John Leo Quotes

By the mid 1920s the typical American town was in full sexual bloom. The change came with erotic fashions, literature and movies, and an unsuspected sexual aid, the automobile.

If winning is the only value, why debate when you can suppress?

Compared with other Americans, journalists are more likely to live in upscale neighborhoods, have maids, own Mercedes and trade stocks, and less likely to go to church, do volunteer work or put down roots in a community. Journalists are over-represented in ZIP code areas where residents are twice as likely as other Americans to rent foreign movies, drink Chablis, own an espresso maker and read magazines such as Architectural Digest and Food & Wine.

Expert victimologists estimate that 91.2 percent of people in North America and Europe now qualify as victims, at least in their own minds.

The modern campus is deeply obsessed by race and gender, and not much else.

In a speech, the columnist Charles Krauthammer.... offered a new version of Socrates' famous saying, "The unexamined life is not worth living." In our age of bottomless self-love and obsession with our own feelings, Krauthammer suggested, "The too-examined life is not worth living either.

Bioethics has hardened into an activist ideology that pervades the medical world, the schools, and government.

The political terms 'will' and 'popular will' have a long track record in Western history going back to Rousseau. That record is profoundly anti-democratic, essentially inviting elites to interpret what the common people believe and want. In litigious modern America, that would be a judicial elite telling us how we meant to vote or should have voted.

... a meddler who cannot leave his subordinates alone is a hands on executive.

We are seeing the bitterness of elites who wish to lead, confronted by multitudes who do not wish to follow.

[D]rawing up 'secret war plans' for a possible attack on Iraq wasn't irrational. The low-level war against Saddam was 12 years old, with no end in sight. American and British pilots were getting shot at, sanctions weren't working, and Bush was getting warnings that Saddam had all those terrible weapons and would use them against America. Bush would have been a fool not to draw up plans. Gee, wait till the critics find out that FDR, without ever informing the media, was plotting to fight Japan and Germany before Pearl Harbor.

The diversity revolution [in the news media] was supposed to increase readership and enhance credibility. Just the opposite has resulted. How long will it take the business to figure this out?

Do we really need more romance attached to the act of blowing people away?

No one attacks loose-thinking and folly with half the precision and zest of Thomas Szasz.

The principal advantage of the non-parental lifestyle is that on Christmas Eve you need not be struck dumb by the three most terrifying words that the government allows to be printed on any product: "Some assembly required."

You can't run a society or cope with its problems if people are not held accountable for what they do.