without damaging wider society.” – LLOYD EVANS

 

“If you ever feel bored in a theatre be aware that you are engaged in a noble act of self-sacrifice. Nations that lack vibrant drama are apt to be taken over by tyrants.” – LLOYD EVANS

 

“Every play is born on death row.” – LLOYD EVANS

 

“An audience that's thinking isn't laughing.” – LLOYD EVANS

 

“The fact is that the theatre has as much impact on society as jazz has on gardening.” – LLOYD EVANS

 

“I searched the program for mention of an intermission, but the producers, wisely for them, had decided not to include one.” – ROBERT PLUNKET (the novelist)

 

"The actresses left the stage and came out in the audience. Uh-oh, I thought, audience participation time. Get me out of here." -- ROBERT PLUNKET

 

“Farce is tragedy out of uniform”. – V. S. PRITCHETT

 

"Drama is life with the dull bits cut out." -- ALFRED HITCHCOCK

 

«It’s always difficult to deal with homosexual badinage in the theatre. There’s so much effusiveness, so much jokey campness that it’s sometimes hard to spot authentic homosexuality.» – SIMON BRETT (in his amusing detective novel, «What Bloody Man Is That?»)

 

«Tragedy is all too human. Comedy is divine.» – ANTHONY BURGESS

"The theatrical interchange is magic. The audience reacts as one. In the presence of artistic talent they react to the intent of the artists, in its absence, to the desire to go home." -- DAVID MAMET

"I never played theater as a kid, and I didn't like boys who did. They were sissies." -- HUMPHREY BOGART ( No doubt. But on the other hand, young spoiled Bogie had been a bit of a sissie himself, growing up as a pampered lad in Manhattan)

"I never go to the theatre if I can help it. Can't stand it. It's like being strapped in your seat in front of a telly with only one channel. And you can't talk, you can't eat, you can't drink, you can't go out for a piss, you can't even cross your legs because there's no room." -- DAVID LODGE


 

Theatre (“Musical”)

“Of all the methods that humans have contrive ed for diverting themselves in the evening, the musical is the most charmless and debased. It has no grace, modesty or decorum. That these ceremonies of silliness are considered entertainment is proof of our deadened sensibility.” – LLOYD EVANS (the theatre critic of the UK SPECTATOR)

 "Then I looked at the programme (sic). There wasn't an interval (intermission), if you please. Always a gloomy discovery at a musical." -- WILLIAM DONALDSON (the English gossip-columnist and playboy)


Theory

“Nothing ensures an obliviousness to theory like the need to get a passing grade on a quiz about it.” – P.J. O'ROURKE

"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is."-- JOHANNES ("JAN") LAMBERTUS ADRIANA VAN DE SNEPSCHEUT (For those of you who might not have heard of him, the marvelously monikered Squire van de Snepscheut, here, was a Dutch-born computer scientist at Cal Tech who apparently died prematurely and mysteriously in 1994, but I don't know.... I reckon that before he pegged out, he might have been onto something, no?)

 

“I think I'm going to move to Theory. Because big government always works in Theory.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

 

"A gram of experience is worth a ton of theory." -- LORD SALISBURY

 

“Theory is fine, but it does not prevent things from happening.” – SIRI HUSTVEDT (the lady novelist – authoress of “The Blazing World”)

 

"The gentile makes gods of stone and we of theories." - ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER

 

“Just as there are things which work in theory which don’t work in practice, there are things which work in practice but not in theory: The bicycle.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“The world does not work in practice the way it works in theory.” – RORY SUTHERLAND (a variation of a fairly self-evident theme....)


“Third Way, The”

“But then I was forced to read THE THIRD WAY.  And, to my surprise, I was impressed by Anthony Giddens (ed-the author) – not impressed enough to finish all 155 pages of his dreary book, but impressed.  Giddens explains the difference between the Third Way and the traditional left. Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton, and Gerhard Schroder (and Anthony Giddens!) confess to a belief in the marketplace. Granted, as a Road to Damascus experience, this is like being blinded by the realization that you’re headed in the Damascus direction.  Not believing in the marketplace is akin to not believing in gravity.  No amount of Marxist theory or Utopian social experiment will change the fact of the marketplace, just as no amount of theoretical physics or laboratory experiment will get me to finish reading THE THIRD WAY.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

 

“The ‘middle ground’ is a compromise between politicians, unrelated to the aspirations of the people. The ‘common ground’, on the other hand, is shared by the people and those politicians who truly understand them.  It is often very far from the middle ground: it is the opposite of the politically correct new establishment; it is entirely antipathetic to the views and priorities of the bourgeois liberal media.” – SIR KEITH JOSEPH (One of Margaret Thatcher’s main political advisers…)

 

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

 

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

 

“The 'Third Way' takes you to the Third World.” -- VACLAV KLAUS

 

"To win the center, you don't have to go to the center." – SCOTT WALKER (the ex-US soldier and great commenter to NRO’s The corner)

 

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

 

"The parts of a 'mixed' economy that work are the free parts." -- DEIRDRE NANSEN McCLOSKEY

 

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

 

“Third World, The”

“The Third World has remained mired in poverty and oppression.  That was totally unforeseen.  It turned out that those who presided over economic development knew almost nothing about the sources of wealth.  They still haven’t learned.  Poverty was blamed on colonialism and a shortage of capital. Give ‘em independence and wads of cash, then. That would do the trick. Tyrannies were duly installed, seated at the UN, and things went from bad to worse. Nowadays we imagine that what poor countries need is democracy. But that will not be enough. Rachel Carson’s offspring, preaching ‘sustainable’ development, are in any event doing their best to ensure that the poor countries stay that way. Welcome to the new colonialism.” – TOM BETHELL

 

“One nice thing about the Third World, you don’t have to fasten your seat belt. (Or stop smoking. Or cut down on saturated fats.) It takes a lot off your mind when average life expectancy is forty-five minutes.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

 

“What would be a road hazard anywhere else, in the Third World is probably the road.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

 

“The Third World can be defined as a collection of countries that receive foreign aid.” – PETER BAUER (LORD Bauer to you. And this is a pretty good pocket definition. And speaking of definitions, whatever happened to the “Second” World? No one ever mentions it….)

 

“The Third World serves three purposes, as far as I can tell: the first is to furnish us with a certain amount (but not too much) of cheap labour; the second is to tickle our palates with exotic cuisines, so that we can establish our sophistication in the eyes of our peers by our familiarity with them; and the third is to serve as a outlet for conspicuous compassion”. – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

"Third world types equate briefcases with power, for some reason." -- NELSON DEMILLE 

“The seething raging Third World masses are united in one thing: the desire for a Green Card.” – V. S. NAIPAUL

 

“The Third World is an artificial construction of the West – and ideological Empire on which the sun is always setting.” – SHIVA NAIPAUL (nice, Shiva....)

 

“In the developing world, seat numbers are still an alien concept.” – PETER MOORE (the Australian travel writer)

 

Thought                                                                                                                                

“The bulk of mankind is as well qualified for flying as thinking.” – JONATHAN SWIFT (I almost – and probably should have – put this under “Stupidity”.)

 

“Feeling comes naturally but thought does not.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

“The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that SOB who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

 

“People’s claims to have arrived at some conclusion or other by sustained, connected thinking should always be received with skepticism.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

 

“We have no money, so we shall have to think.” – ERNEST RUTHERFORD (1871-1937 – the English “Father of Nuclear Physics”)

 

"The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling." -- THOMAS SOWELL (and of course he's feeling much put-upon....)

 

“If everyone is thinking the same thing then someone isn’t thinking.” – GEN. GEORGE S. PATTON JR.

 

"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." -- JOHN F. KENNEDY

 

“A conclusion is just the place where you get tired of thinking.” – STEPHEN WRIGHT (the American comedian)

 

“Think! How the hell are you gonna think and hit at the same time?” — YOGI BERRA

"Thoughts are never honest. Emotions are." -- ALBERT CAMUS (I always kind of liked Camus because I saw him as the "anti-Sartre", but this is the intellectual rationale for Leftism, and he couldn't be wronger, here.)

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” -- ALBERT EINSTEIN

 

"Without thinking, there's no clarity; and without feeling, there's no purpose." -- MARK HELPRIN

 

"Strategy was nine tenths reaction. Study any situation too long, you can think yourself into paralysis." -- MICK HERRON

"We devote most of our thinking to short-term triviality, with little or none for long-term essentials." -- DANNY DE BELDER (yes, and an awful lot of this Compendium would bear you out, old chap…)                                                                                                                                                                            

“Yours to obey. The painful task of thinking is mine.” – ADMIRAL SIR GEORGE RODNEY                          (British naval commander, prominent during the US War of Independence and the Napoleonic Wars)

                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.” - GEORGE ORWELL

“It was nice, sometimes, being on one’s own, thinking one’s own thoughts. One could be so indiscreet.” – JOSEPH CONNOLLY

"The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible." -- DAVID OGILVY        (the legendary English advertising pioneer)


Threats

"I learned (from the Holocaust) that when people say they want to kill you, believe them." – ELIE WIESEL

 

"Never be afraid of a fellow who is going to hit you, for if he meant it he wouldn't tell you." -- W. C. FIELDS    (uh, this has not been my experience... nor, apparently, Squire Wiesel’s either….)

Thunberg, Greta

“That Swedish doom goblin who bestrode the planet hectoring everyone, before lockdown mercifully put a stop to her wanderings.” – ROD LIDDLE

 

“At present, the world’s energy policy is being directed by a teenager without a degree who didn’t go to school. That’s one of the strangest fairy tales in history. And it’s true.” – LLOYD EVANS (in March 2021)

 

"In eight years' time, when the planet hasn't disappeared in a cloud of toxic gas, presumably Greta will throw up her hands and say: 'Sorry guys. Looked like I was wrong about you ruining my childhood. I'm now going to become a flight attendant." -- TOBY YOUNG                                                                                                            (in Feb. 2020)

Tibet                                                                                                                                  

“The Tibetans have solved the problems of political philosophy by reducing the subject to two propositions: 'Is it the custom?' or 'is it not the custom?'.”  – MICHAEL WHARTON                                                          (the long-time DAILY TELEGRAPH columnist who wrote under the name of “Peter Simple”)

 

Time

“Time and space are God’s way of stopping everything from happening all at once and all in the same place.” – RONALD KNOX (English 20th Century theologian, though this fairly well-known quote has also been attributed to many others, including Stephen Hawking…)

 

“Nothing ever quite ends.” – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

 

"I know what time is until you ask me for a definition of it." -- ST. AUGUSTINE

 

“Being rich is having money, being wealthy is having time.” -- MARGARET BONANNO (the American science fiction writer who's, among other things, written a bunch of “Star Trek” novels)  

 

“I don’t fret over lost time — I can always use the situations in a novel.” – JERZY KOSINSKI

 

“A country that leaves everything to the last minute is a country on its toes.” – PETER BIDDLECOMBE

 

“Some of the days are kinda long, but the years go by very quickly.” – GEN. CREIGHTON ABRAMS (in answer to a reporter's question to him about being in Vietnam for 4 straight years)

“There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” -- V. I. LENIN (reminds me of General Abe, see above) 

"Tomorrow is nothing, today is too late; the good lived yesterday."  -- MARCUS AURELIUS

 

“Time is like a river. As soon as a thing is seen it is carried away and another takes its place, and then that other is carried away also.” – MARCUS AURELIUS (The first 5 words of this were taken by the great prog rocker Alan Parsons for his excellent song “Time”)

 

“If you count time in heartbeats, an elephant’s is different from a mouse’s. Each living creature has its own time.” – ANNA SHERMAN (the author of “The Bells of Old Tokyo”)

 

“A French five minutes is ten minutes shorter than a Spanish five minutes, but slightly longer than an English five minutes which is usually ten minutes.” – GUY BELLAMY

 

“But why can’t time run backwards? It might as well – It’d make just as much sense as running forwards.” – KEITH WATERHOUSE

 

“Nothing would ever get done without deadlines.” – BORIS JOHNSON (The Prime Minister who used to be a journalist)

 

“We don’t actually measure the passage of time with clocks or calendars, but with events.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“That’s the thing about the eleventh hour. You never know when it’s a quarter to – you only know when it’s five after, and counting.” – NELSON DEMILLE

"It is a delusion to think that you can make up for lost time. the best you can hope for is not to lose any more." -- ROBERT LITTELL (seems self-evident -- but it's nicely said, in any case....) 

"Wasting someone’s time is an expression of contempt for them." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

"Funny how there were laws against people who stole your money but no legal redress of any kind against people who stole your time." -- PHILIP THODY (I agree -- with knobs on -- specially inasmuch as more often than not, time is more valuable than money. Anyway, Professor Thody said this in 1979)

"That the real hallmark of personal freedom, as far as I'm concerned -- when the clock doesn't matter." -- RUSH LIMBAUGH (20 Jan 2021 –  3 weeks before he died.)

 

"Control your time. If you're working off your inbox, you're working off the priorities of others." – DONALD RUMSFELD

 

“Time is the soul and procreative element of the universe.” – PYTHAGORAS (I have no real idea what the old geezer was getting at, here, but it sounds a big bogus to me.)

 

“Time is a series of ever-perishing instants continually renewed by God in split-second acts of deliberate creation.” – RENE DESCARTES (and this sounds even more cukoo than old Pythagoras, see above.)

