Jonah Goldberg quotes:

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  • Our country, if you read the 'Federalist Papers,' is about disagreement. It's about pitting faction against faction, divided government, checks and balances. The hero in American political tradition is the man who stands up to the mob - not the mob itself.

  • But if the choice is a cool president and 8 or 10 percent unemployment in a declining economy and a country that seems to be going in the wrong direction and structural unemployment for young people at 50 percent, I'd rather have a dorky president who fixed those problems.

  • Joe Biden says the Wall Street crisis is the result of George W. Bush's tax cuts, which makes as much sense as blaming the rising price of fairy dust. But as a wise man once asked, Who gives a rat's patoot what Joe Biden thinks?

  • Getting the support of Syria is the moral equivalent of winning the Klan's endorsement - it might be useful but it doesn't necessarily speak well of you.

  • Those who say [Joseph] Padilla should get a civilian trial are essentially saying that if you reject the rules of civilized nations, like those inscribed in the Geneva Convention, you therefore deserve to be treated better, not worse, than those rules require.

  • The main difference between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives are honest about it. We're kind of dorks about it. We are kind of like Dungeons and Dragons geeks.

  • Keep Hope alive, particularly if Hope is the name of a very cute puppy and not some ill-defined abstraction that is in fact code for big government.

  • There was no intellectual movement in American history called social Darwinism. The people who were supposedly the leaders of the social Darwinist movement never embraced something called social Darwinism. It didn't exist.

  • Despite what you may have been taught about Indians or Africans or ancient Celts, poor people are terrible stewards of their environment. For instance, if my kid were starving to death, I would happily feed her fresh panda.

  • Keep in mind that Eric Alterman is media critic for The Nation-a hysterically left-wing magazine dedicated to the proposition that corporate America, U.S. foreign policy and the Republican Party are criminal, racist or both. The simple reality is that, for him, the Democratic Party is far too conservative.

  • If you spend any time in Washington you'll find nerds. What happens is most of them sublimate their fixations with comics, or baseball cards, or 1960s British comedies to policy minutiae and political arcana. But, like Christians in ancient Rome, you can still spot them if you know the signals.

  • Republican politics have been off-kilter for several years now because a large segment of the conservative base does not look back fondly on the Bush presidency.

  • It was in the 1960s that the left convinced itself that there is something fascistic about patriotism and something perversely "patriotic" about running down America. Anti-Americanism - a stand-in for hatred of Western civilization - became the stuff of sophisticates and intellectuals as never before. Flag burners became the truest "patriots" because dissent - not just from partisan politics, but the American project itself - became the highest virtue.

  • We are all descended from cavemen who broke the skulls of their enemies with rocks for fun or profit. But that hardly mitigates the crimes of a man who does the same thing today. I see no problem judging the behavior of the Islamic State and its apologists from the vantage point of the West's high horse, because we've earned the right to sit in that saddle.

  • The Founders understood that democracy was important, but if you didn't filter it through a republican system you'd be just as likely to end up with a tyranny of the majority as you would with a healthy society. Don't worry, I won't quote the Federalist Papers, but trust me, it's in there.

  • The Mars Polar Lander cost the average American the price of half a cheeseburger. A human lander would cost the average American more -- perhaps even ten cheeseburgers! So be it. That is no great sacrifice.

  • You can make a very good argument that society would be much worse off if you let 10 rapists and murderers free rather than put one poor, wrongly accused accountant in prison. And so my only point on that is that it should open up an argument. It should not sort of settle one, because nobody disagrees with it.

  • But you're never taught in schools - we don't teach anyone in public schools that government is the problem. We don't teach anyone in college that government is the problem - except maybe a handful of sort of unique, conservative schools. But mainstream media never talks as if government is the problem.

  • Pragmatism is the disguise progressive and other ideologues do when they want to demonize competing ideologies.

  • And it's the President of the United States who said he wasn't going to spike the football and all this, we shouldn't gloat about it, running campaign ads, gloating about it and saying the other guy isn't good enough to do the tough things that I did, which I think is, one reprehensible.

  • If power made one evil, then God would be the Devil.

  • The problem with the United Nations is that while democracy within nations is the best available form of government, democracy among nations can be a moral disaster - especially if some nations are not democracies.

