U
UKIP (& Reform UK Party & Nigel Farage)
“Every pub is a parliament.” – NIGEL FARAGE
"Send me to Parliament to be a bloody nuisance! -- NIGEL FARAGE (in June 2024)
“UKIP is 'Top Gear' for people who don't like cars.” – BILL BAILEY (an English funny man, on Stephen Fry's “QI” TV program)
“Why did I join UKIP? Because it’s the only major political party that supports free speech.” – PAUL JOSEPH WATSON (a young English YouTube “personality”, in July 2018)
“And then there’s Nigel Farage. Now, I have an enormous respect for the chap and think he probably deserves the title of most important politician of the present century, and one of the ten most important of the past 75 years. He has chutzpah and charisma and a sharp wit, possesses an admirable contempt for the establishment and he is brave and decisive.” – ROD LIDDLE (In May 2019)
Ukraine (& war in Ukraine)
“I need ammunition, not a ride.” – VOLOVIMIR ZELENSKY (the embattled President of Ukraine on 26 Feb 2022, on being offered “evacuation” by President China Joe Bidet. I also would’ve liked to include “Russian warship, go fuck yourself!”, but it’s never been identified which of the 13 Ukrainian troops on “Snake Island” said it, before being captured by the Russkies….)
“Napoléon noted ‘In war, the moral is to the physical as three to one’. Ukrainians have it, Russians don’t.” – CHUCK DEVORE (ex-California Assemblyman, VP of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and an ex-US Army intel officer)
"The Russian army hasn't fought a conventional war against a near-peer since 1945. It's out of practice, poorly trained, poorly led, and poorly motivated. It does have plenty of heavy armaments (thermobaric bombs). It can destroy, it can't fight." -- CHUCK DEVORE (the ex-US Army Intel Officer of THE FEDERALIST)
"When you're in the USA or Europe the Russians are just assholes. When you're unlucky enough to live next to them the Russians are far worse, a threat to your very life and way of life. If you think Russia is a model for anything except gangsterism you are very seriously fucked." -- JOHN SCHINDLER (on 15 March 2022)
"If Russia laid down its arms, there would be peace. If Ukraine laid down its arms, there would be no Ukraine." -- SEN. TOM COTTON
"We are basically dead men. Most of us know this. It's why we fight so fearlessly." -- LT. ILIA SAMOILENKO (of the Ukrainian Army, from the ruins of the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol, in May 2022. I doubt if Lt. Samoilenko is still alive, as I type this, but I wanted to do my small bit to memorialize his brave words.)
“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)
"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)
"Putin started this. Kick his ass." -- SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM
Unanimity
“Nothing that results in human progress is achieved with unanimous consent. Those that are enlightened before the others are condemned to pursue that light in spite of the others.” -- CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS
Understanding
“Does one really have to point out that understanding a phenomenon is not the same as advocating it?” – MIDGE DECTER (Good point – I oppose, say, communism and Islamism, because I understand them…)
"It would take more than anyone could give to understand the life of one single other person -- we cannot even understand our own lives." -- MARK HELPRIN
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." – UPTON SINCLAIR
“Mutual incomprehension rarely qualifies as a clash.” – JOSEPH BOTTUM
“To understand is not to forgive. It is simply better than the alternative, which is not to understand." – ALEC NOVE (Russian-born prof of economics at Glasgow Univ., and author, 1915-1994)
“We have a duty to pity before we comprehend.” – FERDINAND MOUNT (actually, he said this in the context of us looking back upon the past.)
"There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other." -- ERIC HOFFER
"I can explain this to you. I can't understand it for you." -- ED KOCH
Understatement
“It is not all pleasure, this exploration.” – DAVID LIVINGSTONE (writing in his journal a few days before his wretched death in 1873 in a mud hut in some misbegotten chabonga in what became Northern Rhodesia in what is today's Zambia. In the words of Lucy Vickery, writing in the UK SPECTATOR, “his final days had been plagued by pneumonia, malaria, foot ulcers, piles, rotting teeth, leeches, hostile African tribesmen and a large blood clot in his gut.” Jeez. Well, at least he didn't end up in a stew-pot, like poor old Cpt. Jaicintho dos Tortugas in my friend P. N. Gwynne’s brilliant novel “Firmly By The Tail”....)