 

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

 

"Time is a great commodity when you don't have it." -- JOHN P. McAFEE (in his 1993 Vietnam War novel "Slow Walk In A Sad Rain")

“Time is the one thing you can spend without earning it.” – JAMES HAWES (the English novelist)

 

“Time did not now proceed in the way it had previously done. Once upon a time there was waking, which was slow and painful, and then quite a long period replete with chances and triumphs and defeats and risks, which sometimes, though not always, ended with lunch. Afternoon used to be as prolonged and arid as Arizona, and they were followed by things called evenings, which were entirely different and separate from nights. Now – you woke up with a sense of relief and surprise that you were still there, you got up, brushed your teeth, and before you knew it you were watching television. It was dark outside and well past your bed-time. You were also, probably, drunk, but how you got drunk was a mystery.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS

 

"People say 'I'm taking it one day at a time'. You know what? So is everybody. That's how time works." -- HANNIBAL BURESS

"The idea is that by getting people somewhere twenty minutes quicker, they could get more work done and all those extra twenty minutes would collectively translate into gazillions of extra pounds for the economy. I am a little dubious about this myself because I think that if you give anyone anywhere an extra twenty minutes, they will just have a cup of coffee. It's what you and I would do. It's what anyone does with twenty minutes." -- BILL BRYSON

Timidity

“It is the policy prescriptions of the fearful which are most likely to bring their worst nightmares to life.” – KENAN MALIK (Columnist for the UK Observer & International New York Times. Author: The Quest for a Moral   Compass)

 

"A timid question will always receive a confident answer." -- CHARLES JOHN DARLING                                               (English lawyer, judge, and politician, 1849-1936) 

 

Tolerance/Intolerance

“Tolerance carried to extremes converts from a virtue into the vice of indifference and apology.” – DAVID PRYCE-JONES

 

“I learned early in life that tolerance and respect are quite different things. One does not have to respect a man’s opinions to respect his right to have them: Indeed, tolerance would not be necessary if one respected everyobody’s views. It hardly takes tolerance to tolerate what one respects.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE

 

“Tolerance is another name for indifference.” – FREDERIC RAPHAEL

 

“What should not be a crime is not thereby a virtue.” – FREDERIC RAPHAEL

 

“We must be open and tolerant towards Islam and Muslims because when we become a minority, they will be so towards us.” – JENS ORBACH              (I promise this is a real quote, and not some poor right-wing attempt at satire. Mr. Orbach is something that purports to be Sweden’s Minister for Democracy. So. THAT’s alright, then….)

 

“Any person who claims to be tolerant naturally defines himself in opposition to those who are intolerant. But that makes him intolerant of certain people – which invalidates his claim to be tolerant.” – JUDEA PEARL (the dad of Daniel Pearl, the poor chap whose head was chopped off by the Jihadis in Pakistan. And, speaking for myself, I never met anyone claiming to be “tolerant” who actually was. Incidentally, Daniel Pearl was an ΑΔΦ bother of mine — he at Stanford.)

 

"While Europe has a high degree of tolerance for intolerant imams, it won't tolerate anyone pointing out that intolerance." -- MARK STEYN

 

"The more officially 'tolerant' we become, the more intolerant we must be in enforcing it." – MARK STEYN

 

"When you tolerate the avowedly intolerant, it's only an interim phase." -- MARK STEYN

 

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

 

“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society … then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. … We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.” -- KARL POPPER

 

“Here's a basic truth that needs to be heeded: You cannot be tolerant with the intolerant. When those who would kill you declare war on you as these killers have, you have two choices -- fight the war or surrender. You can't decide not to participate. It doesn't work that way.” – BRUCE McQUAIN (in his blog “Questions and Observations”, Dec 10)

 

“Toleration is not the opposite of intoleration, but is the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms. The one assumes to itself the right of withholding liberty of conscience, and the other of granting it. The one is the Pope, armed with fire and faggot, and the other is the Pope selling or granting indulgences. The former is church and state, and the latter is church and traffic.” -- THOMAS PAINE

"Rather than ushering in a golden age of enlightenment, the collapse of American Christianity gave rise to a new intolerance towards anybody who diverged from progressive opinion." -- ED WEST    (the English author, journalist and columnist, in Dec. 2023)

"If you permit everything, you stand for nothing." -- ROBERT FRAZER                                                                                              (A citizen of Salford, England, on 15 April 2023) 

“Where once tolerance was the discipline of leaving people in peace to go about their lawful business insofar as it did not harm others, in spite of one’s disapproval of what they did, it is now a demand for total acceptance, approval, and even celebration what one previously found aberrant or even abhorrent.” – ANTHONY DANIELS (he was writing about the “tolerance” of homosexuals in 2012, and how it wasn't enough for the homosexuals)

 

“The ancient Greeks understood that carrying any principle to extremes was dangerous. Yet, thousands of years later, some Western nations take tolerance to the extreme of tolerating intolerance among immigrants to their own societies. Some even make it illegal -- a "hate crime" -- to warn against intolerant foreigners who would like nothing better than to slit the throats of their hosts, but who will settle for planting a few bombs here and there.” – THOMAS SOWELL

 

"It's not what you preach, it's what you tolerate." LEIF BABIN (Iraqi vet, Navy SEAL, and founder of some sort of consultancy company called "Echelon Front")

 

“Tolerance and apathy are the last virtues of a dying society.” -- ARISTOTLE

 "Societies are far gone in depravity when toleration is considered good in itself, without regard to the thing tolerated." -- A. K. CHESTERTON (G.K.'s cousin) 

«Intolerance has become a growth industry. The politically correct has become the politically required, and nobody can any longer indulge straight talk, careless or otherwise.» – WESLEY PRUDEN (In THE WASHINGTON TIMES, 27 Sept. 2014)

 

“There are some principles which tolerant people have to be intolerant about.” -- RORY SUTHERLAND

 

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

 

“The case for toleration is never more than an inch away from being suffocated by the desire to punish.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON (in his book “The Smallest Minority”)

 

"In the name of tolerance, tolerance is being abolished." – CARDINAL CORMAC MURPHY-O'CONNOR

 

“How can you walk on the wild side when all is permissible?” – COSMO LANDESMAN (bemoaning, in 2018, that nothing is “wrong” anymore – at least sexually)

 

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

 

“For me, intolerance is still the adrenalin in the vein of society. Without it we should perish, with it we get into trouble.” – ROBERT MORLEY (the portly English comic actor)

 

 “Tolerance will reach such a level that intelligent people will be banned from thinking so as to avoid offending the imbeciles.” – FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY (prescient fellow)

"Evil preaches tolerance until it is dominant, then it tries to silence good." -- ARCHBISHOP CHARLES J. CHAPUT (of Philadelphia) 

"Tolerance is not a Christian virtue. Charity, justice, mercy, prudence, honesty -- these are Christian virtues.In fact, tolerating grave evil within a society is itself a form of serious evil." -- ARCHBISHOP CHARLES J. CHAPUT

 "We tried tolerance. Then we got perverts reading porn to our kids in kindergarten." -- KURT SCHLICHTER (in September 2023)

“Too Big To Fail”

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

 

"Folks, this government isn't too big to fail, it's too big to succeed."- SARAH PALIN

 

“Torture”

“The problem is that Congress passed a law prohibiting torture, and all it did was say that torture is the intentional infliction of severe physical pain or suffering — that was it. It did not list anything about what qualified as torture and what was not torture. There are some people who think that keeping someone in solitary confinement is torture. The hard thing for a lawyer to figure out was, well, What is inside and what is outside the line?” – JOHN YOO (the lawyer in W’s Justice Dept. who tried to keep things together; Fat load of thanks it got him.)

"All torture is, in the end, directed at the spirit." -- GEOFFREY HOUSEHOLD (I'm not so sure about that....) 

“Nobody believes in torturing terrorists . . . unless we really need to, in which case everyone does. Nothing has ever brought forth more inanity from the chattering class than the question of how to deal with ‘high value’ terrorist detainees.” – PETER MULHERN                                                                                                    (An excellent commenter on NRO)

 

"Don't kid yourself, it works...if Waterboarding doesn't work, they deserve it anyway...." -- DONALD TRUMP (Of course it works – that was never even a question. But no one has ever properly addressed the “ticking time-bomb” scenario, except my, ahem, good friend P. N. Gwynne in his excellent “The Bronx Bombing”)

 

Totalitarianism

“One advantage of totalitarianism – the lower down the food chain, the higher they jump.” – CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY (I’m not sure how any of this is an advantage, but still, it makes a neat quote…)

 

“There is something deeply worrying about a country in which the satire reflects the government line.” – SIMON HOGGART

 

"There seems to be a deep instinct in human beings for making everything compulsory that isn't forbidden," – ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

 

“Fascism and Nazism were not only related to Bolshevism, they would have been inconceivable without it, and, in their various and chilling ways, Hitler, Mussolini and the associates of Lenin said as much.” – JAMES SHERR (lecturer at Lincoln college, Oxford)

 

“Communism is Fascism - successful Fascism, if you will. What we have called Fascism is, rather, the form of tyranny that can be overthrown - that has, largely, failed. Not only is Fascism (and overt military rule) the probable destiny of all Communist societies - especially when their populations are moved to revolt - but Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful variant, of Fascism. Fascism with a human face.'' – SUSAN SONTAG (because she's a lefty herself, she adds that “with a human face” thing. Not me.)

 

“The sin of nearly all left-wingers is that they have wanted to be anti-fascist without being anti-totalitarian.” – GEORGE ORWELL

"Totalitarianism demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective Truth." -- GEORGE ORWELL  

"Totalitarianism...does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud." -- GEORGE ORWELL

 

"Totalitarianism is Europe's great modern innovation, its gift to the world, and Europeans consciously or unconsciously resent that the United States has been preventing them from fully developing this great modern innovation of theirs." -- JEAN-FRANCOIS REVEL (obviously, he said this in the less baleful pre-Obama era)

 

“In totalitarian societies, the totalitarians rely on a simple truth: Heroes are always in short supply.” – MICHAEL MOYNIHAN (An editor of both “Vice” and “Reason” magazines.)

 

“Totalitarians are armed intellectuals.” – RICHARD BROOKHISER

“Totalitarianism, defined as the existential rule of Gnostic activists, is the end form of progressive civilization.” -- ERIC VOGELIN (German-American philosopher, 1901-1985 — “gnostic”, by the way, means , more or less, “a select few”) 

“Schools and hospitals are Total Institutions.” – JACQUES DERRIDA (Professor PoMo himself, and this gives you a little insight into why Commies, National Socialists, and other totalitarians always make such a fetish of schools and hospitals – a little hint, folks: it ain't because they care about readin' writin' and 'rithmetic or how's your grannie....)

 

“For totalitarianism to work everybody has to keep a straight face.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

"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")

“A man's admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.” – ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

 

“Once the Left starts on something, it won't stop. Because it cannot stop. The logic of its position always demands a totalitarian solution.” – DAVID KAHANE (a.k.a. MICHAEL WALSH)

"Yes, in the '30s, I was a communist, which is to say, a fascist." -- CLAUD COCKBURN (leftist English journalist, author and screenwriter, 1904-1981) 

“Never underestimate the coercive power of the central state in the service of good.”-- JERRY BROWN (the sparadrap governor of California, and if this isn't a defense of totalitarianism, I don't know what is....)

 

“Ultimate power is to be able to insist people recount a lie, that they know to be a lie and that they know you know is a lie.” – ANGELO CODEVILLA

"I have always thought that between the two great murderers, Hitler and Stalin, there was one difference. Hitler's evil stemmed from something, Stalin's from nothing." -- BERNARD LEVIN (the long-time columnist for the Times Of London)

"Give me a fully-committed Communist, and I'll make him a National Socialist within a month." -- JOSEPH GOEBBELS

“The difference between Nazi and Communist is that when you say how horrible Nazis have been, they don't say, ‘Well, real Nazism has never been tried’." – FRANK J. FLEMING (author of “Superego” and senior writer at the great BABYLON BEE)

 

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

“I will never abandon man to the ravings of the enemies of human nature. I am not here to be popular. Bishops have paid the price of blood for having opposed Nazism, Communism and all sorts of racism. Never will I be complicit in my silence in this new ideology.” -- CARDINAL ROBERT SARAH
(An absolutely splendid chap -- should've been Pope instead of the Argentine Marxist Bergoglio)

"We English hate fascism, but we loathe bolshevism as much. So if there is somewhere where fascists and bolsheviks can kill each other off, so much the better." -- STANLEY BALDWIN (twice Conservative UK Prime Minister, 1923--29, and 1935-37 -- and he said these wise words in 1936, as the Spanish Civil War was just getting cranked up)

"The difference between the two ideologies is instructive: The fascists tortured you to make you confess to crimes you really committed. The communists torture you to confess to imagined crimes." -- ROBERT LITTELL 

"I'm grateful to live in a country where the totalitarians are so hilariously inept." -- DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE (actually, this was said in the early 2010s... by 2019, American totalitarians had become considerably less inept....)

 

“When you live in a totalitarian country, you learn not to be judgmental. You learn to be very cautious in your judgments because you know that people sometimes find themselves in hopeless situations.” – VLADIMIR BUKOVSKY

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

“Once you decide that human nature is a fiction, that human beings are merely the sum of impressions made on them by their surrounding culture, then politics acquires an enormous jurisdiction. Consciousness becomes a political project, and the point of politics becomes the control of culture in order to control the imposition of proper consciousnesses.” -- GEORGE WILL (in 2023) 

"Totalitarianism is a game you cannot elect not to play. You can't hide from it. You cannot impress totalitarians by showing them how YOU refuse to compromise your libertarian principles. There are no cease-fires, no safe areas, no holy ground where swords cannot be drawn." -- JOHN HAYWARD (National Security Editor at Breitbart, in Jan 2023)

 

“Totalitarian politics is total on more than one front: total authority, total discretion, total reach. To fracture political power is to recognize limits on political power, which is an unthinkable thought for the totalitarian.In the American context, the states are an embarrassment to the Left and an impediment to the Left’s increasingly totalist project. Totalitarianism fully realized requires that there be nowhere to run.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 "Man's desire to belong to something bigger than himself gave birth to all the totalitarian systems which emerged in the twentieth century." -- FRANCISCO FUENTES    (my Cuban "X"-pal) 

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

 

"If you compare what fascists did to what communists did, it quickly becomes apparent that the two things, while not identical, are far closer to identical things than opposite ones." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“Modern technology makes casual state intrusion into our daily lives easier than it has ever been in history. But it doesn’t change the rights and wrongs of any of it.” – JAMES BALL (the “Global Editor” of something called “The Bureau of Investigative Journalism”)

 

"There is a kind of low-level totalitarianism detectable in many institutions today -- from elite universities to newspapers, publishers and technological companies --which reveals that practices such as informing, denunciation and defamation can all flourish even in the absence of a one-party dictatorship." -- NIALL FERGUSON

 

"I was alarmed when so many young people declared their intention of voting for the far left. Youthful idealism is one thing, but supporting the idea of a political system that murdered, tortured, exiled or terrified tens of millions of people simply for having different opinions or believing in God -- that's entirely another. All totalitarian societies, whether fascist or communist, breed corruption, greed and cruelty." -- DEBORAH CLARKE (a lady living in Surrey, England, writing in THE SPECCIE in September 2021)

 

“I wonder how many such men 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)

"We were told that it was nothing short of blasphemous to see communism and Nazism as morally equivalent, but we nevertheless said -- and never stopped saying -- that communism was no less evil than Nazism." -- NORMAN PODHORETZ (as quoted by Bernard Levin, in his 1995 collection"I Should Say So")


 “The notion that what you mean does not matter if people become upset with you is yet another small step on the path to totalitarianism.” – ROD LIDDLE (not so small, either, Rod)

 

“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)

 

"Nobody has ever complied their way out of totalitarianism." -- ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. (in Jan 2022)

"The Germans are the only decent people left in Europe. If it's a choice between them and the Russians, I prefer the Germans. We may have been fighting the wrong enemy all along. But while we're here (on the border of the Soviet-zone), we should go after the bastards now, 'cause we're gonna have to fight 'em eventually." -- GEN. GEORGE S. PATTON, JR. (on 21 July 1945, and perhaps it's not surprising that he was murdered shortly thereafter...)  

