Jonah Goldberg
Our fear of hypocrisy is forcing us to live in a world where gluttons are fine, so long as they champion gluttony.
Getting the support of Syria is the moral equivalent of winning the Klan's endorsement - it might be useful but it doesn't necessarily speak well of you.
The main difference between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives are honest about it. We're kind of dorks about it. We are kind of like Dungeons and Dragons geeks.
I would also say Barack Obama has spent much, much, much, much more money than the Republicans.
If you spend any time in Washington you'll find nerds. What happens is most of them sublimate their fixations with comics, or baseball cards, or 1960s British comedies to policy minutiae and political arcana. But, like Christians in ancient Rome, you can still spot them if you know the signals.
If we say that anyone who 'moralizes' must be perfect morally then we are in effect saying no one can moralize.
The problem with the United Nations is that while democracy within nations is the best available form of government, democracy among nations can be a moral disaster - especially if some nations are not democracies.
If power made one evil, then God would be the Devil.
The premise of my book is that everyone is a bit ideological to some extent. Everyone comes from a ideological perspective.
And it's the President of the United States who said he wasn't going to spike the football and all this, we shouldn't gloat about it, running campaign ads, gloating about it and saying the other guy isn't good enough to do the tough things that I did, which I think is, one reprehensible.
You know those Navy SEALs, they weren't Democrats and Republicans. They were just doing what was best for America. Wouldn't that be a great country if all of you Americans were just like that? You followed orders, you marched in step and you followed my agenda.
I think as - all in all, it's better to have a cool president than a not cool president.
One of the things that really drove me crazy was the way in which college kids, in particular, are educated to think that ideology is dangerous and bad.
We are a species that must try to impose and find systems - systems of thought, ways of organizing and categorizing reality.
You can make a very good argument that society would be much worse off if you let 10 rapists and murderers free rather than put one poor, wrongly accused accountant in prison. And so my only point on that is that it should open up an argument. It should not sort of settle one, because nobody disagrees with it.
There was no intellectual movement in American history called social Darwinism. The people who were supposedly the leaders of the social Darwinist movement never embraced something called social Darwinism. It didn't exist.
Our country, if you read the 'Federalist Papers,' is about disagreement. It's about pitting faction against faction, divided government, checks and balances. The hero in American political tradition is the man who stands up to the mob - not the mob itself.
But you're never taught in schools - we don't teach anyone in public schools that government is the problem. We don't teach anyone in college that government is the problem - except maybe a handful of sort of unique, conservative schools. But mainstream media never talks as if government is the problem.
But if the choice is a cool president and 8 or 10 percent unemployment in a declining economy and a country that seems to be going in the wrong direction and structural unemployment for young people at 50 percent, I'd rather have a dorky president who fixed those problems.
But it is one of these sort of mythologies about America and its intellectual history, that the right embraced this thing called social Darwinism, when it never did so.
Social distinctions tend to matter only at your own level and above.
Republican politics have been off-kilter for several years now because a large segment of the conservative base does not look back fondly on the Bush presidency.
Obama did inherit a deficit when he came into office. Why this fact justifies racking up vastly more debt and bigger deficits is a logical mystery.
The GOP needs to figure out a way to become more appealing to new constituencies.