Unemployment (see also Work)
“The self-unemployed are no more than bimbos who read magazines.” – A.A. GILL
“I have seen the future, and it does not go to work.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE
"Jobs are desired but job-creators are reviled."—GEORGE GILDER
“When the labor force consists of just one guy who is working, unemployment will be 0% and Obama will be triumphant.” – KURT SCHLICHTER
“Don’t let anybody tell you it’s corporations and businesses create jobs.” – HILLARY CLINTON (Queen Clueless....)
"When you're unemployed, that's when you need a holiday. That's really tough." -- TOBY JONES (the English actor)
Unhappiness
“The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room”. – BLAISE PASCAL (He of the famous “Theorem”. 1623-1662)
“Restlessness is discontent – and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man – and I will show you a failure.” -- THOMAS EDISON
“Like many great men, he also suffered from his own strange cultivation of personal unhappiness.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
“One becomes moral as soon as one becomes unhappy.” – MARCEL PROUST
“Happiness comes and goes. It tends not to hang around. Unhappiness has a habit of outstaying its welcome.” – CONOR O’CALLAGHAN (in his novel “We Are Not In The World”)
United Nations, The
“Any large gathering of world leaders is a waste of time.” – MARK STEYN
“I was asked a question about the United Nations and replied that it was a good basic axiom that if you took a quart of ice cream and mixed it with a quart of dog feces the result would taste more like the latter than the former. But the danger, when you enroll the free nations and the thug states in the same club, isn’t that they meet each other halfway but that the Free World winds up going two-thirds, three-quarters, seven-eights of the way.” – MARK STEYN (in 2006)
“A sandbox for the Third World”. – HELMUT SCHMIDT (the ex-German Chancellor)
“The U.N. is now a central problem of the world, because we take too much notice of it.” – PAUL JOHNSON
“A conclave of dictators doesn’t become democratic merely by voting on where to order lunch” – JONAH GOLDBERG.
“In effect, the U.N. simply legitimizes whatever elites and tyrants have gained power over the particular nations named in its list.” – ROGER SCRUTON
“Indeed, it is thanks largely to U. N. conventions that terror networks have been able so easily to internationalize themselves.” – ROGER SCRUTON (he wrote this in 2003, 3 years prophetically before the Supreme Court’s disastrous an kak-headed HAMDAN decision…)
“If religion is the opiate of the masses, then the United Nations is the opiate of the asses.” – JONAH GOLDBERG
“(The UN is) at best a meaningless charade; at worst, a Machiavellian cesspool.” – ARTHUR HERMAN (the author of, among other things, “To Rule The Waves”)
“What happens in the Security Council more closely resembles a mugging than either a political debate or an effort at problem-solving.” -- JEANNE KIRKPATRICK (my dad’s old collaboratrix in “Resistance International”)
“When leaders are afraid to take real action they go to the U.N., where they know nothing tangible will be achieved.” – GARY KASPAROV (the ex-Chess maven and Russian politician. A good guy – I once sat across from him on a flight between Prague and Frankfurt, and he busied himself the entire flight doing 4 things at the same time – 1/ chatting to me, 2/ drinking scotch, 3/ playing remote chess with someone on a little computerized chess set, and 4/ attending to a stunning blonde bimbo who was traveling with him, and who was almost certainly not his wife.)
“Few organizations reward incompetence as richly as the United Nations.” – ADAM LEBOR (author of “Complicity with Evil: The U.N. in the Age of Modern Genocide”.)