“There was some great mass delusion in this insane country. They all thought alike. Hanging on at all costs to the formula, the slogan, the message,  the chant.” – LIONEL DAVIDSON (the great spy novelist happened to be writing about communist Czechoslovakia, here)

 

"Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and Socialism are only superficial variations on the same monstrous theme -- collectivism." -- AYN RAND

"You will be made to care." -- ERICK ERICKSON      (the radio talk show host)

Tourism

“We think we’re learning about a country when all we can really see is how successfully the natives have altered the place to gratify our prejudices.” – LLOYD EVANS

 

“Sights are an irritating bore. Happy is the town that has nothing to show.” – D. H. LAWRENCE

 

"Some places are worth seeing, but not worth going to see." -- DR SAMUEL JOHNSON

 

"One sure sign that you have entered tourist hell is that the spelling gets terrible -- shoppe for shop or even, in extreme cases, §hoppe; olde for old." -- MARK LAWSON

 

"The two basic techniques of tourism: recreate the visitors' past and sentimentalize your own." -- MARK LAWSON

 

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

"American tourists abroad could never be mistaken for a corps de ballet." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

"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  

"The working class finds nothing shameful about tourism. It is the middle class that has read and heard just enough to sense that being a tourist is somehow offensive and scorned by an imagined upper class which it hopes to emulate and, if possible, be mistaken for." -- PAUL FUSSELL

"Never go on holiday to a country where they still point at passing planes." -- WILLIE RUSHTON (An English cartoonist, satirist, comedian, actor, and co-founder of the satirical magazine Private Eye)

 

“The English tourist is always happy abroad as long as the natives are waiters.” – ROBERT MORLEY (the very funny old round English comic actor)

"Why people choose to go there when everywhere else in the world is not there is a mystery beyond answering." -- BILL BRYSON

 

Trade (and International Trade)

“Governments seem to think that trade is something that takes place because of a trade agreement. The order is the other way around. People trade and have done for several thousand years, because it is to their mutual advantage. After a bit, governments come along and try to direct and often impede it, but in the modern world of instant communications, ready transfers of money and container shipping, this has become blessedly difficult.” – CHARLES MOORE

 

"The stifling groupthink of the Washington trade and economics establishment, which, almost without exception, refused even to consider the possibility that Chinese economic and trade policies might pose a threat to the United States. The Washington elite-consensus view was and is that trade is always good (even one-sided free trade in which the other side is mercantilist); that while trade might hurt individual workers, it can't hurt the overall economy; and that there is no difference between challenging foreign mercantilism and naked protectionism. President Trump, to his credit, is the first U.S. president to forcefully confront China over its unfair economic practices." -- ROBERT D. ATKINSON             (This guy was a member of Obama's -- that's right, Obama's -- WH Office of Science and  Technology.)

"The US exports mostly shitty movies, shitty music, smart phones, financial and insurance products. The world can get by without those. Russia exports energy and agricultural products. The world can’t get by without those." -- SAMUEL M'CHEYNE GLASSER

Tradition

“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.” – GEN. SIR CHARLES NAPIER (British Commander-in-Chief in India, 1842-1851; and this is – quite rightly – often held up as an example of the salutary effects of colonialism.)

 

“Tradition means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.” – G. K. CHESTERTON

 

“Tradition, shorn of nostalgia, metaphysical sentiment, and cant is simply another word for what worked. Note: I didn’t say “what works,” because some traditions outlive their utility in both a practical and a moral sense.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

"Just because a tradition isn't honourable, that doesn't stop it being a tradition." -- ALAN COREN (de chronicler o’ de life an’ times o’ Idi Amin – strewth, … look it up....)

 

“Tradition does not mean that you never do anything new, but that you will never fall below the standard of courage & conduct handed down to you. Then tradition, far from being handcuffs to cramp your action, will be a handrail to guide & steady you in rough places” -- WILLIAM (VISCOUNT) SLIM       (the doughty -- and eventually victorious -- English commanding general in Burma in Archie Bunker's "Dubbyadubbyatwothebigone"....) 

“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” -- GUSTAV MAHLER      (neatly said, by the celebrated  Austro-Czech tunesmith, 1960-1911) 

Tragedy

"It's a short distance from the tragic to the trivial." -- CHARLES McCARRY

Trains

“The real reason for progressives' passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans' individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.” – GEORGE WILL

 

“Only fairies ride in trains.” -- W. C. FIELDS

 

“Like many ideas from the first few decades of the previous (20th) century, trains are perfectly progressive; There's no individual decision on direction or duration, no competitition, no penalty for poor performance, and the money to run the thing is exacted from the unwilling by the force of the state.” -- JAMES LILEKS

 

“You always enter a town by the back door, bumping and swaying along old tracks like a drunk on hands and knees.” -- JAMES LILEKS

 

“Your seatmate on a train is usually some sort of nightmare or another.” -- JAMES LILEKS

 

"AMTRAK, the only transportation system that regularly suffers delays due to things like 'mist" and 'ennui'." -- JAMES LILEKS

"Few things are more luxurious than sleeping in a train." -- GEORGE COURTAULD (in his 1995 "The Travels Of A Fat Bulldog")


“The only way of catching a train that I have discovered is to miss the train before.” -- G.K. CHESTERTON

 

“The passenger train is like the male teat, neither useful nor ornamental.” -- JAMES J. HILL (the 19th century Canadian railroad tycoon, honcho of the Great Northern Railroad)

 

“A train isn't a vehicle, it's a place.” – PAUL THEROUX

 

“Why are men so much more likely to be interested in trains than women? I believe this to be a question of profound importance. It has implications for the debate about whether behavioral gender differences are inborn or learned. In the argument about nature versus nurture, therefore, a tendency to be interested in railways stikes me as a small but rather perfect argument for 'nature'.” -- MATTHEW PARRIS

 

“A train station is a place where the successful cross paths with those who are nothing.” -- EMMANUEL MACRON (Heh, a real man of the people. Actually, it could me at Penn Station or at the Gare du Nord....)

 

“Even the worst railway station is better than an airport.” -- CHRISTIAN WOLMAR (A British journalist and “railway historian”)

 

“You tell a car where to go, but a train tells you where you are going. That’s why progressives love trains — they fit perfectly into the progressive conception of the world as a vast Erector Set to be tinkered with by social engineers until utopia has been built.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“Rich lefties love, love, LOVE trains. Trains are for central planners, who decide where the tracks will be and when the trains will run. Everyone goes where they’re supposed to go, when they’re supposed to go. Orderly. Predictable. ‘Rational’, they’ll say. And rich lefties hate SUVs.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

"I once took the train from Argentina over the Andes to Chile. The train was so slow you could get off, fuck a llama and get back on." -- SAMUEL M'CHEYNE GLASSER

 

‘Third class train rides in India are not restful.” – PATRICK MARNHAM

"Hell, I know now, will be an eternity of traveling by the local train services towards East Sussex." -- AIDAN HARTLEY      

 

Trans-sexuals (& etc.)         

"Did it ever occur to the feminists that once they started claiming (against all empirical evidence) that they were exactly the same as men and could do anything a man could do... that men would do the same thing? Girls, you asked for Dylan Mulvaney." -- MICHAEL WALSH (Mulvaney being the poster-boy for this particular weirdness when he said this, in April 2023)

"There is no such thing as a transgender child. A trans child is like a vegan cat—a sick person forced them to be that way." -- IAN MILES CHEONG     (an excellent Canadian-Malaysian anti-Left "influencer" and general "media person")

"Drag queens manage to stop looking like men without every really looking like women." -- DONALD WESTLAKE

Transportation

“Please note Dave’s Laws Of Transportation: trains are for freight, corn is for cows, left lane for passing only.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

 

“The progressive dream: You take a fast train to another city, where you board a streetcar to get to the bike-rental place, and then you bike to your destination, which is a physician assisted suicide center. Because there's just no point to life anymore?” -- JAMES LILEKS

 

"AMTRAK, the only transportation system that regularly suffers delays due to things like 'mist" and 'ennui'." -- JAMES LILEKS

 

Travel

“In (north) Africa there are monsters, which forsooth are so dreadful of aspect that, instead of traveling further, you would cant to creep again into your mother’s lap.” – PARACELSUS (this intrepid chap was a 15th Century Swiss doctor, believe it or not, and I’m reliably informed that his mother killed herself before he was in his teens.)

 

“Two key rules of Third World travel:

                1. Never run out of whiskey.

                2. Never run out of whiskey.” -- P. J. O’ROURKE

 

“A principal difficulty for the traveler in the 20th Century (is that) there were no journeys to be made that had not been made already. Other, better men will have gone before. Under such circumstances, only the born tourist – happy, goggling, ruminant – can follow in their tracks with the conviction that he is not wasting his time.” – PETER FLEMING

 

“I have done a good deal of traveling in my life. I don’t say that I subscribe wholeheartedly to the principle that  ‘it is the journey not the arrival that matters’. But I do believe that it pays to keep moving.” – STANLEY JOHNSON (Brit author and conservative Party “MEP”, in May 2010)

 

“They change the sky; not their soul, who run across the sea.” -- HORACE (the old Roman pote – 65-8 BC)

 

“Two great talkers will not travel far together." -- GEORGE BORROW (19th century British novelist and travel writer)

 

"I am averse to travel and I don't think much of abroad. That said, I wouldn't mind going to China, provided I could return the same day." -- PHILIP LARKIN (England's late, great curmudgeon pote. He was Kingsley Amis' best friend and Margaret Thatcher's favorite pote, but when she tried to get him to accept the nomination for Pote Laureate, he declined, saying he didn't think that such a pompous position ought to even exist. A thoroughly    good, if a little odd, egg.)

 

"There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there." – G. K. CHESTERTON

 

"A fellow of mediocre talent will remain a mediocrity, whether he travels or not; but one of superior talent (which without impiety I cannot deny that I possess) will go to seed if he always remains in the same place." -- WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791)

 

"The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those who have not viewed the world." -- ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT (the “father of geography”)

 

“What a snare this travelling business is to the young writer. He goes to some blasted jungle or other and imagines that everybody will be interested in it.” -- P. G. WODEHOUSE

 

"Group travel requires a certain level of voluntary infantile behavior." -- NELSON DEMILLE

 

“‘Off the beaten track’ is a place of fear, full of problems with language, maps, toilets, money, internet connections and car rentals. I derive no pleasure from the unknown, only anxiety. It is often said that you should step outside your comfort zone, but I don’t see why. I have spent decades carefully constructing y own comfort zone. That is where I want to stay, precisely because it is comfortable.” -- LEO McKINSTRY

 

"To discover new lands you must first lose sight of the shore/" -- ANDRE GIDE (this may sound all nice and poetic, but as a good old imperialist, I'm not sure I buy it -- it sounds to this old colonialist like "going native". Unsound in the extreme.)

 

"I do not bring back from a journey quite the same self that I took." -- W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

"Everybody looks better when they're away from home." -- MALCOLM BRADBURY (I don't know that this is true -- at all -- but it sounds rather nifty, so....)

"Travel seems to me a splendid lesson in disillusion." -- D.H. LAWRENCE (God knows, he did enough of it....)

"In broad terms, the world divides into the tourist zones and the terrorist zones." -- MARK LAWSON   (In 1993)

 

“Many shall go to and fro, and knowledge shall increase.” – SIR FRANCIS BACON (in 1620)

 

“The less people travel, the more they conceive, like the Chinese before them, the world to be filled with hairy-faced baboons who live in utter squalor, or worse.” – PAUL THEROUX

 

“Travel, so broadening at first, eventually contracts the mind.” – PAUL THEROUX

 

“All travel is a form of gradual self-extinction.” – SHIVA NAIPAUL (I’m not sure that this is true – or that it even makes sense... But it’s the great Shiva Naipaul, so in it goes....)

 

“When we are young, we travel to see the world, afterwards to make sure it is still there.” – CYRIL CONNOLLY

"How can you wonder your travels do you no good, when you carry yourself around with you and are saddled with the very thing that drove you away." -- SOCRATES (as quoted by his odd-couple mate Seneca) 

“It was fun thirty-five years ago to travel far and in great discomfort to meet people whose entire conception of life and manners of expression were alien. Now one has only to leave one’s gates.” – EVELYN WAUGH (in 1963)

 

"There were few young people; young people did not come to the tropics from choice, only if they were sent." -- WILLIAM BOYD

 

"Never go on holiday to a country where they still point at passing planes." -- WILLIE RUSHTON (An English cartoonist, satirist, comedian, actor, and co-founder of the satirical magazine Private Eye)

 

“Journeys are as much about your traveling companions as they are about the places you visit.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS (at the end of his 1995 book “From Wimbledon To Waco”, and although verging on a banal tautology – he’s not wrong, here.)

 

“He that is a traveller must have the back of an ass to bear all, a tongue like the tail of a dog to flatter all, the mouth of a hog to eat what is set before him, the ear of a merchant to hear all and say nothing.” – THOMAS NASHE (in his 1594 “The Unfortunate Traveller”)

 

“Nobody traveling on a business trip would ever be missed if he did not arrive.” – THORSTEIN VEBLEN (The leftist Norwegian-American economist, 1857-1929, and certainly NOT a businessman)

 

"One travels to experience the past, and travel is thus an adventure in time as well as distance." -- PAUL FUSSELL (in his 1980 book "Abroad", and in fairness to him, this was only ONE reason he posited for why we travel...)

