Mark Steyn
Government health care changes the relationship between the citizen and the state, and, in fact, I think it's an assault on citizenship.Collection: Health
Americans and other Westerners who want their families to enjoy the blessings of life in a free society should understand that the life we've led since 1945 in the Western world is very rare in human history. Our children are unlikely to enjoy anything so placid, and may well spend their adult years in an ugly and savage world unless we decide that who and what we are is worth defending.Collection: Children
Indeed, if I understand this global-warming business correctly, the danger is that the waters will rise and drown the whole of Massachusetts, New York City, Long Island, the California coast and a few big cities on the Great Lakes - in other words, every Democratic enclave will be wiped out leaving only the solid Republican heartland. Politically speaking, for conservatives there's no downside to global warming.Collection: New York
The most basic of conservative principles is that if you reward bad behavior you get more of it.Collection: Principles
But, once you get a taste for shutting people up, it's hard to stop. Why bother winning the debate when it's easier to close it down?Collection: Winning
It is surely only a matter of time before some federal judge finds the Constitution unconstitutional.Collection: Judging
Most mainline Protestant churches are, to one degree or another, post-Christian. If they no longer seem disposed to converting the unbelieving to Christ, they can at least convert them to the boggiest of soft-left clichés, on the grounds that if Jesus were alive today he’d most likely be a gay Anglican bishop in a committed relationship driving around in an environmentally friendly car with an “Arms are for Hugging” sticker on the way to an interfaith dialogue with a Wiccan and a couple of Wahhabi imams.Collection: Christian
LBJ held up Detroit as a model of what the Great Society could accomplish. He was right.Collection: Detroit
Big Government is erecting a panopticon state - one that sees everything, and regulates everything. It’s great “customer service,” except that you can never get out of the store.Collection: Government
The Western front is the important one in this war - the intersection between Islam and a liberal democratic tradition so mired in self-loathing it would rather destroy our civilization just to demonstrate its multicultural bona fides.Collection: War
I believe Western culture - rule of law, universal suffrage, etc. - is preferable to Arab culture: that's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I support immigration, but with assimilation.Collection: Believe
Big Government is the small option: it's the guarantee of smaller freedom, smaller homes, smaller cars, smaller opportunities, smaller lives.Collection: Home
When you're taxing bovine flatulence emissions, there's nothing left to tax.Collection: Bovine
The greatest crime of welfare isn't that it's a waste of money, but that it's a waste of people.Collection: People
If you took every single penny that Warren Buffett has, it'd pay for 4-1/2 days of the US government. This tax-the-rich won't work. The problem here is the government is way bigger than even the capacity of the rich to sustain it. The Buffett Rule would raise $3.2 billion a year, and take 514 years just to pay off Obama's 2011 budget deficit.Collection: Government
Once you accept you're a child in the government nursery, why shouldn't Nanny tell you what to do?Collection: Children
The state of our civilization manifests itself both in the non-problems that terrify us beyond all reason - rising sea levels - and in the real problems we pay no heed to [population decline]...In reality, much of the planet will be uninhabited long before it's uninhabitableCollection: Real
If gun control bore any relation to homicide rates, Washington, DC would be the safest place in the country.Collection: Country
The spirit of the age is: Ask not what your country can do for you, demand it.Collection: Country
Almost by definition, secularism cannot be a future: it's a present-tense culture that over time disconnects a society from cross-generational purpose. Which is why there are no examples of sustained atheist civilizations. "Atheistic humanism" became inhumanism in the hands of the Fascists and Communists and, in its less malign form in today's European Union, a kind of dehumamism in which a present-tense culture amuses itself to extinction. Post-Christian European culture is already post-cultural and, with its surging Muslim populations, will soon be post-European.Collection: Christian
Freedom is messy. In free societies, people will fall through the cracks - drink too much, eat too much, buy unaffordable homes, fail to make prudent provision for health care, and much else. But the price of being relieved of all those tiresome choices by a benign paternal government is far too high. Big Government is the small option: it's the guarantee of smaller freedom, smaller homes, smaller cars, smaller opportunities, smaller lives.Collection: Fall
Sometimes societies become too stupid to survive. A nation that takes Barack Obama's current rhetorical flourishes seriously is certainly well advanced along that dismal path.Collection: Stupid
For Al Gore and Paul Ehrlich and Co., whatever the problem, the solution is always the same. Whether it's global cooling, global warming, or overpopulation, we need bigger government, more regulation, higher taxes, and a massive transfer of power from the citizens to some unelected self-perpetuating crisis lobby.Collection: Government
Welfare culture is bad not just because, as in Europe, it's bankrupting the state, but because it enfeebles the citizenry, it erodes self-reliance and resourcefulness.Collection: Self
The trouble with the social-democratic state is that, when government does too much, nobody else does much of anything.Collection: Government