“I’m never particularly surprised when the United Nations seems to oppose human freedom rather than promote it.” -- FRED THOMPSON
“The actions of the UN are, on a global level, the equivalent of seeing a little girl fall down a well and saying in response: ‘Let’s form a committee.’ Actually, they are worse than that, because some of the committees at the UN are notorious for throwing little girls down wells.” – JONAH GOLDBERG
“The U.N. is a ludicrous playpen for the failed states and most odious despotisms of the planet.” – CONRAD BLACK
“The UN is the geopolitical equivalent of YouTube commenters.” -- DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE
“Virtually the whole of the U.N. is devoted to the Palestinians.” – JAY NORDLINGER (in June 2012)
"If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13, with 26 abstentions." -- ABBA EBAN (Israel's urbane and Robert Morley-like British-born Ambassador to the UN and then Foreign Minister during the 70s)
"The UN is a ship that exists for the benefit of its crew." -- TOM BETHELL
“The UN is a nest of totalitarians, barbarians and anti-Semitic scum” – DAVID HARSANYI
"Corrupt, incompetent and openly anti-Semitic — if al-Qaeda, the Mafia and the world’s laziest postal workers teamed up to take over a high school’s debate team, the result would be the United Nations." – MICHAEL GRAHAM
“People should stop complaining that the UN ‘doesn’t do anything’ – just imagine how much worse it would be if it ever got off its ass and did something.” – JACK JOLIS
"The world's most stupid, costly and deluded organisation, the United Nations." – ROD LIDDLE
“The United Nations, a sprawling multinational bureaucracy linked by luxury dining, corruption and complicity in terrorism.” – DANIEL GREENFIELD (in August 2019)
Uniqueness
"Only I myself am novel -- the experience is not." -- MALCOLM BRADBURY
“Unity”
“The elevation of unity as the highest social value is a core tenet of fascism and all leftist ideologies. We tend to forget that unity is, at best, morally neutral and often a source of irrationality and groupthink. Rampaging mobs are unified. The Mafia is unified. Marauding barbarians bent on rape and pillage are unified. Meanwhile, civilized people have disagreements, and small-d democrats have arguments.” – JONAH GOLDBERG
"I will go to my grave wondering why people who profess to support democracy want to unify the country. In a democracy, the country is not supposed to be unified, at least not about very much." -- JONAH GOLDBERG
“We make our worst mistakes when we make them together.” – DAVID FRENCH
“'Political ‘unity' is a totalitarian Utopian concept — like 'equity': both are unattainable and would be hell-on-earth if they ever were.” – JACK JOLIS
"'Unity' is like 'equality': Everyone says they're for them but thank God they're unattainable, because they'd be hell in reality.” – JACK JOLIS
" 'Uniting' the country is impossible and trying to do so is fascistic. Leading the country is what's needed.» – JACK JOLIS
"Political tongues love to assert of their candidate the ability to 'unify' the country. But what does this mean? If we understand it to mean complete unanimity, such can be found only in a slave state. Should it mean universal agreement, we cannot achieve 'unity' even in our families. Disparity of opinion is not only inevitable in politics; its acceptance is a sign of health." -- DAVID MAMET
Universe, The
“The farther we look, the more ancient is what we see.” – JOHN UPDIKE
Universities
“The thoughts of taxi-drivers are not filtered through a mesh of barbarous but gimcrack theory of the type peddled in those institutions of higher work-avoidance known as universities.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE
“Sanctuaries in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices find shelter and protection after they have been hunted out of every other corner of the world.” – ADAM SMITH (in the 21st Century, Universities are the last bastions of the worldwide Left – pretty prescient fellow, old Adam, referring here to Oxford University….)
“When this year’s freshmen enter the academic world, they will encounter a bizarre universe in which big-time athletics, business education, and rigorous science programs operate under the umbrella of institutions that define themselves in terms of left-wing ideology.” – JAMES PIERESON (a writer for The Weekly Standard, Oct. 2005)
“A father puts his son to university to spend his money, to lose what good qualities he has and to gain nothing useful in return.” – SYDNEY SMITH (British writer, essayist and clergyman – 1771-1845)
“Paying tuition (at Princeton is) like buying a brand-new BMW every year and driving it off a cliff." – PETER SCHROEDER (of the Wall Street Journal. Recounting what the Princeton admissions officer told his parents. He ended up going to Notre Dame.)
“Columbia (University’s) idea of a good middle linebacker is Mohandas K. Gandhi.” – D. KEITH MANO
“The Sixties radicals are still with us, but now they do not paralyze the universities, they run the universities.” – TOD LINDBERG
“Going to universities is useless, but you don’t want to admit you haven’t done it.” – LLOYD EVANS
“A really good university is one whose way of life is as unlike that of the big wide world as possible.” – CHARLES MOORE
“College is primarily a credentialing rite, a prolonged and fantastically expensive mental bris. The content is secondary.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE
“Universities, established and funded by the Free Enterprise system – which is to say the accrual of wealth – house, support, and coddle generations of the young in their dissertations on the evils of America.” – DAVID MAMET
“American universities have become islands of repression in a sea of freedom.” – ABIGAIL THERNSTROM (author and Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute)
“Universities share one characteristic with compulsive gamblers and exiled royalty: There is never enough money to satisfy their desires.” – DEREK BOK (ex-President of Harvard)
"The average college campus has 135 lefty organizations, representing the same 50 students." -- DAVE "Iowahawk" BURGE
“Most of the smartest people I know have college degrees. All of the stupidest people I know have college degrees.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE
“College teaches you to think critically. Just not about college.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE
“For every right wing lunatic in an Idaho cabin, there are 500 left wing lunatics with tenure at a state university.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE
“Apart from maybe those in Gaza, our (American) elite universities are probably the most anti-American in the world.” – MARK KRIKORIAN
"There is no spot more like an Indian reservation than a college campus, with its subsidized life-style, taxpayer support, separate-seeming nationhood, and heavy alcohol use." -- ROB LONG (NATIONAL REVIEW columnist and executive producer of "Sullivan and Son" on TBS, commenting on why it should make sense that the world's most famous 1/32nd Cherokee squaw, Elizabeth "Fork Tongue" Warren, eventually pitched up at Harvard's State Semiversity.)