"Never go on trips with people you do not love." -- ERNEST HEMINGWAY (Gosh, "Papa", that would cut down on trips, ah, rather considerably. Anyway, he said this after driving across France with F. Scott Fitzgerald)

"The first thing we see as we travel around the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind." -- CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS (I say, steady on old boy... Meanwhile, Monsieur Levi-Strauss, 1908-2009 was a famous Frogue anthropologist.)

"The emotional high point of every flight I have taken was the moment I finally got back (to the airport) and finally climbed into my own car. There is probably a word for this in German -- the rapid dissipation of tension and anxiety you experience when you leave any public space and escape into your own vehicle. This is the automotive equivalent of getting home late to find your spouse has unexpectedly prepared a chicken Madras -- while naked." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

"When you're travelling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road." -- WILLIAM LEAST-HEAT MOON     (travel writer and bogus Osage Indian -- and in my own extensive travels I've found these words of his to be exactly bullshit... and in fact, as I type this, I'm tempted to not even include it....)

Travel, Air

“If God had wanted us to fly, He would have bought the ticket.” – JOHN LEE HOOKER (The great blues singer – and put him in there, with Satchel Paige, in the Wise Old Spooks Hall Of Fame.)

 

“These days, ‘flight attendants’ on US airlines are mostly fat grannies in stretch pants with serious anger-management issues.” – MARK STEYN

 

“The airline cabin (is) already the most regulated jurisdiction in the free world — a kind of way-up-there-in-the-blue state where the ambitious Democrat’s fondest desires on gun control, smoking, and indeed free speech had all been implemented.” – MARK STEYN

 

“There are few signs more dismal than that of a law-abiding citizen having his genitalia pawed by state commissars, but having them pawed while wearing a 'Don't Tread On Me' T-shirt is certainly one of them.” – MARK STEYN

 

“Nowadays you can go anywhere in the world in a few hours and nothing is fabulous anymore.” – ROALD  DAHL

 

“The airline industry is the one business in America that is less efficient than the federal government.” – DAVID FREDDOSO (in National Review Online in 2007)

 

“Airports nowadays resemble locker rooms, with grotesquely overweight people waddling in their track suits and disgusting trainers (sneakers). When I first flew across the Atlantic in 1948, I we had beds in first class and everyone was dressed to the nines. In fact, I don’t think they would have allowed anyone dressed in a track suit to board.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS (in 1997. And I, too, as a little boy, remember flying across the Atlantic on old Pan Am – then PAA – “Stratocruisers” in those days, which had two decks and beds – just like ol’ Taki says….)

 

“Being in an airplane is the closest law-abiding citizens get to being in jail. In fact, I have been in jail, and the modern airplane is far worse than my very short jail experience.” – BEN STEIN (see also Dr. Samuel Johnson on “BOATS”.)

 

"According to the latest epidemiological research, airports reside somewhere between no-frills Haitian brothels and Penn State fraternity bathrooms when it comes to hygiene.... Air travel is the most expensive unpleasant experience in everyday life outside the realm of words ending in -oscopy." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“How do they keep their lies straight in this business?” – WALTER KIRN                                              (the author of “Up In The Air”, on the airlines industry.)

 

"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

 

"I did not fully understand the dread term 'terminal illness' until I saw Heathrow for myself." -- DENNIS POTTER (the Brit playwright and screenwriter)

 

“My theory: the government wants you to lose weight so they won't be so grossed out molesting you at the airport.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

 

 “The TSA is not security; it’s ritual.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“If you have never missed a flight, then you are wasting too much time in airports.” --  UMESH VAZIRANI                                                                    (The economist)

 

“Aside from the engineering, the most beautiful thing about a long-haul airliner is the economic wizardry which keeps it flying. On board are a variety of seats from the sybaritic to the spartan for which people have paid wildly varying amounts of money, even though each seat will reach the same destination in the same length of time. You may find this class division offensive. However, if you were to try to make aircraft egalitarian, the system would collapse. Without the people in the front paying handsomely to sit in splendour, many of the people in the back could not afford to travel at all. An airliner is in some ways slightly socialist – it redistributes wealth through voluntary means.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“Jet lag is the time it takes for the soul to catch up with the body. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.” – WILLIAM GIBSON (“souls can't move that quickly”? Do tell... Anyway, Gibson in a novelist and author of “Pattern   Recognition”)

 

“If Christ came back tomorrow, He’d have to change planes in Frankfurt.” – P. J. O’ROURKE

"You are still in one place when you arrive at the other. The aeroplane (sic) is faster than the heart." -- V. S. NAIPAUL     (in 1979)

"Any long-haul flight can plausibly be described as an act of violence" -- WILLIAM ATKINS (English travel writer, author of "The Immeasurable World")

 

“Traveling with an airline now feels a bit like going on holiday with a friend who – just beneath the surface – actually hates you.” – JENNY McCARTNEY (in August 2017)

 

"Many hijacks are not nearly so bad as getting through Heathrow.” -- MILES KINGTON

"Definition of a well-off man:  somebody who pays for a first-class ticket out of his own pocket." -- DAVID LODGE

"There are three things in this life about which one can do nothing:  death, taxes and airlines." -- FREDERICK FORSYTH

"Flying anywhere in Africa is uncomfortable if you cannot fly at dawn or dusk." -- HRH PRINCESS ANNE (King Bigears' younger sister, who’s actually a pretty good egg in my book -- she happens to be the royal "patron" of my club in London, The Special Forces Club)

"All long flying times end in fifty-five, just as all prices end in ninety-nine, and for precisely the same reason, to prevent the consumers from guessing the truth." -- MARK LAWSON

"A modern-day Dante, I think would have a circle in hell that was for the baggage carousel. And there, while it turned, the doomed and damned would be damned and doomed for eternity to wait for their bags which would never come." -- STEVE TESICH

 

“Flight is so ubiquitous and commonplace that the person sitting next to you no longer feels obliged to strike up a conversation as if you were two explorers charting the same patch of the unknown. This is the only improvement I can think of in thirty-odd years of flying. What good things I can find to say about flying all seem to arise out of serendipity rather than the airline actually living up to its advertisements.” – KEITH WATERHOUSE (in 1989)

 

“There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror.” – ORSON WELLES

 

"If God had wanted us to fly, would he really have invented airline food?" -- FRANK LAWTON (the English journalist-- and I quite like airline food, and think it's unjustly denigrated.)

“An unusual-shaped air hostess does not inspire confidence. I remember thinking on an Air Cubana flight to Havana in 1985, ‘If they can’t afford women under fifteen stone, what chance is there that they’re bothered to service the engines?’  ” – NIGEL WILLIAMS (15 stone is 210 pounds, and shame on the otherwise amusing novelist Nigel Williams for flying to Havana in 1985, let alone on something called “Air Cubana”)

"Home is the only place where you can be yourself, and all travel is a pretense." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS

 "No one finds you out as quickly as a travelling companion, not even a wife or brother." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS


 

Travel Writing

“Travel writing is the red light district of literature – a space where anything goes.” – COLIN THUBRON

 

“The only aspect of our travels that is guaranteed to hold an audience is disaster.” – MARTHA GELLHORN (A left-wing travel writer who was also one of Hemingway’s wives.)

"Probably it's best to imagine your own foreign country. I wrote a very good account of Paris before I ever went there. Better than the real thing." -- EVELYN WAUGH (I/P.N. Gwynne concur -- having invented, in central Africa, the People's Republic of Malaria, in southeast Asia the Kingdom of Phuland, and, in eastern Europe, Gryaznia.) 

Treason/Treachery

“When you have lived in Narnia long enough, you can see the eyes of the traitors.” – C. S. LEWIS (eh?)

 

“We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” – C. S. LEWIS

 

“God died, not in battle or in peace with his dogs around him, but by treachery.” -- MICHAEL OAKESHOTT

 

“The traitor is loyal to his needs.” – WILL COHU (British journalist and author/novelist)

 

“The stigma of treachery requires a particular courage, desperation or some psychological spur.” – WILL COHU

 

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

 

"For traitors are distasteful even to the sides they join."-- TACITUS

 

“England is, I believe, the only country in which, during a great war, eminent men write and speak as if they belonged to the enemy.” – LORD SALISBURY (Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury) (It’s just as well the old boy didn’t live to see modern-day America... where we call such people “The Liberal Establishment” and “The Mainstream Media”.)

 

"Trust is overrated. All the treachery in the world is built on a foundation of trust." -- WILL WILES

 

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

"I have never known a political dissident who did not have a deep-seated need to describe their own treasonous thoughts and actions as patriotism." -- CHARLES McCARRY 

“If I had but one bullet and were faced by both an enemy and a traitor, I would let the traitor have it.” -- CORNELIU ZELEA CODREANU

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

“An apostate is always worse than a stranger: strangers unite the tribe against them, apostates are splitters. That is why we take our enemies prisoner but kill traitors.” – JAMES HAWES (the English novelist)

"With a crime of this sort (treason), unless you take measures against it being committed, it is too late -- appealing to the law achieves nothing, because once the city has been captured, the victims are left with nothing." -- CATO THE YOUNGER (95-46 BC, real name: Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis) 

“A nation can survive its fools, and even its ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard within the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies at the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of the nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he affects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. – CICERO (MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO)

 

Treaties

“A treaty is only ‘the supreme law of the land’ in the same sense that a statute is, meaning: If it violates the Constitution, it is invalid.” -- ANDREW C MCCARTHY

"Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last." -- CHARLES DEGAULLE 

“Treaties are made to be broken.” – JOSEPH STALIN               (Well, he ought to know – not only he broke quite a few in his day, but he was on the receiving end when Mr. Hister wiped his arse with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1941)

 

“When intentions match agreements, the agreements are superfluous. When agreements and intentions do not match, agreements are futile.” – ANGELO CODEVILLA

 

“No treaty has ever signified any thing since the World began.” – JOHN JAY (while he was negotiating the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War)

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

"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

Tribalism

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

Trickery

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

 

“It's easier to fool people than to convince people that they've been fooled.” – MARK TWAIN

 

“Trickle-Down Theory, The”

“The less-than-elegant theory that if one feeds the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.” – JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH (cute, but his condescension is misplaced. If any economic theory was ever proved true, it’s the good old “trickle-down”…)

" ‘Trickle-down economics’ is one of the great canards of our politics, and anyone who employs the phrase is either an ignoramus or a demagogue.” — THOMAS SOWELL

Tropics, The

“In the tropics, at two o’clock in the afternoon, who can take himself seriously?” – SHIVA NAIPAUL

 

"There were few young people; young people did not come to the tropics from choice, only if they were sent." -- WILLIAM BOYD

 

“I am not a hot-weather person – am, in fact, strongly sympathetic to the folk-anthropological notion that vigorous civilization cannot arise in a seriously hot climate. How did people in hot places get anything done before air conditioning cam in. Heat is another country. They do things differently there. Or rather, if they have any sense, they do nothing at all.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE (my late dad – like Derbs, England born and bred – was once asked what in his opinion was the   greatest invention of the 20th century, and without the slightest hesitation said “air conditioning”.)

"Get in your shower. Turn it on. Turn it off. Turn it on. Turn it off. Do that night and day for about three months and you will understand monsoon." -- JOHN P. McAFEE

"I have two rules: never do business with any country that has green in its flag or where they don't wear overcoats in winter. They have stood me in pretty good stead." -- SIR BENJAMIN SLADE (Chairman of something called Shirlstar Container Transport Co., in 1995)

"Litter in a hot country is vastly fouler than in a cold one." -- GEORGE COURTAULD (This is so self-evident that I almost didn't include it... but I happen to like George Courtauld, who's a fellow member of my club in London, The Special Forces Club)

"A case of vodka is an essential for bush travel. It can be used externally as I did with the fire ants, to start a fire, as a disinfectant, to be used as a torch, or, when all else fails, just drink it…." -- JIM HORN (my CIA-communicator buddy from Central Africa, in his memoir "Ubangui Nights")

"The direct ray of the sun -- almost vertical at all seasons of the year -- strikes down on man and beast alike. Woe to the white man who he finds uncovered." -- WINSTON CHURCHILL (in his "My African Journey", written in 1907)

"The mild and woozy acceptance of the tropics." -- LAURENCE SHAMES

"The Amazonas is not a kind place. You rot fast there." -- CHARLES BREWER-CARIAS (the legendary Venezuelan explorer, to his friend the English explorer-author Redmond O'Hanlon)

"No one can have any conception of what boredom really means until he has been to the tropics." -- EVELYN WAUGH     (in Central Africa, in 1930)

Trouble

“I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean" – G. K. CHESTERTON

 

“If you don’t want trouble with somebody else, be sure he has something to be afraid of.” – DONALD KAGAN                                                              (The great Yale classicist)

"Parents are the difference between adolescent and adult trouble. By the time you're an adult, you become convinced that surely this is one group likely to be on your side." -- JOHN BUCKLEY (The Republican political consultant, and Bill Buckley's nephew)


“This is a time that separates the men from the sheep.” – PAUL JOLIS 

Trudeau, Justin                                                                                                                                    

“Justin Trudeau is what would happen if the song ‘Imagine’ took human form.” -- BEN SHAPIRO

"Four years is pretty much the maximum any country, except Canada, can take of unrelieved wokery." -- ROD LIDDLE (in May 2023)

“Trudeau may not be very bright but he is sublimely devious.” – DAVID SOLWAY

“Trump Derangement Syndrome”                                                                  

“Trump’s election is the worst thing that’s happened in the world in my whole life.” – JONATHAN CHAIT                                                                    (remember, this idiot lived through 9/11....)