Anything that shifts power from the individual judgment of free citizens to government is a bad thing.Collection: Government
In Europe, nothing is certain except death and welfare, and why let the former get in the way of the latter?Collection: Europe
The United States, for its part, downgraded from low-level to complete withdrawal, much to the regret of other delegates such as the Reverend Jesse Jackson, President-for-Life of the People’s Republic of Himself.Collection: People
Mr Hughes's current claim of "bisexuality" has the whiff of artful centrist positioning about it: bi- is the proportional representation of sexuality in a world where most of us - straight or gay - operate a first-past-the-post system.Collection: Gay
In Britain, everything is policed except crime.Collection: Crime
Contemporary politics is all about phony energy, about running around slamming doors for the sake of it-or, more to the point, opening them and tossing through a huge sack of taxpayer dollars.Collection: Running
Even if you don't mind Romneycare, or the abortion flip-flop, or any of the rest, there's a more basic problem: He's not a natural campaigner, and on the stump he instinctively recoils from any personal connection with the voters.Collection: Abortion
No family of an American hostage has ever been prosecuted for paying a ransom for the return of their loved ones. The last thing we should ever do is to add to a family's pain.Collection: Pain
The Democratic Party is uniquely virulently racist and pro-slavery to a degree unseen anywhere in the English-speaking world!Collection: Party
[Charles] Manson wanted to start a race war. Nobody said he was leading some sort of charge about white supremacy.Collection: War
Sadly, a U.S. invasion of Iraq 'would threaten the whole stability of the Middle East' - or so Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, told the BBC on Tuesday. Amr's talking points are so Sept. 10: It's supposed to destabilize the Middle East. The stability of the Middle East is unique in the non-democratic world and it's the lack of change in Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt that's turned them into a fetid swamp of terrorist bottom-feeders.Collection: Unique
In the Western world, countries that were once the crucible of freedom are slipping remorselessly into a thinly disguised serfdom in which an ever higher proportion of your assets are annexed by the state as superlandlord. Big government is where nations go to die - not in Keynes' 'long run,' but sooner than you think.Collection: Running
For all the casual slurs about 'cultural imperialism', British imperialists were more interested in other cultures than anybody before or since, and, if they hadn't dug it up and taken care of it, we'd know hardly anything about the ancient world. What's important about a nation's past is not what it keeps walled up in the museum but what it keeps outside, living and breathing as every citizen's inheritance.Collection: Taken
We are the source of our problems not mysterious sinister foreigners overseas.Collection: Mysterious
Popular culture as a whole is popular, but in today's fragmented market it's a jostle of competing unpopular popular cultures. As the critic Stanley Crouch likes to say, if you make a movie and 10 million people go see it, you'll gross $100 million - and 96 per cent of the population won't have to be involved. That alone should caution anyone about reading too much into individual examples of popular culture.Collection: Reading
The minute health care becomes a huge, unwieldy, expensive government bureaucracy it's a permanent feature of life and there's nothing anyone can do about it.Collection: Government
[We] assume that social progress is like technological progress: one cannot uninvent the internal combustion engine, so how could one uninvent liberty?Collection: Progress
In 1897, troops from the greatest empire the world had ever seen marched down London’s mall for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee. Seventy years later, Britain had government health care, a government-owned car industry, massive government housing, and it was a shriveled high-unemployment socialist basket-case living off the dwindling cultural capital of its glorious past. In 1945, America emerged from the Second World War as the preeminent power on earth. Seventy years later . . . Let’s not go there.Collection: Queens
We're on the brink of a world in which the wealthiest nations, from Canada to Norway to Japan, can barely project meaningful force to their own borders while the nickel 'n' dime basket-cases go nuclear.Collection: Meaningful
So-called "progressives" actively wage war on progress. . . . Ultimately, progressives are at war with mass prosperity.Collection: War
[To] the progressive mind, the very concept of "the enemy" is obsolescent: there are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven't yet accommodated.Collection: Just Friends
Byrd, the former Klu [sic] Klux Klan Kleagle, is taking a stand over states' rights, or his rights over State, or some such. Whatever the reason, the sight of an old Klansman blocking a little colored girl from Birmingham from getting into her office contributed to the general retro vibe that hangs around the Democratic Party these days.Collection: Girl
Last month, 80,000 Americans signed on to new jobs, but 85,000 Americas signed on for Social Security disability checks. Most of these people are not 'disabled' as that term is generally understood. Rather, it's the U.S. economy that's disabled, and thus Obama incentivizes dependency.Collection: Jobs
I don't think Donald Trump is a conservative. I think his line on China for example, that he's going to talk tough to China. China didn't create Social Security, Medicare. China isn't spending a fifth of a billion dollars every hour that it doesn't have.Collection: Thinking
"Moderate" Republicans such as Arnold Schwarzenegger like to boast that they're fiscal conservatives and social liberals. But the social liberalism always ends up burying the fiscal conservatism.Collection: Republican