Conrad Black Quotes

We must express the view, based on our empirical observations, that a substantial number of journalists are ignorant, lazy, opinionated, and intellectually dishonest. The profession is heavily cluttered with aged hacks toiling through a miasma of mounting decrepitude and often alcoholism, and even more so with arrogant and abrasive youngsters who substitute 'commitment' for insight. The product of their impassioned intervention in public affairs is more often confusion than lucidity.

[Canada's social welfare system is] an overgenerous reinsurance policy for an underachieving people.

All emphasis in American prisons is on punishment, retribution, and disparagement, and almost none is on rehabilitation.

Given the genocidal belligerence of Iranian threats against Israel, it is hard to take issue with Israel's right to preemptive self-defense.

There can be no return to prosperity while the government (of Ontario) believes that taking money from the people who have earned it and giving it away to the people who haven't, in exchange for their votes and regardless of merit, is the essence of fairness.

The argument of socialists, that people really want to share, beyond a reasonable level of charity, is rubbish, though it is espoused by a lot of rich, pious hypocrites who want to share only enough to avoid widespread starvation, mob violence, and government seizure of more of their incomes.

A quest for knowledge is not a war with faith; spirituality is not usually an infelicitous amalgam of superstition and philistinism; and moral relativism, taken outside midfield, leads inexorably both to heresy and to secular wickedness, which are often identical.

Greed has been severely underestimated and denigrated - unfairly so, in my opinion.

There is not one shred of evidence that the Internet has had any downward influence on North American or European newspaper circulation.

Economics is half psychology and half Grade Three arithmetic, and the U.S. does not now have either half right.

Terrorists cannot threaten the survival of a great nation.

I do not at all have the mind of a bully... in my mind bullies are intolerant of contrary opinion, domineering and rather cowardly. I would hope that none of those terms could be fairly used in describing me.

I made 50 million bucks yesterday. That's a flameout I could get used to.

I have long thought that his [Rupert Murdoch's] social philosophy was contained in his cartoon show, The Simpsons: all politicians and public officials are crooks, and the masses are a vast lumpen proletariat of deluded and exploitable blowhards.

The U.S. prosecution service is eating at the soul of the American republic. It is an absolute danger to everyone.

The American legal industry is a medieval guild in which the prosecutors, bar, and bench join hands to ensure that legal invoices are paid, no matter how excessive.

The facts of Watergate have been wildly exaggerated.

The balance between faith and reason is for the determination of each individual, and of the people as a whole, not of unauthorized government officials uttering impious humbug as they arbitrarily try to define that balance.

I am proud of being in a U.S. federal prison and surviving it.

Nixon's full term was one of the most successful in U.S. history, which is why he was re-elected by the largest plurality in the country's history.

I am a passport-carrying citizen of the E.U.

Like all fads, corporate governance has its zealots.

I don't go around trying to stir up foreign wars.

Maximising my wealth was never my chief thing.

I never ask for mercy and seek no one's sympathy.

I always keep a firewall between my own travails and my perception of public-policy issues; otherwise I would retain no credibility as a commentator.

For decades, I have been a militant anti-declinist in terms of America's place in the world.

For all history up to the end of the Cold War, summit meetings were historic and dramatic occasions, when leaders who controlled the destiny of much of the world met to change the world.

Guerrilla wars, and even more so terrorist assaults, are conducted only by forces with insufficient strength to carry out a real war.

Watergate enabled the Democrats to cut off all aid to South Vietnam and ensure American defeat in a war their party entered and had effectively lost, before Nixon salvaged a non-Communist South Vietnam while effecting a complete American withdrawal.

While few judges or prosecutors would be afraid to exercise their perfectly legitimate discretion in favour of an ordinary man, not to mention a minority group member, most would be terrified to exercise the same discretion for someone politically, financially or socially powerful.

We're going to try and recruit the very best people we can and produce the best papers we can, and publish them to the highest standards we can .

The greenhouse effect of carbon-dioxide emissions does produce gentle warming if it is not counteracted by unpredictable natural phenomena, but it cannot be measured directly against the volume of such emissions.

The bedraggled warhorse of American blowhardism.

It is galling to see such mendacious hypocrites as Kennedy and Biden at the Senate Judiciary Committee sitting in judgment on distinguished jurists.

Most American media outlets that are controlled by Jews seem to be reflexively, or at least habitually, anti-Israel.

The destructive fixation of the envious English-Canadian mind requires that the highest, happiest most agile flyers be laid low. [It is] a sadistic desire corroded by soul-destroying envy, to intimidate all those who might aspire to anything the slightest exceptional.

Perhaps the gravest under-publicized atrocity in the world is the persecution of Christians.

Rupert Murdoch is probably the most successful media proprietor and operator in history.

Since biblical times, and probably before, the wealthy have been envied and condemned.

I don't have any shame.

I may have made a mistake in renouncing my Canadian citizenship, which I have never ceased to promise to try to regain.

The Arabs could have peace tomorrow if sufficient numbers of Palestinians were not content to be used as cannon fodder in fruitless assaults on Israel, even as the surrounding Arab powers distract the Arab masses with the red herring of Israel while retarding their countries with their repression and corruption.

Although his personality is generally quite agreeable, Mr Murdoch has no loyalty to anyone or anything except his company.