"Know-it-alls hate Trump... And Americans hate know-it-alls." -- P. J. O'ROURKE

Trump, Donald                                                                                                   

“Trump has a kind of dairy Midas Touch. Turns everything he touches into low-rent cheese.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

“Trump is an unintentional master of the art of rectal ventriloquism. No, I don’t mean he’s a champion farter, I mean he talks out of his ass, and the words magically start coming out of other peoples’ mouths.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"I don’t think Trump is philosophically conservative, but he is philosophically American.” – JOHN NOLTE  (an editor at “Breitbart”)

 

“A boorish and crude demagogue, but useful for smashing the walls of the leftist prison all political debate is had inside. While many of Trump’s actual proposals are misguided, nonsensical, or untenable, by smashing the window, he's begun the process of freeing the American people from the artificial and destructive constraints of Left-defined discourse.” – ACE OF SPADES (STEVE McCUTCHEON)

 

“Trump is a blow-dried blowhard real-estate developer who makes Ozymandias sound like Little Nell.” – CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY

 

“One can deplore Trump for his vulgarity, incoherence and demagoguery. But one mustn't deplore the people he has enthralled. They may not have degrees, most of them, and they may be a bit susceptible to a voice that inflames their darker passions. But they have been disappointed and deceived, and their anger is real.” – CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY

 

“Trump is a strategic ignoramus. No sense of anything.” – JOHN SCHINDLER

 

“Trump isn't a right-winger. Trump isn't a left-winger. He's a malignant narcissist who apes the views of anybody who briefly flatters him.” – JOHN SCHINDLER

 

"Donald Trump is that guy on Survivor who's made mutually-conflicting promises of alliances with everyone in the game." -- JOHN HAWKINS (boss of "Right-Wing News" and "Townhall" columnist)

 

“Except for the occasional churlish moment, Donald Trump seems to be genuinely enjoying the experience of fame in a way that no one in his right mind ever does, and the fact that he therefore seems  not to have any sense or intelligence or taste whatsoever is beside the point. The man has adapted.” -- NORA EPHRON (in 1989)

 

“Trump couldn't build a goddamned sand castle on the shore in Atlantic City without going bankrupt twice.” -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

"Donald Trump communicates with the philosophical clarity of a toddler who has just dropped his ice-cream cone." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“Trump will have to work really hard at being a lazier, less engaged consumer of intelligence than Obama.” –  JOHN SCHINDLER (the ex-NSA staffer, author and blogger, on the Twoot)

 

"I hope Donald Trump is so successful as president that one day the stage version of him will be a lesbian of color." -- JOHN SCHINDLER

 

"When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same. The temperament is not that different." -- DONALD J. TRUMP  

 

“I don't think Trump knows a goddamn thing about economics.” -- BEN STEIN (who nevertheless voted for him. As I did.)

 

"Donald Trump has all the vices associated with being a rich swinging guy, including loving the nearness of beautiful women. I don't recall Mr. Trump's ever having said or written a single racist word or made a single racist gesture. Accusing him of being a racist is like accusing him of being from Mars. If that's the best the Democrats can do against him, they don't have much to talk about." -- BEN STEIN                                        (1 Aug. '19)

 

“Trump is a beta male's idea of what an alpha male should be. Trump does what most normal people imagine they would do if they had a billion dollars: he enjoys it. He buys a plane with his name on it and flies around mouthing off. “ -- RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“Unlike Hillary, Trump was sufficiently interesting that people wanted to see him.” -- RORY SUTHERLAND

 

“I feel like this presidential election (Trump-Clinton) is essentially a battle between the article and the comments section.” – LAURENT DUBOIS (of  Duke Univeristy)

 

“You know, for a conservative there's not much to like about Trump, but there are two things to love. The first is that he's not Hillary Clinton. The second is that he just doesn't care what liberals say.” -- KURT SCHLICHTER

"I like Trump. I thought he was a great president. Look at his accomplishments! Incredible. I am hard on him. I cut him no slack. I expect him to perform, and when he does not, I say so. I don’t mince words. Does that make me anti-Trump? No. I say refusing to confront his worst instincts is anti-Trump. It’s no favor to pretend that dumb things he does are not dumb. The one thing he always needed most was a hard-ass Sergeant Major to tell him what the toe-suckers won’t." -- KURT SCHLICHTER (in Feb. 2023)

“Trump’s onto something, because secretly everybody’s getting tired of political correctness, kissing up. We’re really in a pussy generation. Everybody’s walking on eggshells. We see people accusing people of being racist and all kinds of stuff. When I grew up, those things weren’t called racist.” -- CLINT EASTWOOD

 

“Donald Trump will not defend the Constitution. He doesn't know the Constitution. He only knows power and what it brings to his legacy.” -- J.D. RUCKER (a guy on the Twoot, 21 July 2016)

 

"Trump's main (only?) talent seems to be driving his opponents to hair-trigger displays of pants wetting. Makes serious opposition harder." -- FRANKLIN HARRIS (liberal American journalist, on the Twoot)

 

“Whatever Trump is, he is certainly not a good loser, and that appeals to those who feel, whether admirably or not, that they are no longer going to be, either. Good losers have the money and power to shrug off setbacks, those on the edge more often see failure in existential terms.” – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

 

"The president (Trump) became the imperfect vessel for the perfect storm of discontent in America..." – HUGH HEWITT

 

"When you get right down to it, the two of them (Trump and Obama) are the identical sort of narcissist: bitter list-makers, reflexive braggarts, perpetual self-justifiers, petty insulters. Barack Obama and Donald Trump are basically the same guy, it's just that Barack Obama is the NPR version." -- ROB LONG

 

“I have many reservations about The Donald – but when I see the establishment, the newish establishment, so apoplectic about his very existence, I kinda know what side I'm on.” – ROD LIDDLE

 

“Is this hatred of Donald Trump perhaps a complex that I can look up in a textbook of psychological disorders? A modern equivalent of valetudinarianism, perhaps? Certainly the Trump-haters I meet are wealthy. The wealthier they are, the wealthier the hatred. They also hate their own white working class. It's so strange.” – JEREMY CLARKE

 

“And I don’t join in the two minutes of Hate for Donald Trump, which is the modern equivalent of saying grace before a meal at a dinner party.” – JEREMY CLARKE

 

“Anti-Trump Republicans are at least as offended by the president's style as they are by his policy positions.” – REIHAN SALAM (in NR 31 July 2017)

 

“The Donald might be very hard to defend at times, but the anti-Donald camp is impossible to excuse. It believes in democracy as much as Robert Mugabe does.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS (in Nov. 2017)

"Many of us are embarrassed by what Trump says and does, but we also recognize how far left the pendulum has swung under a media that see middle- and working-class whites as the enemy. Trump's strength is the Forgotten Man. And by him I don't mean that common little man who publishes the Bagel Times, I mean the law-abiding, proud-of-their-country's-past, salt-of-the-earth American." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS (in May 2022)

 

“What you've got to realize is that the American President (Trump) is just one of the huge, great global brands. He is penetrating corners of the global consciousness that I think few other presidents have ever done.” – BORIS JOHNSON (the British Foreign Secretary, in November 2017, for which factual statement he was roundly attacked by all the usual lefty suspects.)

 

“I love Trump because he tells Africans frankly. I don’t know whether he was misquoted or whatever. But he talks to Africans frankly. In the world, you cannot survive if you are weak.” – YOWERI MUSEVENI (the president of Uganda, in January 2018)

 

“The appeal of Trump is not just that he’s rich, but that because he’s rich he gets to do whatever he wants — and he does not want to drink kale juice.” – JOSH BARRO (of “Business Insider”, in 2016)

 

"For someone so frequently denounced as a liar, Donald Trump keeps an awful lot of promises." – DOMINIC GREEN (in the UK SPECTATOR, May 2018)

 

"Trump is a practical person who saw the gap between, on one hand, the American foreign-relations community seduced by effete European charlatans and internationalist flim-flammers and, on the other, the impatient public who are aware of America’s faults but love their country." -- CONRAD BLACK

 

"Trump isn't a Republican, he's a Resultist. He just drives a Republican car to get there." – BILL MITCHELL (a conservative on the Twoot, and head of something called "YourVoice America TV")

 

“Trump is the first president in American history to be attacked by the media for keeping his promises.” -- CHARLIE KIRK                                     (The conservative president of something call "Turning Point USA")

 

"Trump could've been in the Ruling Class but he said 'no thanks'. In fact, he's a defector from the Ruling Class. He listened to the very people the Ruling Class hated. " -- CHARLIE KIRK 

 

"Trump's cunning and mercurialness, honed in Manhattan real estate, global salesmanship, reality TV, and wheeler-dealer investments, may have earned him ostracism from polite Washington society. But these talents also may for a time be suited for dealing with many of the outlaws of the global frontier. By his very excesses Trump has already lost, but in his losing he might alone be able to end some things that long ago should have been ended." -- VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

 

"Never before in the history of the presidency had a commander in chief earned the antipathy of the vast majority of the media, much of the career establishments of both political parties, the majority of the holders of the nation's accumulated personal wealth, and the permanent federal bureaucracy. And lived to tell the tale." -- VICTOR DAVIS HANSON           (In March 2019)

 

"Trump voters take his words seriously but not literally, while the mainstream press takes him literally but not seriously." -- SALENA ZITO (many have repeated this truism, but she was its originator.)

 

“Right now the value of Trump to the Trump voter is he is all that stands between them and handing the keys to Washington back over to the people inside Washington. That’s it. He’s their only option. You’ve got to pick the insiders or him” -- SALENA ZITO (on 23 Aug., 2018)

 

"Name one president in the last thirty years who had the balls and brains to defy Wall St. smarties, the Democrat Party, experts up the yingyang, and fainthearted Republicans, to renegotiate massive trade deals that screwed us. What are you talking about - charm school, or the ship of state?" -- DAVID HOROWITZ (in August 2018)

 

“When you look at the real barometer of presidential truthfulness which is promise-keeping, he’s probably the most honest president in American history. For better or for worse, whether you agree with his policies or disagree with his policies he’s done exactly what he said he would do as president.” – MARC THIESSEN

 

“The leftists I know hate Mr. Trump’s vulgarity, his unwillingness to walk away from a fight, his bluntness, his certainty that America is exceptional, his mistrust of intellectuals, his love of simple ideas that work, and his refusal to believe that men and women are interchangeable. Worst of all, he has no ideology except getting the job done. His goals are to do the task before him, not be pushed around, and otherwise to enjoy life. In short, he is a typical American—except exaggerated, because he has no constraints to cramp his style except the ones he himself invents.” – DAVID GELERNTER (in the WSJ, Oct. 2018)

 

“Trump is the average American in exaggerated form. Democrats can’t stand it.” – DAVID GELERNTER

 

“Trump understands what Caesar knew as well: a leader detested by the guardians of tradition can afford to ignore them, and trample on tradition itself.” – TOM HOLLAND (in THE SPECCIE in November 2018)

 

“If  my dear friend Donald Trump ever decided to sacrifice his fabulous billionaire lifestyle to become President, he would be an unstoppable force for ultimate justice that Democrats and Republicans alike would celebrate.” – JOHN F. KENNEDY JR. (in his magazine “GEORGE” in June 1999)

 

“We didn’t hire a barbarian to sing soprano in the choir; we hired him to beat back the savages.” – SCOTT JENNINGS (writing in the LA TIMES, on 10 March 2019, paraphrasing the viewpoint of evangelicals towards Trump)

 

"I'm glad Trump's not 'normal' -- 'normal' wasn't getting us anywhere." – LARRY O’CONNOR

"How long can I hate the guy who is doing everything I want?" -- DR. NAOMI WOLF    (the one-time liberal who seems to get more and more "mugged by reality", in Jan. 2024)

“An important truth about Trump’s opponents: They’re so bewitched by the President and, more significantly, by their reaction to his vices that they’re in danger of facilitating his re-election. Like the insulation around a cable, they don’t carry the charge, they deliver it. Every moment that they spend scrutinizing their exquisite disdain for their enemy is a moment lost in the search for arguments that might defeat him.” – LLOYD EVANS

 

“I vehemently disliked Trump when he first announced his candidacy. But as time went by and events unfolded, my mind slowly began to change, as did my friendships with former neoconservatives, whose intransigence soon disgusted me. It didn’t take long for me to go from anti-Trump to 'anti-anti-Trump'. As time went on, and I looked around me, however, I began to be bothered by the hatred that was building up against Trump from my soon to be new set of ex-friends. It really disgusted me. I just thought it had no objective correlative. You could think that he was unfit for office — I could understand that — but my ex-friends’ revulsion was always accompanied by attacks on the people who supported him. They called them dishonorable, or opportunists, or cowards. And I took offense at that. So that inclined me to what I then became: anti-anti-Trump. By the time he finally won the nomination, I was sliding into a pro-Trump position, which has grown stronger and more passionate as time has gone on." -- NORMAN PODHORETZ

 

"His shortcomings are many and some matter, but under present circumstances what matters more is that Trump understands we are at war and he is willing to fight. In conventional times, Trump might have been one of the worst presidents we ever had; but in these most unconventional times, he may be the best president we could have had." -- THOMAS D. KLINGENSTEIN                                                                                                  (in "The American Mind", the publication of The Claremont Institute)

“What you hear frequently is ‘Gee, I like Trump’s policies but I don’t like the rest of him,’ and my thought is that it’s the rest of him that really inspired the movement. Yes, I agree with many or most of his policies, but what I think was so unusual was his courage. Can you imagine what it would take to stand up to the kind of abuse he was subject to?” -- TOM KLINGENSTEIN (the boss of the Claremont Institute, in Sept. 2022) 

“Donald Trump broke the brains of a lot of people.” -- GLENN GREENWALD (Greenwald is a far-leftist, anti-American piece of shit poofter – but here he’s quite right)

 

“We voted for a leader, a disruptive agent of change. Not a Saint.” – SEBASTIAN GORKA

"For the last six years, Donald Trump has been the leader of the Left. They couldn't find anyone on the bench to send in, so they chose the rival team's most powerful player and instructed the faithful that it was opposite day." -- DAVID MAMET (in 2022) 

"Part of the Left's outrage at Trump was his refusal to speak in hieratic language. He's spent his life buying and selling politicians, negotiating with construction unions, bureaucrats, and The Boys. He speaks American, and those of us who also love the language are awed and delighted to hear it from an elected official.

Donald Trump looked at the Left and informed us that he knew them of old: they were the same thugs, thieves, cheats and whores with whom he'd been doing all his life." -- DAVID MAMET (in 2022)

"It is the immemorial tactic of a dictatorial regime to accuse its opponents of what it is doing. Donald Trump was vilified by the Left because 'he lied'; in fact, he was at a disadvantage because he did not lie." -- DAVID MAMET

"The Left's loathing of President Trump was, finally, terror of one who was not afraid of them." -- DAVID MAMET

“The election of a reality-TV star to the US presidency does seem to have stymied satire as we know it.” – LOUIS AMIS (in the SPECCIE, May 2019. I suspect that Louis is Martin’s son – Martin does have a son of that name – but I can’t find confirmation of this)

 

“Uneducated people voted for Trump. I don’t think a lot of people was educated.” – LEBRON JAMES (de man is a genias, what can I tell ya....)