“Colleges make it possible for middle-class kids to afford a four-year fantasy interval of hash and hook-ups while parroting trendy twaddle to withered agitators barnacled to the hull by tenure. No one complains because studies show that college automatically makes you richer, perhaps because employers think 'If you could stomach that codswallop without geysering latte out your nostrils in laughter, you'll put up with anything I throw at you'.” – JAMES LILEKS
“Universities are breeding grounds for clinical depressions.” – CHARLES SAATCHI
"Most American universities are hardly loci of thought at all but rather costly sports centers and health spas."-- PAUL FUSSELL (in 1991)
“Listen, college is like a sandbox: The children may throw sand at each other, but in the grand scheme of things it’s unimportant. You should just try to have a good time.” – ALSTON B. RAMSAY (an ex-editor of the righteous DARTMOUTH REVIEW)
“Universities are just about the only place in the western world where you will find people who sign up to the dull, Victorian, mechanistic plodding of Karl Marx; somehow Marx and his disciples have a sort of tenure in the soft social sciences, the faux disciplines of sociology and lit crit and meeja (sic) studies, and of course any module with the word 'ethnic' or 'cultural' in its heading.” -- ROD LIDDLE
"Our universities are stuffed with some of the most stupid people on God's earth." -- ROD LIDDLE (in April 2018)
“If car companies have to report MPG by model, colleges should have to report 5-year employment success of graduates by major.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE
" ‘Go to college’ is to education what ‘put stuff in your mouth’ is to nutrition.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE
"College campuses essentially operate on mob rule at this point.” –WILLIAM A. JACOBSON (A lawyer and law professor at Cornell, and the man behind the “Legal Insurrection” blog, in May 2014)
“The new iron rule of the American college degree: The more it costs, the less it's worth. Bank on it.” – JACK JOLIS
"Most American kids leave college stupider than they were the day they entered." -- JACK JOLIS
"Except for engineering students, kids leave American colleges stupider than when they went in -- and to the extent that they do any work at all there, they do it in their first year." -- JACK JOLIS
“The bachelor's degree as general credential has a great deal of allure, not least to people who suspect—perhaps with some reason—that they are frauds.” -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
“College is in many cases a very expensive four- to six-year sleepaway camp for young adults who really are too old for that sort of thing, where the main lessons given are status-signaling.” -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
"And if any American city should have a prestigious institution of higher education in it, it may as well be Pyongyang." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON.
"The University brings out all abilities, including incapability." —ANTON CHEKHOV
“The American university today is one big containment area for the mentally ill. And that's just the faculty.” – RUSH LIMBAUGH
"'College' is not accurate. If all you're breeding is pansies, time to call them Greenhouses.” – JOHN NOLTE
“The American university is now a caricature of an educational institution. It is difficult to come up with an idea or policy that is more absurd than the ideas and policies that now dominate American campuses.” – DENNIS PRAGER (a great guy, who operates a blog/website/YouTube operation that calls itself “Prager University”)
"If you send your children to a university, you are endangering both their mind and their character. There is a real chance they will be more intolerant and more foolish after college than they were when they entered college. When you attend an American university, you are taught to have contempt for America and its founders, to prefer socialism to capitalism, to divide human beings by race and ethnicity. You are taught to shut down those who differ with you, not to debate them. And you are taught to place feelings over reason — which is a guaranteed route to eventual evil." -- DENNIS PRAGER
“Decide whether you want to risk sending your child to a place that will greatly increase his or her chances of being depressed, engaging in binge drinking, and learning nothing important — while being taught how awful America is, why speech he or she doesn’t agree with should be suppressed, how pathetic religious Christians and Jews are, how wonderful religious Muslims are, and how important skin color is.” – DENNIS PRAGER
“My belief is that most of the time, colleges today produce a worse human being or, at the very least, a person who is no better, wiser, or more mature than when he or she graduated high school.” – DENNIS PRAGER
"Outside of the natural sciences and a few other disciplines (such as mathematics and business), American universities are becoming laughing stocks of intolerance.” -- STEPHEN PINKER (a liberal and an atheist – and, of all things, a Psychology Professor at, of all places, Harvard – in April 2018)
“It is less surprising that students are stupid, which they have always been, than that university authorities kowtow.” – MAX HASTINGS (former editor of THE DAILY TELEGRAPH and author of “The Secret War”)
