Mark Steyn Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Big Government is the small option: it's the guarantee of smaller freedom, smaller homes, smaller cars, smaller opportunities, smaller lives.

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?

The spirit of the age is: Ask not what your country can do for you, demand it.

How do you 'invest in the future'? By borrowing $188 million every hour. That's what the Government of the United States is doing. It's spending one-fifth of a billion dollars it doesn't have every hour of every day of every week - all for your future!

Question: How much do you have to invest in the future before you've spent it and no longer have one?

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.

There may be many things wrong with the United States but only a blind fool who hasn't been paying attention for the last twenty years would hold up Europe as the alternative.

LBJ held up Detroit as a model of what the Great Society could accomplish. He was right.

The Democratic Party is uniquely virulently racist and pro-slavery to a degree unseen anywhere in the English-speaking world!

The first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death.

So there was President Obama, giving his bazillionth speech on health care, droning yet again that “now is the hour when we must seize the moment,” the same moment he’s been seizing every day of the week for the past year, only this time his genius photo-op guys thought it would look good to have him surrounded by men in white coats.

Those who can do. Those who can't form a supercommittee.

In a way, both the U.S. media and those wacky rioters in the Afghan-Pakistani hinterlands are very similar, two highly parochial and monumentally self-absorbed tribes living in isolation from the rest of the world and prone to fanatical irrational indestructible beliefs — not least the notion that you can flush a 950-page book down one of Al Gore's eco-crazed federally mandated low-flush toilets, a claim no editorial bigfoot thought to test for himself in Newsweek's executive washroom.

The long-term cost of a welfare society is the infantilization of the population.

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.

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.

We live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are children if they're serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President Clinton's Oval Office.

Much of America is now in need of an equivalent of Mrs. Thatcher's privatization program in 1980s Britain, or post-Soviet Eastern Europe's economic liberalization in the early Nineties. It's hard to close down government bodies, but it should be possible to sell them off. And a side benefit to outsourcing the Bureau of Government Agencies and the Agency of Government Bureaus is that you'd also be privatizing public-sector unions, which are the biggest and most direct assault on freedom, civic integrity, and fiscal solvency.

This is a perfect snapshot of the West at twilight. On the one hand, governments of developed nations microregulate every aspect of your life in the interests of 'keeping you safe.' ... On the other hand, when it comes to 'keeping you safe' from real threats, such as a millenarian theocracy that claims universal jurisdiction, America and its allies do nothing. ... It is now certain that Tehran will get its nukes, and very soon. This is the biggest abdication of responsibility by the Western powers since the 1930s.

[We] assume that social progress is like technological progress: one cannot uninvent the internal combustion engine, so how could one uninvent liberty?

A big chunk of Western civilization, consciously or otherwise, has given the impression that it's dying to surrender to somebody, anybody. Reasonably enough, Islam figures: Hey, why not us?

We immigrants can sometimes sound a little hysterical about this because we come from places that have tried this and we know where it leads. Anybody who's lived in countries with socialized health care knows that it becomes the dominant political issue.

Appeasement is a vote to live in the present tense, to hold the comforts of the moment.

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.

The industrial powerhouse of 1950 [Detroit] is now a crime-ridden wasteland with a functioning literacy rate equivalent to West African basket-cases.

The best reason to diminish social programs is not to put more money in people's pockets but to put more responsibility in people's pockets.

The salient feature of America in the Age of Obama is a failed government class institutionally committed to living beyond its means, and a citizenry too many of whom are content to string along.

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.

When you're taxing bovine flatulence emissions, there's nothing left to tax.

The essence of a government health care system - for people who have never lived under it and don't know - is waiting, waiting, waiting. You wait for everything. You wait for years for operations that are routine in America.

What happened to those men and women at Fort Hood had a horrible symbolism: Members of the best trained, best equipped fighting force on the planet gunned down by a guy who said a few goofy things no one took seriously. And that's the problem: America has the best troops and fiercest firepower, but no strategy for throttling the ideology that drives the enemy — in Afghanistan and in Texas.

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.

Hollywood gave us far more Muslim terrorists in the Eighties and Nineties than it has since 9/11.

We're told the old-school imperialists were racists, that they thought of the wogs as inferior. But, if so, they at least considered them capable of improvement. The multiculturalists are just as racist. The only difference is that they think the wogs can never reform: Good heavens, you can't expect a Muslim in Norway not to go about raping the womenfolk! Much better just to get used to it.

If you're 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you're graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade. There has been no global warming this century. None

If you look at the range of Hollywood movies playing in most cities in the developing world, you'd hate the America they portray, too.

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.

Only in America does 'health' 'care' 'reform' begin with the hiring of 16,500 new IRS agents tasked with determining whether your insurance policy merits a fine.

Government health care changes the relationship between the citizen and the state, and, in fact, I think it's an assault on citizenship.

To expect the government to save you is to be a bystander in your own fate.

Long before they slump into poverty, great powers succumb to a poverty of ambition.

If the IMF is correct (a big if), China will be the planet's No.1 economy by 2016. That means whoever's elected in November next year will be the last president of the United States to preside over the world's dominant economic power.