 

"Trump is neither a hawk nor a chicken - he’s an eagle." -- KURT SCHLICHTER

 

"Donald Trump is the first president in history who arrives to work and the whole world knows what he's thinking." -- JEREMY HUNT (British Foreign Secretary, June 2019)

 

"Donald Trump talks like a normal American, a normal New Yawkuh. That’s his only sin." -- DOV FISCHER

 

"Trump’s greatest crime, and his greatest triumph, is to become a living example that you do not have to submit. You do not have to apologize. You do not have to back down, or grovel, or confess. You are free unless you accept your chains. What message is more hopeful or American than that?" -- DANIEL JUPP      (in the SPECTATOR USA, August 2019)

 

"It is really remarkable that a 73-year old man can be such a master of forms of social media which did not exist until his sixth and in some cases his seventh decade. The mainstream media see President Trump's tweeted outbursts or comments shouted beside a helicopter as ill-judged. They falsely equate what they don't like with what doesn't work, and therefore they lose." -- CHARLES MOORE                                               (in July 2019)

 

“Dear Leftists: We disliked 0bama like you dislike Trump, with one big difference: We disliked 0bama because he hates America. You dislike Trump because you hate America.” – AVA ARMSTRONG (an American authoress of lurid ladies’ fiction – and a conservative voice on the Twoot)

 

 “Trump will blow something up and then he’ll fix it, but if he doesn’t blow it up he can’t fix it. The bigger the blow up, the better the odds of fixing it. I saw a method to the madness.” – DOUG WEAD (historian – author of the 2019 book “Inside The Trump White House”)

 

“He’s my president, not my pastor.” – TIMOTHY PHILEN (an advertising exec and author of “You CAN Run Away From It!”, writing in THE AMERICAN     THINKER in Dec. 2019)

 

“In Trump we voted for a disruptive, rude agent of change, who knew how -- and most importantly, was willing -- to fight. And who didn't care what they called him. Meanwhile, friends, teachers, and confessors we already had -- up the wazoo.” – JACK JOLIS

 

“In Trump we vote for a disruptive, rude agent of change, who knows how -- and most importantly, is willing -- to fight. And who doesn't care what they call him. Meanwhile, friends, teachers, and confessors we already have -- up the wazoo. But defenders of America? Not too many.” – JACK JOLIS

 

"Trump speaks for the ordinary, normal American, and sometimes he speaks like an ordinary, normal American. The former is why he was elected, and the latter is why those that hate him, hate him." -- JACK JOLIS

 

“Trump was perpetually surprised by the viciousness, treachery and sheer nastiness of those who opposed him, and fatally thought a combination of his charm, bullshit and flattery could win any and everyone over.” - JACK JOLIS

 

“Trump is an astonishingly successful and effective President who has done an immense amount of good for the country. That’s enough for me.” – ROGER KIMBALL

 

“Trump is a total political surprise, who appeared to be terrible in theory but who is terrific in practice. Trump’s mentality is basically ‘I love my country. I want my country to be strong. I want good trade deals. I want to get the bad guy and help the good guy’, which is a simple concept that anybody can understand intuitively.” – MICHAEL KNOWLES (of NR, in January 2020)

 

"I don't think Washington did us any favors over the last sixty years., it's all been the same unpleasant clowns until President Trump." -- KELSEY GRAMMER (“Frasier Crane”)

“The President wasn’t elected because he was a diplomat or a politician but because he’s Donald Damn Trump.” - LOU DOBBS                                      (contributed by my friend Sam Glasser’s friend Jim Newell)

“I don’t think that Trump’s critics have realized that vastly more Americans are like Trump than like the critics.” – MARK NOONAN                                (American novelist, blogger. He said this on the Twoot)

 

"Donald J. Trump was elected not because enough Americans fell in love with him personally, but because he was the apparent antithesis to what they despised most."-- MICHAEL WALSH

"Trump crashed the DC party. They can never forgive him for that. Hillary was supposed to be next in the lineage of liars and pimps that compromise our permanent government class. She, and her allies will hound him to the grave. We’ve already seen how they’re willing to break every law in the books to get him. They’ve lied to the courts. They’ve enlisted the corrupt MSM. They’ve caused massive rioting and destruction to discredit Trump." -- CARL GOTTLIEB (describes himself as a "recovering TV journalist". On the Twoot.)


 "In the end I believe my generation will surprise everyone. We already know that both political parties are playing both sides against the middle, and we'll elect a true outsider when we fully mature. I wouldn't be surprised if it's not a business tycoon who can't be bought and who does what's right for the people. Someone like Donald Trump, as crazy as that sounds." -- KURT COBAIN (in 1993)

 

“My father wasn’t changed by Washington. Washington was changed by my father.” – IVANKA TRUMP (Republican Convention, August 2020)

 

"Some don’t like Trump’s brash manner—but it’s been essential. He peels off those who fetishize 'civility' so they can refuse to face our current crisis. We always needed to be rid of these people, and alienating the 'OMG his tweets' crowd was a blessing." -- DAVID REABOI                            (the conservative blogger on national security)

 

"Trump is missing many traits that most humans share, but he understands how people think better than almost anyone." -- MICHAEL ELY (a guy on the Twoot -- 15 Sept 20)

 

“Trump is the most successful stand-up comic ever” – SCOTT ADAMS (the creator of the “Dilbert” comic strip, in 2020)

"Trump, with his vulgar style and legion of faults, nonetheless had the effect of a sun lamp or disagreeable medicine on a nasty boil: He drew all the hysteria, fanaticism, and arrogance of hardcore progressive thought to the skin’s surface, where the boil and its poison popped." -- C. DENNIS PEEK (in August 2022)

"One reason I like Trump is because I despise his enemies, and one reason I despise Biden is because he's in love with our enemies. You cannot serve effectively as an American president if you hate Americans. You cannot fight the growing threat of American communism with milquetoast McConnellism as your broken sword. You cannot be polite and quiet and hope to beat back the Marxist hordes already despoiling America from within the gates and bloodying Americans with nasty blows. You have to fight back hard." -- J. B. SHURK (in THE AMERICAN THINKER, October 2022)

“Trump is the only person I’ve met who has the sheer courage to take the beating, keep fighting, and genuinely get the country back on track.” -- NEWT GINGRICH    (in Feb. '24)

"Miracles have a way of finding Donald Trump." -- GREG KELLY (19 May 2024)

“Yes, Donald Trump was a flawed man but his sins are minor compared to those of his persecutors.” -- TUCKER CARLSON (in June 2023)

“He’s liberated us in the deepest and truest sense, and the liberation he has brought to us is the liberation from the obligation to tell lies. Donald Trump has made it possible for the rest of us to tell the truth about the world around us. If you want to enslave people, if you want to degrade them, force them to tell lies, and they have.” -- TUCKER CARLSON     (At Madison Square Garden, 26 Oct. 2024)

"They say Trump is out of control, but he's not. He's out of their control." -- TUCKER CARLSON

"A 78-year old multiple billionaire, he should be on a yacht on the Med, touring golf courses. But he is not. He is in Pennsylvania spitting out bullets! Running for the love of his country! God speed Donald! God bless the United States!"-- CONOR McGREGOR      (the fighting Champ -- in 2024)

"Donald Trump is not a politician. He is a leader. Politicians are a dime a dozen: leaders are priceless." -- CLARENCE HENDERSON      (American civil rights leader)

Trump, Ivanka

"So I see that Ivanka Trump was booed and jeered at a gathering of power women in Germany a few days ago. She responded with her customary politesse. But as I thought about it the consciousness came to me that Ivanka Trump might have been more assertive. She might have said, “I am a person, just one person, and as just one person you can treat me as you wish. But I am a Jew. My husband is a Jew. We are Jews and we are Americans and I am here at the request of the President. Your ancestors murdered six million of my fellow Jews and killed hundreds of American prisoners of war. Nevertheless, when the war ended, America fed your ancestors, gave them medical care. We funded the rebirth of German industry. We kept a large force in Germany to protect you from the Russians for 72 years and we paid for it even as Germany grew rich. So I don’t think I’ll listen to your jeers any longer. And I’ll tell my father that you don’t need us any more and we surely don’t need you.” -- BEN STEIN (In May 2017)

 

“Trumpism”/Trump Administration, The

"For many years, I used to harbor a secret wish that there would be a nuclear war, not out of misanthropic rage against humanity but because it was likely to knock down the Trump Tower in New York.” -- BERNARD LEVIN (the long-time columnist for the Times Of London -- already in 1992!) 

“Be honest about how you lie, with Donald Trump.” – PIERS MORGAN

 

“Appeals to precedent or the liberal post-war order will only persuade them to be more radical; arguments must be framed in terms of US national interest.” – BORIS JOHNSON (The Brit Foreign Secretary, January 2017)

 

"'Trumpism' doesn't exist. The president has tendencies and impulses, some of which conflict with one another, rather than a political philosophy." -- RAMESH PONNURU

 

"'Trumpism' is a psychological orientation, not a political philosophy." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“That’s part of the genius of the Trump presidency. As a philosophical or ideological affair, it’s a train wreck. But as entertainment, it’s really quite brilliant.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

"Donald Trump did the best job in my political lifetime...Everything he did...worked!"-- SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM 

"One of the good things about Trump is: he unhinges liberals and reveals them as being very illiberal indeed." -- ROD LIDDLE     (in Jan. 2024)

"You think that they're going to give you your country back without a fight, you're sadly mistaken. Every day is going to be a fight. This is the promise of Donald Trump." -- STEVE BANNON

 

“If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he'd be doing:

*Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could 

*Blocking oil and gas pipelines

*Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions

*Cutting US military spending

*Trying to damp down tensions with Russia's ally Iran

That Trump is planning to do precisely the opposite of these things may or may not be good policy for the United States, but anybody who thinks this is a Russia appeasement policy has been drinking way too much joy juice. 

Obama actually did all these things, and none of the liberal media now up in arms about Trump ever called Obama a Russian puppet; instead, the preferred to see a brave, farsighted and courageous statesman. Trump does none of these things and has embarked on a course that will inexorably weaken Russia's position in the world.” – WALTER RUSSELL MEAD (American author, historian, history professor (at Bard, of all places – previously at Yale. In April, 2017)

 

"'America First' does not mean 'America Alone'." -- SEBASTIAN GORKA (Trump's British-Hungarian-born Special Adviser, 6 July 2017)

 

"Trump is, though no one left of center would dare admit it, arguably the leftmost Republican president ever elected, and his closest advisers -- his daughter and son-in-law -- were until a few minutes ago lifelong Democrats." -- IAN TUTTLE

 

"It is precisely Trump’s refusal to cooperate with the ruling class in the destruction of the country that makes him the first consequential Republican president since Reagan." -- GEORGE  NEUMAYR (in the AMSPEC, 2017)

 

"Much of the media is too consumed with hatred of Donald Trump to appreciate that there may be some benefits to his presidency." -- JAMES FREEMAN (of the WSJ -- April 2018)

 

“If after 14 months of a Trump presidency (which has seen the appointment of Neil Gorsuch, the rollback of regulations, the revival of our military might, and a tax cut for all) you still oppose Trump, then you are not a conservative. This does not mean he is beyond criticism. Of course not. Clutch those pearls at the things he says and his personal behavior. That was why the Good Lord fave you the ability to wince.But judged by his actions alone, he is Reagan. I get that a president is also a moral leader. Jimmy Carter was great at that. I wish Trump would have kept it zipped. I wish he were less loud, less proud, and a little bowed. But as Donald Rumsfeld said, you roll with the army you have.And if you are not rolling with this army, kiss off.” – DON SURBER (in April 2018)

 

"I'm convinced we've reached the point where there is absolutely nothing that President Trump could do to satisfy the deranged left. This is no longer politics for them. It's personal. Peak derangement is when you're willing to destroy yourself just to hurt someone else. Sad." -- BRENDEN M. DILLEY   (Author of "Still Breathin'")

 

“It's hard, when you're up to your armpits in alligators, to remember you came here to drain the swamp." ~ RONALD REAGAN

 

“The repeated failure of the Obama administration and its predecessors to meaningfully address the problem of violent criminals’ coming and going at will across the U.S.-Mexico border is, in case you have forgotten, the proximate cause of the Donald Trump presidency. The United States is learning the same lesson that is being taught the hard way in Europe. If responsible actors refuse to deal seriously with immigration, there are sundry populist-nationalists of varying degrees of respectability or nastiness waiting on the sidelines to pick up that dropped ball. You know how the Trump guys are always saying, ‘This is how you got trump’.” -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"I felt that the US was a stronger force under Trump." -- LIZ TRUSS     (The British Prime Minister, briefly, in 2022, said this in April 2024)

"The two most underrated parts of Trump’s presidency have been his Bismarck-level foreign policy achievements and his borderline suicidal transparency." -- JESSE KELLY (Host of ‘I’m Right’ on The First. Host of the nationally syndicated Jesse  Kelly Show.)

“Trump is not the cause of division in America. He’s the response. One can only ask to be left alone for so long until one is inclined to hit back and hit hard. Trump is the simply the one who delivers the hit.” --JESSE KELLY                                                                                                                               (a radio-talk show host out of Houston)

"Trump is blamed for ending the postwar order. But all he did was bury its corpse — very loudly and bigly." -- VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

"But was not Trump the most pro-Israeli president in history, who finally moved the American embassy to Jerusalem, cut off money for Hamas, ratified the Golan Heights as part of Israel, declared the Houthis a terrorist organization, junked the Iran Deal, birthed the Abraham Accords, took out Iran’s arch-terrorist Qasem Soleimani, and put a travel ban on anti-Israel, terrorist-supporting countries?" -- VICTOR DAVIS HANSON (in Nov. 2023)

"America remains a majority conservative country. It took an outsider with New York values to stand up for them. Ain’t life a strange ride." -- MIKE CERNOVICH (Conservative writer, film-maker and journalist)

 

“Moving to politics after a career in real estate and show business, Trump finds ‘booster talk’ as natural as breathing. Statements which foreigners took for lies or braggadocio in the 19th century, American speakers intended to be vaguely clairvoyant. There is a long, pre-Trump tradition of taking seriously but not literally boosters who describe events that have not yet gone through the formality of taking place.” – DANIEL BOORSTIN (the distinguished American historian)

 

“In much of the Trump commentariat, there's always new and secret evidence. Another investigation. Just the tip of the iceberg. Much more to come. Only the beginning. Always.” – BYRON YORK

 

“Institutions matter until Donald Trump wins an election, and then the entire system needs junking and is probably being run by the Russians anyway.” – CHARLES C.W. COOKE

"They say that Trump is out of control, but he's not. He's just out of their control." -- TUCKER CARLSON 

"We find ourselves in a domestic, or civil, war almost. The only way I know out of this is to fight it intellectually, which sounds weak. But the fact that Trump was elected is a kind of miracle. I now believe he’s an unworthy vessel chosen by God to save us from the evil on the Left … Trump, with all his vices, has the necessary virtues and strength to fight the fight that needs to be fought. And if he doesn’t win in 2020, I would despair of the future." -- NORMAN PODHORETZ

 

“Donald Trump has caused the Shadow Government to come out of hiding.” – JACK DEVERE MINZEY

"President Trump was like a flashlight: suddenly you could see clearly all the things hiding in the dark. We're wide awake now." -- EMERALD ROBINSON (White House correspondent for NEWSMAX) 

"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. Of course she later went on to attack Trump and become his mortal enemy, but... here she defended him.)

