Richard Brookhiser Quotes

Libertarians are believers in small government who really mean it -- no excuses, no exceptions. [For Libertarians], the excesses of government are their best recruiters.

Depression manifests itself in a lack of will.

Public opinion should not be confused with popular sentiment. Popular sentiment is what people say to one another around their dinner tables. Popular opinion is what they say to callers from polling organizations.

The Dutch practice euthanasia so briskly that they will kill themselves even before the Islamists get around to it.

One of the benefits of a bad education is the constant pleasure of discovery.

The young women who attract so much attention never change: They are all stupid. They have at best only the crudest notions of their own power, and never calculate motives or consequences. Giving a young woman a young woman's body makes as much sense as giving ten teenagers Lamborghinis and telling them to drive in figure 8s around a parking lot.

Madison lived in his head and public speaking did not come naturally to him.

Some lawns have all the cheer of old cemeteries.

Routine is supposed to be the great deadener of souls; how much worse is the half-completed task, the broken round, the unfulfilled routine?

Only the stupefying ignorance of young women prevents them from comprehending the stupefying emptiness of the men who cluster round them.

Aaron Burr was like a new refrigerator. He was bright, cold and empty.

[Washington had won] a war for independence and then gone home. [He embodied] the legend of the Roman who returned to his plow after saving his country.

Madison loathed Hamilton and loved Jefferson above all.