«Every new bad idea in America today can ultimately be traced to the university.» – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
"Why is college so expensive? Go ask the Deputy Assistant Vice Chancellor for Pronouns. Xer office is next to the Climbing Wall Starbucks." -- DAVE «IOWAHAWK» BURGE
"What other business would allow itself to become openly hostile to such a massive slice of the market?" -- JONAH GOLDBERG (specifically in response to Berkeley, Sept. 2017, but on US Universities in general)
«This country started on its long decline the day newspapers began expecting reporters to have college degrees.» – RICK SHAEFER (a letter-writer from Kent, Washington state, to NR, in August 2017)
«The reason everyone thinks college is so important is obvious: Higher education is a racket for the Left, providing employment, affirmation of their views, a comfortable, insular environment, and a stead stream of newly-indoctrinated progressives, so the media do everything they can to keep pumping up enrollment. » – RICK SHAEFER
"Yalies, like vampires, can recognize one another in the dark." -- NELSON DEMILLE
“Give me an army of West Point graduates and I’ll win a battle. Give me a handful of Texas Aggies and I’ll win a war” – GEN. GEORGE S. PATTON, JR.
"The fancier the college, the more oblivious you are when you're done." – CHRIS PLANTE (on his 24 April 2018 radio program)
"The old conservative complaint was that colleges made students liberals and resentful of where they came from. Now, after a generation or more of left-wing dominance of academia, students arrive at elite liberal-arts campuses having learned almost nothing of their civilization and expecting to be entertained and not have their opinions, which largely mimic the ambient liberal culture, challenged. (When such challenges occur, as with conservative speakers on campuses across the country, riot has again become a diversion for spoiled students ungrateful for the stupendous riches they have inherited." – GERALD R. RUSSELLO (author of a biography of Russel Kirk, in NR, in May 2018)
«By stealth, American colleges are pursuing quotas, which is unconstitutional, and that’s why college admissions offices are more secretive than the CIA.» – LIONEL SHRIVER (in the SPECCIE, 23 June 2018)
"In the end, a degree is not something you earn, but something you buy." -- LIONEL SHRIVER (in October 2022, remarking on how it, at that time, cost $83,250 devalued Bidenbuck$ PER YEAR to attend NYU. NYeffingU!)
“out: The United States of America
in: The State University of America” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE
"It starts with the Harvards and then it trickles down to the Bugtussle States, thanks to prestige-envy administrator who rush to mindlessly adopt whatever fashionable neo-Nazism is hot in the academic Big Leagues." -- DAVE "IOWAHAWK" BURGE
"I gave up teaching at a university a few years ago when I was told not to correct spelling mistakes or give low marks in exams. 'You seem to think that if a student does badly it's their fault,' I was told by my rampantly progressive boss. If you're never told off at school or university, and never get a black mark, no wonder you enter your twenties thinking you're the Messiah." -- HARRY MOUNT
"Tax preferences have made private colleges into powerhouses of wealth and enhanced their privilege. On a balance sheet, many of America's elite universities resemble hedge funds with vestigial educational missions. This should be ended." -- BRENDAN MICHAEL DOUGHERTY
“The college environment, where we all stood pre-acquitted by the great liberations of Rousseau, Nietzsche, Freud and Marx, who to such universal amazement and relief had shifted villainy from the individuals to the society.” – JOHN UPDIKE
"University space has a way of leading you into that abyss of identity politics, political correctness, and the worst offender of them all, collectivism." -- EMINA MELONIC (the Bosnian-American PhD candidate, writing in NR in May 2023)
"Universities of great renown and learning have turned into politically correct, race-obsessed places where one either plays along and submits or is shown the door by racial vigilantes." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS
“Parents who spend 18 years of their lives inculcating kids with classical-liberal ideas and teaching them solid Judeo-Christian values, but universities will make sure you’re spending Christmas dinner arguing with a fourth-wave feminist about intersectionality, whatever that means. There’s nothing you can do about it.” – DAVID HARSANYI
"It is central to the liberal delusion to deny facts, whether it be in gender politics, racial politics or even in mathematics. And so the American liberal colleges shepherd us all towards the De-Enlightenment." -- ROD LIDDLE
"You send your kids off to college. They love you. You walk away with a Cornell mom T-shirt. You are walking away going this is great, & come Thanksgiving, your kid tells you that you are an imperialist and a racist & a homophobe. That is not worth $120,000." -- ANDREW BREITBART (Andrew died in 2012 -- do the inflationary math yourself. Oh, and I went to Cornell -- and if anything, Andrew's being too kind, here.)