 

"What was revealed was the extent of rottenness in the system. If Trump had been a godlike Alexander it would have been one thing. But he's not. That they are actually less competent than a casino manager and reality show host is too much for them to take. Yet it is nevertheless true. The real crisis of American governance isn't that Trump is some evil genius. It is what a bunch of mediocrities the elite have turned out to be. Better to have found out now than in the middle of some existential conflict with a great power." -- RICHARD FERNANDEZ     (who writes the blog “The Belmont Club”)

 

"The left isn’t attacking Trump because they think he’s the problem. The left is attacking Trump because they think America is the problem." – KAYA JONES (“Christian, Grammy-award winning singer; Pussycat Doll”)

“China’s rulers are good at intimidating others. Trump is better at refusing to being intimidated.” – GORDON G. CHANG

"The people that voted for Trump are never going to abandon him. I don't care what the DoJ does. I don't care what the media does. They're never gonna abandon him. You know why? They elected him knowing who he is. And in many cases they admire who he is. He is the one person standing in the way of them losing their country. In their minds, that's what's at stake." -- RUSH LIMBAUGH 

"Democratic politicians seem to spend about half the day accusing President Trump of trashing vaguely defined Constitutional norms—and the other half explaining how they plan to trash enumerated Constitutional rights." – JAMES FREEMAN (One of Annie’s pals from the WSJ, on 15 Oct 19)

 

"It's quite odd that when Putin was rigging the election for Trump he didn't also choose to rig the popular vote." -- MICHAEL MALICE ( From his Wiki: Michael Krechmer, better known as Michael Malice, is a New York City-based author, columnist, and media personality.)

 

"America does not need to see the tax returns of a billionaire who became a public servant. America needs to see the tax returns of public servants who became millionaires while being public servants.”-- JAESON LUBELL (Private attorney in New York)

 

"Trump fans are often wiser than the people who loathe them." -- FREDDIE GRAY (The SPECTATOR Deputy Editor, on 7 November 2020)

 

“Trump appears to be the only person in the world willing to take on the CCP (Chinese Communist Party).” – DOUGLAS MURRAY (December 2020)

 

“Above all, Trump did the world a favour by standing up to China’s menace.” – DOMINIC GREEN (The Deputy Editor of the “Spectator USA”, in Dec. 2020)

 

"I think China is a place where President Trump got it right. He basically awakened Americans, and I would say especially the business community, to a China that — the assumptions about which we had gotten wrong. And the assumption for 40 years was that a richer China would be a freer China, and that’s clearly not going to happen." -- ROBERT GATES (One of Obama's Secretaries of Defense, but nevertheless an honorable American and a "nation-security" muckamuck for presidents of both parties, and he said the above on "60Minutes" in October 2021)

 

“Trump wasn’t a conservative, said the thinktanks and politicians, because he didn’t sound like Ronald Reagan. But Reagan was more like a Jeffersonian Democrat than an old-school Republican, a product of the Cold War consensus that had embraced free markets to beat the Reds.

Trump wasn’t about returning to the 1980s but the 1920s, when Republican elites protected markets with tariffs, curtailed immigration and stay out of foreign conflicts. And the questions he asked – What is a nation without borders? Why do we want to spread freedom abroad? Again echo those older matters of belonging, identity and nationhood that gave rise to modern conservatism in the first place.” – TIM STANLEY             (the UK DAILY TELEGRAPH American Affairs correspondent, in October 2021)

 

"The world was far more safe on Donald Trump's watch than any single day we've had so far with Joe Biden in the White House." -- REP. JIM BANKS (Republican Congressman from Indiana, on 1 March 2022)

"Trump never wanted anything but the best for America." -- KANYE WEST (To Tucker Carlson, October '22)

"When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, it transpired that Trump's intemperate complaints about German reliance on Russian fossil fuels had actually been bang on the money." -- WILLIAM COOK (in the SPECTATOR, 19 Aug. '23)

"The country is a mess because politicians suck. They're two-faced and gutless, and illegals are everywhere, and we want it all fixed. We don't care that Trump is crude and we don't care that he's been married 3 times. This country became weak and bankrupt, our enemies are making fun of us, and we're being invaded by illegals. We're becoming a nation of victims where every Tom, Ricardo and Hasid is a special group with special rights to a point where we don't recognize the country we were born and raised in. And we just want it fixed. And Trump seems to be the only guy who understands what the people want.

We're sick of politicians. We just want this thing fixed. Trump may not be a Saint, but we're not voting for a Pope. We're voting for a man who doesn't have lobbyist money holding him back, a man who doesn't have political correctness restraining him. And he says he'll fix it. And we believe him because he's too much of an egotist to be proven wrong, or to be looked at and called a liar." -- STEVE HARVEY (the black TV game-show guy)

"Let's face it. Donald Trump is a rough individual. He is vain, insensitive, and raw. But he loves America more than any President in my lifetime. He is the last firewall between us and this cesspool called Washington. I'll take him any day over any of these bums." -- JAMES WOODS

"Trump had a particular constellation of assets that fit the moment when we’re in a war. He showed us that we’re in a war. And he smoked out rats: the media, we now know, is corrupt. We knew it was biased, but now we know it’s absolutely corrupt. We now know that the intelligence agencies — which we thought were biased — we now know that they’re corrupt." -- TOM KLINGENSTEIN 

"Donald Trump doesn't embarrass the 'elites' because they perceive him as tacky or unrefined. Their distress has nothing to do with his fondness for gold-plated furnishings, long red ties, or big buildings adorned with his name. They do not care that he is loud and boisterous, down-to-earth, or salty with his language. President Trump humiliates them by simply refusing to bend the knee. And he terrifies them by choosing to stand taller when they wish him to fall for good. For decades, the Uniparty Establishment insisted that all of America's problems were too complex to remedy. Tens of millions of illegal aliens rampaging through the southern border? An insidiously creeping totalitarianism wafting over the land in the guises of 'political correctness' and other obscene, destructive Marxist claptrap used to whittle down free speech and incinerate family, civic, and religious institutions? A rising China gaining dominance at Americans' expense? The Establishment 'Elite' looked around and said, 'Sorry, America, there's just nothing we can do. It's best you accept the inevitable and maybe hurry up and die.' Donald Trump looked around and said, 'What are you doing? Are you crazy? You can't have a nation without borders, and you can't claim to be a superpower if those borders aren't controlled. You can't possibly have America's national security at heart if all of the nation's hydrocarbon energy and manufactured goods come from overseas powers often hostile to the United States'." -- J. B. SHURK (in THE AMERICAN THINKER, October 2022)

"Trump is not a candidate. He is the leader of a nationwide movement to take power back from the establishment." -- NEWT GINGRICH    (in January 2024)

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

 ”As a Democrat who has been left homeless, who is now definitely in the center but probably leaning increasingly right, I am left yet again with an appreciation, despite the messenger, of the message of the Trump administration because what those guys did was pretty incredible in hindsight. 

So much of the work that happened in that Trump administration turns out to have been right. And that’s what is so frustrating for me. 

The work on the border wall? We didn’t like the messenger, so we killed the message. Turned out it was right. Issuing long-term debt to refinance when rates were at zero? We didn’t like the messenger, so we killed the message. A structural peace in the Middle East? We didn’t like the messenger, so we killed the message.

When are we gonna stop shooting ourselves in the foot? And when are we going to actually see and take the time to look past who is saying things and actually listen to them word for word?” -- BARI WEISS (the liberal ex-NY Times hotshot, in October 2023)

"Trumpism is just moderate Republicanism, with 15 rather than 6-week abortion bans and campaigning against other Republicans who would cut Social Security. Liberals are much better off with this on offer than DeSantis/Cruz-style conservatism." -- PATRICK RUFFINI     (In May 2024, and this is true -- and it's why I supported Cruz in '16 and DeSantis in '24. But Trump -- like Nixon before him) drives all the right people totally bonkers, so I'm happy to vote for him whenever it's him or a Democrat).

"When Donald Trump rails about 'fake news’ and insults journalists interviews, I suspect this resonates with voters much more than most journalists realize." -- RORY SUTHERLAND

“If you move against Ukraine while I’m president, I will hit Moscow. All those beautiful golden turrets will be blown up.” -- DONALD TRUMP     (Trump, when he was still President, to Putin, as reported by the NY POST in 22 Feb, 2022)   

"No western spy agency is actively seeking to subvert the CCP (though the last Trump administration came close." -- NIGEL INKSTER    (the ex-MI6 boss, in April 2024)

 "All other foreign policy challenges must be subordinated to the goal of stopping the CCP. It presents the single greatest external threat to our republic (the greatest overall threat to America is actually Randi Weingarten and the teachers unions)." -- MIKE POMPEO      (In 2023)

"Money was almost always the first prism through which he (Trump) evaluated national security matters." -- MIKE POMPEO    (Trump's CIA boss/SecState, describing the consequence of Trump's total lack of ideological thinking) 

"Trump isn’t the chaos. The left’s response to Trump is the chaos."-- NIKKI MOONITZ      (a luminary on X, 15 July 2024)

Trump, (Persecution of)

"This guy Trump is like the American Dreyfus, if you want to know the truth." -- MARK LEVIN (8 Aug. 2023)

"You don't just lock up a presidential candidate because you don't like him. You will destroy America with this myopic nonsense." -- KYLE BECKER (in August 2023)

"It takes integrity to hate Trump and to concede that he’s being persecuted by criminals in power. I’m still waiting." -- BOSCH FAWSTIN (the Muslim-born, Albanian-born American cartoonist — in Sept. 2023)

"These (the Trump indictments) are the Moscow Trials." -- JESSE KELLY (on 15 August 2023)

"I don’t understand conservatives who use ‘too much baggage’ as a reason to withdraw support. His baggage comes from having lunatics attack him and lie about him every day. That’s like saying a battered woman has too much baggage." -- BRANDON STRACKA (founder of "Walk Away" -- said in Sept., '23)

"How may a debate (a discussion, a trial, an election) take place in which one side rejects not its opponent's position but his right to exist?" -- DAVID MAMET (Referring specifically to the persecution of Trump in his 2022 "Recessional")

"Trump was vilified with greater vehemence than anyone in Western memory. He was hated because he was feared -- because he held that prosperity was to be enjoyed as the legitimate reward of sacrifice, struggle, patriotism, and the American culture." -- DAVID MAMET

“The more ­frenzied the effort to cancel him, the stronger Trump becomes. The more bitterly his enemies wage lawfare against him, the more unstoppable he seems to be. In the senior common rooms of our ­universities, in the synod of the Church of England, in the Orwellian corridors of the BBC and among much of the UK establishment there has been a caterwauling orgy of nose-holding abhorrence. In the cocktail parties of Davos, I am told, the global wokerati have been trembling so violently that you could hear the ice tinkling in their negronis," -- BORIS JOHNSON     (the former British PM, in January 2024) 

"They've managed to make Donald Trump 'the return to normality' candidate." — VICTOR DAVIS HANSON (on 8 Feb 2024)

"If you let your hatred for Donald Trump compromise your ability to find true north on your moral compass, shame on you." -- "DR PHIL" McGRAW      (in June 2024)

“It’s time to put Trump in the bullseye.” -- "PRESIDENT" JOE BIDEN     (less than a week before the assassination attempt, 8 July 2024)

Trust                                                                                                                            

"Nothing builds wealth so much as trust -- the trust that permits parties to rely on each other in a joint project -- and nothing cements trust better than enforceable contracts. But contracts aren't really enforceable if one side gets to walk when things don't turn out as he likes." -- F. H. BUCKLEY

 

“Trust and c-operation do not arise naturally. They are not primordial attributes of the 'Noble savage' that get undermined by civilization. The evidence suggests precisely the opposite.” – PAUL COLLIER (in his book “Exodus: Immigration and Multiculturalism in the 21st. Century”)

 

The ability to instantly assess the motives of people is a skill you learn pretty quickly when you travel. Nearly every day you are put in a situation where you have to decide whether or not to trust someone: You have to decide whether they’re ripping you off or helping you out. And it’s a fine line to walk. I haven’t always got it right.” – PETER MOORE (the Australian travel writer.)

 

“Trust your gut... and your instruments.” – BUZZ ALDRIN

"When trust goes, everything goes." -- WILLIAM DONALDSON (the English gossip-columnist and playboy) 

"Trust is overrated. All the treachery in the world is built on a foundation of trust." -- WILL WILES

 

Truth                                                                                                                                 

“The truth will out, when none care whether it come out or not.” – LAWRENCE DURRELL

 

“Don’t expect to be rewarded if you tell the truth.  Hypocrisy no longer has any power to shock us.  We encounter it every day.  But we encounter the truth so seldom  that it shocks and embarrasses us, and we run from it.”  -- CARY GRANT

 

“It may sound simplistic, but truth always is very simple.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

“It’s not the things we don’t know that get us into trouble. It’s the things we know that just ain’t true.” – MARK TWAIN

 

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.” – MARK TWAIN

 

“Perhaps there can legitimately be double standards of morality... but there can never be double standards of truth. If, for example, we are justified in saying that tyranny in Ghana is serving a noble purpose, we are still not justified in saying that it is not tyranny.” – THOMAS SOWELL

 

“If decade after decade the truth cannot be told, each person’s mind begins to roam irretrievably. One’s fellow countrymen become harder to understand than Martians.” – ALEXANDER SOLZHENYTSIN

 

“Whoever said the truth will set you free was full of shit”. – GENNIFER FLOWERS (the poor bimbo who all she got for her pains in telling the truth about Blow-Job Clinton was a WHOLE world of shit… And, as Andrew Ferguson, who quoted her here, reminded her, the guy who said that about the truth setting you free was Jesus….)