The government cannot love you, and any politics that works on a different assumption is destined for no good.Collection: Love You
Liberals are Nazis, and Nazis are liberals. And if you don't agree with me, you're a Nazi too.Collection: Nazi
If there is ever a fascist takeover in America, it will come not in the form of storm troopers kicking down doors but with lawyers and social workers saying. "I'm from the government and I'm here to help.Collection: Government
[Libertarianism] is about curbing state power to let people be and do what they want. Liberalism is about using state power to make people do and be what liberals want. And that makes all the difference in the world.Collection: Differences
The suggestion that liberals aren't moralizers is so preposterous it makes it hard for me to take any of them seriously when they wax indignant about "moralizers." Almost every day, they tell us what is moral or immoral to think and to say about race, taxes, abortion - you name it. They explain it would be immoral for me to spend more of my own money on my own children when that money could be spent by government on other people's children. In short, they think moralizing is fine. They just want to have a monopoly on the franchise.Collection: Children
The white male is the Jew of liberal fascism.Collection: White
Someone once noted that a 'gaffe' in Washington is when a politician accidentally tells the truth.Collection: Political
America's political system used to be about the pursuit of happiness. Now More and more of us want to stop chasing it and have it delivered.Collection: Pursuit Of Happiness
Facts are mere speed bumps on the road to lefty moral outrage.Collection: Lefties
And in the minds of progressives you are free to live anyway you want so long as it's progressive.Collection: Long
Champions of Liberty get called Fascists by Champions of StatismCollection: Champion
Progressivism was a sister movement of fascism, and today's liberalism is the daughter of Progressivism.Collection: Daughter
Simply because the nanny-state wants to hug you doesn't mean it's not tyrannical if you don't want to be hugged.Collection: Mean
Nothing drives your opponents more crazy than being utterly reasonable. And nothing makes demonizing or delegitimizing your opponents easier than letting them shriek unreasonable things for you. The Republicans need to get back to being the party that elicits unreasonable shrieking from their opponents. Not the other way around.Collection: Crazy
One of the overriding points of Liberal Fascism is that all of the totalitarian "isms" of the left commit the fallacy of the category error. They all want the state to be something it cannot be. They passionately believe the government can love you, that the state can be your God or your church or your tribe or your parent or your village or all of these things at once. Conservatives occasionally make this mistake, libertarians never do, liberals almost always do.Collection: Mistake
If you’re too stupid to understand that a philosophy that favors a federally structured republic, with numerous restraints on the scope and power of government to interfere with individual rights or the free market, is a lot different from an ethnic-nationalist, atheistic, and socialist program of genocide and international aggression, you should use this rule of thumb: If someone isn’t advocating the murder of millions of people in gas chambers and a global Reich for the White Man you shouldn’t assume he’s a Nazi and you should know it’s pretty damn evil to call him one.Collection: Stupid
Look, I think liberals have reasonable gripes with Fox News. It does lean to the right, primarily in its opinion programming but also in its story selection (which is fine by me) and elsewhere. But it's worth remembering that Fox is less a bastion of ideological conservatism and more a populist, tabloidy network.Collection: Thinking
Conservatives value economic liberty and moral security, while the liberal values economic security and moral liberty.Collection: Liberty
The Founders understood that democracy was important, but if you didn't filter it through a republican system you'd be just as likely to end up with a tyranny of the majority as you would with a healthy society. Don't worry, I won't quote the Federalist Papers, but trust me, it's in there.Collection: Worry
Christian socialism”). This is a difficult concept for modern liberals to grasp because they are used to thinking of the progressives as the people who cleaned up the food supply, pushed through the eight hour workday, and ended child labor. But liberals often forget that the progressives were imperialists, at home and abroad. They were the authors of Prohibition, the Palmer Raids, eugenics, loyalty oaths, and, in its modern incarnation, what many call “state capitalism.Collection: Christian
Liberals and leftists have been dismissing inconvenient facts by attacking motives for generations. In the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, Soviet spies and abettors attacked the motives of their accusers because the fact of their guilt was undeniable. In the 1960s, over a thousand psychiatrists who'd never even met Barry Goldwater signed a petition saying the GOP candidate was too mentally unstable to be president.Collection: Guilt
Joe Biden says the Wall Street crisis is the result of George W. Bush's tax cuts, which makes as much sense as blaming the rising price of fairy dust. But as a wise man once asked, Who gives a rat's patoot what Joe Biden thinks?Collection: Wise
When you treat reprehensible and ludicrous arguments with respect you have elevated the reprehensible and made the ludicrous a bit more reasonable. Having a serious argument with a Nazi makes the horror of the Holocaust a debatable point. Don't wrestle in the mud with pigs. You get dirty and the pig likes it.Collection: Dirty
Cultures grow on the vine of tradition.Collection: Culture
Forests are breaking out all over America. New England has more forests since the Civil War. In 1880, New York State was only 25 percent forested. Today it is more than 66 percent. In 1850, Vermont was only 35 percent forested. Now it's 76 percent forested and rising. In the south, more land is covered by forest than at any time in the last century. In 1936 a study found that 80 percent of piedmont Georgia was without trees. Today nearly 70 percent of the state is forested. In the last decade alone, America has added more than 10 million acres of forestland.Collection: New York
The search for a moral equivalent of war continues to define American liberalism to this day.Collection: War