“Our American colleges and universities are the last bastion of the old Soviet Union, they really are.” – MARK LEVIN (to Larry O’Connor, on 24 May 2021)
"Even North Korea is not this nuts." -- YEONMI PARK (a young lady defector from North Korea about her alma mater, Columbia University, in June 2021)
“Sadly, all colleges now have adopted systemic racism in the name of diversity.” – DON SURBER (on 23 August 2021)
"It is extraordinary the level of centralized control that is taking place on university campuses. The bent toward authoritarianism in academia leaves one breathless. I worry that future bright individuals will shun academia as it is becoming a place where the spirit goes to die." -- GAD SAAD (Marketing prof at Concordia College, Canada, author, and a professor previously at Dartmouth, Cornell & U-Cal-Irvine. He said this on 24 Sept. 2021)
"At the national level, the link between college education and productivity is virtually nonexistent. If we’re not creating much value with the billions we spend on education, it’s worth asking what those billions have bought. And the answer is: good jobs for university employees, and a social system that disadvantages the poor." -- J. D. VANCE (in NR in Sept 2013)
"I have long held to the belief that the most conformist institutions in America are its universities." -- R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR. (in Feb. 2023)
"The central purposes of cinema and TV is to self-replicate the moribund ideology of the latter-day western campus." -- GARETH ROBERTS (And English screen-writer, in July 2023)
"College -- continued infantilization." -- DAVID MAMET (in 2022)
"Who would actually work for years to pay for 'an education' promising nothing other than the waste of time and the inability to get a job?" -- DAVID MAMET
“The biggest threat to our future isn’t climate change, China or the national debt. It is the tyrannical grip that a hopelessly corrupt higher education now has on our national life. If we don’t stop it now, it will eventually destroy the most successful society in world history.” -- JOHN M. ELLIS (Professor-Emeritus Univ. of Cal - Santa Cruz, in Dec. '23)
"The current generation of undergraduates hold strong views with weak foundations." -- NIALL FERGUSON (in Dec. 2023, and boy, is he putting it mildly....)
“We all live on campus now” - ANDREW SULLIVAN (2018 -- and it's sad but true)
“I think colleges are basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores, but they're not for learning – You don't need college to learn stuff – You can learn anything you want for free.” -- ELON MUSK
"I hate when people confuse education with intelligence, you can have a bachelor's degree and still be an idiot." -- ELON MUSK
University Professors
“I wonder what historians of the future will make of this curious late twentieth-century species, this whiny lamprey who slithers amid the swamp of American materialism only to turn back out of the muck to stick his tiny fangs into his bloated mother, now pouty over all the ingested pabulum that has made him fat but colicky.” – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON (Phew. Yeah, kinda reminds me of the Cornell School of Arts and Sciences I attended 1964-67. It’s good to remind oneself that the great VDH was himself a prof., at Cal State, Fresno. He said this in 1996.)