 

“Speaking is a means to achieve objectives. If a praiseworthy aim is attainable through both telling the truth and lying, it is unlawful to accomplish it through lying because there is no need for it. When it is possible to achieve such an aim by lying but not by telling the truth, it is permissible to lie if attaining the goal is permissible, and obligator (sic) to lie if the goal is obligatory.”  -- AHMAD IBN NAQIB AL-MISRI (in his 1368 manual of sacred Islamic law: “The Reliance Of The Traveler”. Italics added. So I guess it’s a Religion of Truth as well as a Religion of Peace. Good to know….)

 

"I prefer to tell the truth. It's easier to memorize." – GRAHAM GREENE

 

“To see what is in front of one's nose needs constant struggle.” – GEORGE ORWELL

 

“The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.” – GEORGE ORWELL

 

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” – GEORGE ORWELL

"Totalitarianism demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective Truth." -- GEORGE ORWELL 

“We have sought truth and sometimes perhaps found it. But have we had any fun?” – BENJAMIN JOWETT (the 19th Century British theologian, classicist, and Master of Balliol College, Oxford)

 

“The truth will make men free is the motto of American intelligence, but the reality is that it only makes them angry.” – CHARLES McCARRY (America's premier spy novelist)

 

"The truth, once discovered, is of no use: people deny what they have done, forget what they had believed, and make the same mistakes over and over again." -- CHARLES McCARRY

 

“We are morally sick, because we have grown used to saying one thing and thinking another.” – VACLAV HAVEL

 

“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end. If, however, you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth.” – C. S. LEWIS

 

“Ninety percent of human thought is, I sometimes think, devoted to rationalizing why things which are obviously true are not true. And we reward people who give us the best, most plausible falsehoods denying the obvious truth.” – “ACE OF SPADES”      (anonymous, if famous, blogger)                                                                                                                

 

“Truth is like water: it needs a vessel to carry it.” – ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

"There is nothing so uninspiring as the truth. nothing so dull as accurately reported fact." -- NIGEL WILLIAMS    (well, he is, after all, a writer of fiction) 

“Of course it's the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.” – MARGARET THATCHER

“As a rule, only very learned and clever men deny what is obviously true.” – WALTER T. STACE      (a British philosopher)            

 

“Truth isn’t mean. It’s truth.” – ANDREW BREITBART

 

“Never forget, the Speech Police are also the Thought Police. If you can't speak the truth, it becomes impossible to know the truth.” – ROBERT STACY MCCAIN

"We will continue to be your single source of truth. Unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth." -- JACINDA ARDERN (the leftist PM of New Zealand, in 2022 -- and more "Orwellian" than this one shouldn't want to get....) 

“If you’re going to tell people the truth, be funny or they’ll kill you.” -- BILLY WILDER

 

"There's no one thing that is true, it's all true" – ERNEST HEMINGWAY (yet another example of why I always thought Hemingway was a load of crap.)

 

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.” -- MARK TWAIN (which just goes to show what a crap intel officer he would have made...)

 

“Truth, after all, is hate to those who hate truth.” – TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." -- WINSTON CHURCHILL 

“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” – SOREN KIERKEGAARD

 

"If telling the truth about something can get you killed, then that truth must be told again and again and again and again and again..." -- BOSCH FAWSTIN (the renegade Albanian-American anti-Jihadist cartoonist)

 

“Telling the truth is always a good ploy, if used sparingly. The surprise value of hearing someone own up is so great that you can often get away with murder.” – SIMON BRETT (In  his updated Molesworth book “How to Be Topp”)

 

"Always go too far, because that’s where you’ll find the truth." -- ALBERT CAMUS

 

"Everyone wishes to have truth on his side, but not everyone wishes to be on the side of truth". – RICHARD WHATLEY (Philosopher, Reformer, Theologian, Economist.. 1787-1863)

 

“You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.” – WARREN BUFFETT

 

“Fiction has to be believable. Nonfiction only has to be true.” – JAMES TARANTO

 

“The greater the resistance to a statement, the more likely to be true it is.” -- ROD LIDDLE (I'm pretty sure this is bullshit, by the way, but it sounds good....)

 

“You can always tell when a public figure has said something with a ring of truth about it by the abject apology and recantation which arrives a day or so later. By and large, the greater the truth, the more abject the apology.” -- ROD LIDDLE

 

“People don’t have their own truth. There is truth and there is falsehood, and there’s an end to it.” – ROD LIDDLE

 

"We are in an age characterized as post-truth, sometimes masquerading as 'my truth'." -- ROD LIDDLE    (in April 2024) 

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

“Truth sounds like hate, for those who hate the truth.” – MIKE PENCE

"What is the truth, said jesting Pilate -- and would not stay for an answer." -- FRANCIS BACON

"Truth has never made for real comfort in any human relationship; it's not truth we want but the counterfeit that eases self-doubt." -- BRYAN FORBES

"I'll tell you a peculiar thing:  It makes people happy to tell the truth after a lifetime of lying." -- WALKER PERCY

"Truth is not determined by a majority vote." -- POPE BENEDICT XVI

"People cannot take very much truth, and peaceful government depends on the noble lie." -- PLATO

“Truth does not change: only beliefs do.” -- GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB                                                                            (Mrs. Irving Kristol, and a great philosopher/author in her own right)

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

"There is no truth, only power" -- ANTONIO GRAMSCI (the Italian communist boss who bestowed upon the grateful world the whole "march through the institutions" delight.) 

“Moral progress, or the story of civilization, is a scavenger hunt for categorical imperatives, a search for truths that are — or should be — true everywhere.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

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

 

"As spies, we are midwives to truth. We have to be, that's our mission. We deceive to reveal. Our obligation is to deliver truth, however unpalatable." -- ALAN JUDD

 

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

 

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

 

“Truth-telling often is terrifying, which is why most people avoid it.” – CHARLES MOORE

 

"A bad evasion is tantamount to telling the truth." -- WILLIAM BOYD

 

“Although truth does not have degrees, it does have many borderline cases.” – WILLIAM BOYD (in his short story “Bizarre Situations”)

 

"The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple." -- REBECCA WEST

 

“Truth is always more interesting than the lie.” – JOHN UPDIKE

"Just because something is true, it doesn't mean that it is interesting." -- TOM STOPPARD (the justly-celebrated Czech-born English playwright)

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.” – FLANNERY O’CONNOR

 

“There is not one truth in one century, and then another in a later age.” – NEVIL SHUTE

 

"The truth does not mind being questioned. A lie does not like being challenged." -- PATRICK BET-DAVID (an Assyrian/Armenian Jew, author of "Your Next Five Moves")

 

“Sometimes the best way to hide the truth is to tell it at a time when your listener expects a lie.” – DONALD WESTLAKE

“Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.” – G. K. CHESTERTON (Quoted by incoming Italian PM Giorgia Meloni in her election victory speech, in October 2022)

"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth." -- NIELS BOHR (the renowned physicist, and I wonder if I shouldn't have filed this under PHYSICS?)

“It taught me, at an early age, that being wrong can be dangerous, but being right, when society regards the majority’s falsehood as truth, could be fatal.” ―  THOMAS STEPHEN SZASZ (the late, famous Hungarian-American shrink)

"Truth has become a right-wing concept." -- MELANIE PHILLIPS (the ex-Leftist British journalist, in April 2023)

"I think that our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done." -- KATHERINE MAHER      (the CEO of NPR, in Aug. 2024 -- and this is ANOTHER example the Left's utter contempt for the truth.)


 

Turkey

“Rural Turks are so lazy they get up at four in the morning to have more time to do nothing.” – P. J. O'ROURKE

 

“The Turks are the one great anti-human specimen of humanity, who leave a broad line of blood wherever they go.” – WILLIAM GLADSTONE (The long-time 19th century British Prime Minister, Disraeli's nemesis and, surprisingly, an “anti-imperialist”)

 

“Immigration is like Turkey, as an 'issue': very important, very boring to research, document, and debate, and prone to conflagration when general equilibrium is disrupted.” – ANNE JOLIS

 

“Turks are to the Middle East what Koreans are to Asia: Everyone's scared shitless of them. And with good reason, as they're all stone batshit crazy.” – JACK JOLIS

“Turkey is a society of collective amnesia. Everything is written in water over there – except the works of architects, which are written in stone, and those of poets, which are written in our hearts.” – ELIF SHAFAK (a lady Turkish novelist who lives in London)

 

“For those who argue political Islam and democracy are incompatible, Erdogan in Exhibit A.” – JUSTIN MAROZZI (in May 2019. He is the author of the book “Islamic Empires”.)

"I like the Turks. For a start, they quite like us. The British soldier has always admired 'Johnny Turk' as a good and brave fighter, a worthy opponent. (ED: although Lawrence of Arabia might have disagreed) The Turks often have a good sense of priority. I like the way  that even the most important of the Ottoman rulers had to have a trade, Suleiman the Great passed his apprenticeship as a goldsmith. I also like the sensible phonetic way the Turks spell: taksi, polis, telefon, kokteyl." -- GEORGE COURTAULD (the English author and civil servant, in 1995)

“For a place where not much really gets done, Istanbul buzzes.” – PETER MOORE (the amusing Australian travel writer)

 

Twitter

“The only reason Twitter is amusing is because it's so close to twat.” –  GEORGE SCHLATTER (one of the producers of the old TV show “Laugh-In”)

 

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

 

“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

 

“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 wellbeing. 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)

 

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

"If I've learned anything from Twitter, it's that 'my side' has a population of 1." -- DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE

"I can honestly say I have never once considered leaving Twitter for a right wing or a left wing alternative site, because (A) I am a self-aware attention whore, and (B) I enjoy Twitter's rich stereophonic stupidity." -- DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE (in November 2022) 

“Like any thought that takes 12 seconds to think, I put it on twitter.” – FRANK CHIMERO (An apparently famous NYC “designer”.)

 

"Twitter is a medium that has bizarrely reinvented the brevity of the telegram, but without the Victorian culture of complexity, courtesy and calm." -- KEVIN MYERS (an innocent Irish victim of a twitter-mob.)

 

"I think that the ban of Donald Trump on Twitter is an unacceptable act of censorship... Don't tell me he was banned for violating Twitter rules. I get death threats here every day for many years, and Twitter doesn't ban anyone.  Among the people who have Twitter accounts are cold-blooded murderers (Putin or Maduro) and liars and thieves (Medvedev)... Of course, Twitter is a private company, but we have seen many examples in Russia and China of such private companies becoming the state's best friends and the enablers when it comes to censorship.” — ALEXEI NAVALNY (November 9, 2020)

 

"Ancient Romans had their Coliseum. We have Twitter." -- SIMON BLACK (who runs the website “Sovereign Man” and defines himself as an “international investor, entrepreneur, permanent traveler, free man and a student of the world”)

"It's fun to see 'liberals' outraged at an African-American buying 10% of Twitter probably for the sole purpose of making sure his tweets aren’t censored. And the predictable smearing of Musk by the socialist (which is to say practically all) media has just begun." -- SAMUEL M’CHEYNE GLASSER (on 5 April 2020)

"Twitter is a clown show crashing into a gold mine." -- ELON MUSK (as quoted by NIALL FERGUSON, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution — Before Purchase)

"Twitter was expensive but free speech is priceless" -- ELON MUSK (After Purchase)

"$44 billion was not the cost of Twitter. It was the cost of restoring free speech." -- ELON MUSK

“Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.” – T. S. ELIOT

"Everyone's a teen on Twitter and anyone who seems adult is just acting that way in the hope of applause. I'm not sure my marriage would survive if I read my own husband's tweets." -- MARY WAKEFIELD


"Twitter is not a town square. It is a modern battlefield where geopolitics influences domestic politics. This battlefield is better suited to Machiavelli than Clausewitz."-- ROBERT SPALDING (a conservative author known on the Twoot as "General" Spalding)

"The greatest accomplishment on Twitter isn't going viral, or building a huge following — it's getting banned for saying something true." -- SETH DILLON (The CEO of The Babylon Bee)

"I have never been a contributor to Twitter -- a convocation of obsessive, perpetually furious morons, plus I loathe its modernity in reducing the discussion of complex issues into 75 words of bile, usually ending ‘just like Hitler’." -- ROD LIDDLE

Tyranny

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.” – C. S. LEWIS

 

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences." – C. S. LEWIS

 

“The conservative does not despise government. He despises tyranny.” – MARK LEVIN

 

“Tyranny is like water – it finds the cracks, it finds the holes.” – MARK LEVIN (6 March 2020)

 

“Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry” ~ THOMAS JEFFERSON

 

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

 

"The welfare of the people has always been the alibi of tyrants." -- ALBERT CAMUS

 

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

 

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

 

«Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance.» – ALBERT MAYSLES (the American film-maker – made, among other things, the great Rolling Stones/Altamont flick «Gimme Shelter»)

 

«All men would be tyrants if they could.» – JOHN ADAMS (no Kumbaya here....)

 

«Tyrants are always frauds.» – SIR KINGSLEY AMIS (in 1994, the year before he died)

“Many harmful and pernicious measures are passed in human communities -​-​ measures which come no closer to the name of laws than if a gang of criminals agreed to make some rules.” -- CICERO    (Roman hot-shot, 106 - 43 BC)

«Imagine Big Brother running the department of human ressources in the voice of an especially insistent yoga instructor. Imagine a future in which your boss feels you’re not productive enough, so he sends you to online therapy to make you a better worker, and receives reports on your innermost emotions.» – DOMINIC GREENFIELD (in April 2021, and here he’s describing what I’d call «The New Tyranny»)

 

"You can never comply your way out of tyranny." -- ROBERT J. O'NEILL (the SEAL who got Bin Laden. On 30 Sept. 2021)

"Chaos is the natural state of mankind, and tyranny is its usual remedy." -- GEORGE SANTAYANA (the Spanish-born American philosopher, 1863-1952, whose real name was Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás.)

"All conversations with tyrants end with the words 'thank you'." -- TACITUS                          (Roman historian, 56 - 120 AD -- and I imagine that most conversations with non-tyrannical leaders ALSO end in "thank you", but nevermind -- he made a catchy point.)