“The political opinions of history professors are just as pedestrian as everyone else's, and less smart than the typical Wisconsin farmer.” – MARIO LOYOLA
"Professors are now predominantly closed-minded, ignorant and stupid enough to believe that Marxism works despite overwhelming historical evidence that it doesn’t." -- JOHN M. ELLIS
"Professors are now meant to please students, while it used to be the other way round." -- LIONEL SHRIVER (In Nov. 2022)
“Maybe I'd be more open to Marxism if I was a college faculty member and hadn't spent years helping clean up after it.” – KURT SCHLICHTER
"Marxism still hangs on, barely, acrobatically, in American Universities." -- TOM WOLFE (in 2000)
"The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore, so it eats it. It's rather like getting tenure." -- DANIEL DENNETT (American philosopher, writer, and professor; b. 28 Mar 1942)
“A caliphate of sniveling morons.” – SOHRAB AHMARI (specifically about the U. of California—Berkeley, in Sept. 2017
“The real problem on college campuses is not the whiny, neurotic students, but the postmodern neo-Marxist professors who are manipulating them.” – TOBY YOUNG
“Formerly respectable universities have become the province of a mentally barren professoriate indoctrinating new generations of virtuecrats, who have no room in their minds for any thoughts that might defy the latest orthodoxy.” – ALGIS VALIUNAS (A fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and a contributing editor to The New Atlantis, in April 2019)
"There's literally nothing so insane that you won't find an American ‘college professor’ who's either said it, or agrees with it." -- JACK JOLIS
"In America, it is not too difficult to obtain a bachelor's degree. The student is left very much to his own devices, he accumulates the necessary credits at his leisure, cheating is easy, and there is not much suspense or anxiety about the eventual outcome. He (or she) is therefore free to give full attention to the normal interests of late adolescence -- sport, alcohol, entertainment and the opposite sex." -- DAVID LODGE
“Whom the gods would make mad they first give tenure.” — DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE
Upbringing
“Where you go to school is not actually of much importance. What matters is who your parents are.” – ANDREW GIMSON (British journalist and author, and biographer of Boris Johnson)
Uselessness
"One useless man is a disgrace, two useless men are a Law firm, and three or more useless men are a Congress." – JOHN ADAMS
Utah
“Utah: The perfect place to die.” – SHAUN CASSIDY (The ex-pop warbler, TV-producer of the excellent “Watch My Back”, and native of Utah.)
Utility
"I have no expensive buildings, vases, or clothes, (and) no costly slaves. If I have anything to use, I use it; if not, I do without. What one does not need, however cheap, costs too much." -- CATO (THE ELDER) (hah, "vases". Anyway, this admirable chap was the godfather of "stoicism", and, incidentally, a hero to my ascetic older brother Paul, the ex-Green Beret. He lived 234-149 BC -- Cato the Elder, that is, not my brother the ex-Green Beret....)
Utopias (-nism)
“The historical lesson seems to suggest that the more powerful the urge to social and political utopia, the more appalling the dystopia that follows.” – ANDREW SMITH
“To try to create Utopia is to conjure dystopia.” – GEORGES BERNANOS (French writer and philosopher.)
“Utopians, if they are in earnest, tend to become terrorists.” – PAUL JOHNSON
“It may be argued that utopian revolutionaries are by nature hopeless optimists in that they believe a perfect society can be created by humankind. But to get to that point they must first demolish the existing order completely, and to do this they must persuade a sufficient number of people that things cannot be gradually improved. Their teaching, therefore, is essentially pessimistic.” – PAUL JOHNSON
“Projects based upon some utopian view that human nature is open to change, through appeals to reason or by force, are doomed to cause more of the wars and bloodshed that comprise the planet’s whole record.” – DAVID PRYCE-JONES
“Plans for human betterment do normally come unstuck.” – GEORGE ORWELL
“When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on Earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.” — NADINE GORDIMER (the late, liberal South African writer)
“The attempt to make heaven on earth invariably produces hell.” – KARL POPPER
"People who are looking for a perfect world are bound to be disappointed, and in their disappointment they come to believe, in one way or another, that they have been cheated. And so they have been, though not by the way of the confidence-trickster; those cheated out of their money are the lucky ones, but those who stretched out their hands to Utopia were -- and are, for it is not yet finished -- doomed to disappointment far greater than robbery." -- BERNARD LEVIN (the long-time columnist for the Times Of London, in 1994.)
“My obsession has been that we should have a revolution that goes not resemble the French or Russian, but rather the American, in the sense that it be for something, not against something. A revolution for a constitution, not a paradise. An anti-utopian revolution. Because utopias lead to the guillotine and the gulag.” – ADAM MICHNIK (Polish journalist and early leader of “Solidarnosc” – one of the Good Guys….)
“The utopian impulse, which fills the metaphysical vacuum left by the death of God and the abandonment of religion, is the greatest enemy of a free and liberal order. In other words, you seek perfection and you get North Korea.” – THEODORE DALRYMPLE
“If people can be induced to judge their institutions against Utopian criteria the process of subversion is well underway.” – JOSEPH SOBRAN
"Utopias, however brilliant their configurations, are horrifying." -- VASSILY AKSYONOV (THAT'S the point about all utopias: they're not "good ideas that can never be realized", they're quite simply shitty ideas.)
“The Left's problem is that it has no limiting principle to its idealism. It may deny that it is utopian, and some liberals even recognize the folly of utopianism in the abstract. But those same liberals will not tell their idealistic cohorts to abandon utopianism. It is too useful in motivating those who do not so much think their way through politics as feel.” -- JONAH GOLDBERG
"Where the utopians go wrong is thinking that the eminently flawed institutions of the past were the problem, rather than efforts toward the solution. They start with a vision of the perfect, then fault human institutions and systems for falling short of the ideal." -- JONAH GOLDBERG
"The sense of entitlement—the very opposite of gratitude—derives from various forms of utopianism, including the personalized version of it we might call narcissism. After all, not all utopianisms are about creating a perfect world for everybody. Some people just want a perfect world for them or their tribe. Regardless, the utopians see all that is good as contemptible in the reflection of their personal idea of perfection." -- JONAH GOLDBERG
“Utopian schemes have a way of ending in desperation, tragedy and, all too often, hatred, don’t they?” – ANDREW STUTTAFORD
"To know oneself is to disbelieve utopia." – MICHAEL NOVAK
"The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison." – NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (author of “The Scarlet Letter” and “The House Of The Seven Gables”)
"Our union may not be perfect, but it is perfectible." -- BARACK OBAMA (At a speech before The Urban League, in June 2012. And this, ladies and germs, in 10 short, easily understood words, is the cornerstone philosophy of every utopian totalitarian political dystopia that ever existed; that has piled corpses high and as far as the eye can see. Bim!, nailed, Comrade Corpseman.)
“Democracy is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failures. Faiths and utopias are the noblest exercise of human reason.” – WILLIAM JAMES (Oh. What an ass. He was.)
“A writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.” – JOHN STEINBECK (In his 1962 Nobel acceptance speech, and a better example of sheer fatuity and foolishness I can't offhand think of....)
“Designs for living always end in tears, or worse. From the Russian Revolution to Jonestown, programmes for human happiness come a cropper. It's best to muddle along as we are, not because human beings are a-morons or suckers, or traitors to the cause, but because life is meant to be messy, muddled, contrary, comic.” – ROGER LEWIS
“What the weight of historical evidence shows us overwhelmingly is that almost everything good in the world has sprung up by accident, and almost everything bad is the (largely) unintended consequence of utopians with too much power trying to plan the world into a better state.” – JAMES DELINGPOLE
“Utopias are always banal.” – NICK COHEN (from the UK SPECTATOR... an earnest young leftie who might even be right about utopias if... they existed. Surely he can do better...)
“Anyone who knows history knows that utopianism can justify viciousness.” – NICK COHEN (and he did! I think now he's guilty of understatement...)
“The human being is and has been the brake on the utopian tendency.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
"Utopians are always authoritarians and totalitarians at heart. Whatever rhetoric of democracy or inclusiveness they employ, they reliably end up embracing a top-down and absolutist mode of social engineering, which is inevitable inasmuch as one cannot have social engineering without social engineers." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
"The urge to improve the human condition was too often dangerously close to the urge to control." -- ALAN JUDD
"I had the misfortune of being born into a utopia: Leningrad 1980s. Like every other utopia imposed by man upon his fellow man, it was a miserable place to live." -- ALEXANDER NAZARYAN (A Liberal -- and National correspondent for Yahoo News, in D.C. -- in August 2018)
"The sunny confidence of everyone who grew up believing the gains of Western civ are a happy accident and its sins a poison poured into the mouths of perfectible humanity: 'Let all good things come to an end. Replace them with something better'. That always works out well. At least you get full employment -- for guillotine-blade sharpeners." -- JAMES LILEKS
“All Utopian political projects, whether originating on the left or the right, will inevitably involve a massive escalation in state power as their architects battle to contain our unruly natures.” – TOBY YOUNG
"True socialists do not want a better world, they want a perfect one." -- THEODORE DALRYMPLE
"It seems that utopian dreamers are like the poor, we have them with us always." -- THEODORE DALRYMPLE
"You couldn't help but be struck by that besetting embarrassment -- embarrassing for the Revolution and for all utopian dreams, including yours: human inequality." -- MARTIN AMIS
"Liberals are leftists and leftists are Utopians -- And Utopians believe that evil can be eradicated... vun vay or ze ozzer, ja?" -- JACK JOLIS
“There is a tyranny in the womb of every Utopia.” -- BERTRAND DE JOUVENEL (Frogue philosopher, 1903-1987)