  • Yes, I know liberals are more empirical because Jonathan Chait says they are, but my empirical studies of liberal empiricism keep spitting out contradictory findings.

  • Three explanations dominate speculation about what Obama is up to. The first is that he's trying to lay the groundwork for his successor, presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton. The second is that he's trying to pad his legacy. The third is that he's trying to 'troll' or bait the GOP into debating his agenda rather than pursuing its own. All are plausible, and none necessarily contradicts the others.

  • The decision [to create a theme park called "EuroWorld"] was made by the EU countries in response to their collective realization that no one in Europe has had an innovative idea in well over a century.

  • Our fear of hypocrisy is forcing us to live in a world where gluttons are fine, so long as they champion gluttony.

  • Simply because the nanny-state wants to hug you doesn't mean it's not tyrannical if you don't want to be hugged.

  • The government cannot love you, and any politics that works on a different assumption is destined for no good.

  • In Europe and America alike, voters increasingly recognize that the benefits of the green revolution aren't worth the costs, particularly when the revolutionaries don't have a clue what they're doing.

  • Look, I think liberals have reasonable gripes with Fox News. It does lean to the right, primarily in its opinion programming but also in its story selection (which is fine by me) and elsewhere. But it's worth remembering that Fox is less a bastion of ideological conservatism and more a populist, tabloidy network.

  • On Tuesday, the so-called Islamic State released a slickly produced video showing a Jordanian pilot being burned alive in a steel cage. On Wednesday, the United Nations issued a report detailing various 'mass executions of boys, as well as reports of beheadings, crucifixions of children, and burying children alive' at the hands of the Islamic State.

  • John Kerry is a sphincter. Okay, that's a bit juvenile.

  • I've just returned from my daughter's Halloween parade at grade school. She was supergirl - and she was perfect. And, even better, she still considers boys to be made of kryptonite.

  • Facts are mere speed bumps on the road to lefty moral outrage.

  • I am just mystified by these people telling me I would think Obama was doing a great job if his skin contained less melanin.

  • When activists say we need to move past the partisan divide, what they mean is: Shut up and get with my program. Have you ever heard anyone say, "We need to get past all of this partisan squabbling and name-calling. That's why I'm going to abandon all my objections and agree with you"?

  • You know those Navy SEALs, they weren't Democrats and Republicans. They were just doing what was best for America. Wouldn't that be a great country if all of you Americans were just like that? You followed orders, you marched in step and you followed my agenda.

  • Liberals and leftists have been dismissing inconvenient facts by attacking motives for generations. In the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, Soviet spies and abettors attacked the motives of their accusers because the fact of their guilt was undeniable. In the 1960s, over a thousand psychiatrists who'd never even met Barry Goldwater signed a petition saying the GOP candidate was too mentally unstable to be president.

  • I don't think twice about picking up my dog's poop, but if another dog's poop is next to it, I think, 'Eww, dog poop!

  • Progressivism, liberalism, or whatever you want to call it has become an ideology of power. So long as liberals hold it, principles don't matter.

  • in many respects fascism not only is here but has been here for nearly a century. For what we call liberalism--the refurbished edifice of American Progressivism--is in fact a descendant and manifestation of fascism.

  • Progressivism was a sister movement of fascism, and today's liberalism is the daughter of Progressivism.

  • In crude Marxist terms, liberals have a theory of infallible government that is constantly at war with the reality of life.

  • ...associational ad hominem attacks remain the left's favorite rhetorical strategy for undermining opponents.

  • If there is ever a fascist takeover in America, it will come not in the form of storm troopers kicking down doors but with lawyers and social workers saying. "I'm from the government and I'm here to help.

  • Tom Friedman says China is so awesome they make kosher pigs.

  • What is more likely? That tomorrow will be called 'Thursday' or that Maxine Waters will play the race card in her ethics investigation?

  • Tip to all British tabloids: Do Not Hack Amy Winehouse's Phone. I repeat: Do Not Hack Amy Winehouse's Phone.

  • If you think shrinking government and getting it less involved in your life is a hallmark of tyranny it is only because you are either grotesquely ignorant or because you subscribe to a statist ideology that believes the expansion of the state is the expansion of liberty.

  • I'd like to know why sociologists can't decide whether movie sex and violence has any effect on children, but there's a universal consensus that even a glimpse of a Camel will force children to become lifelong smokers.

  • As a broad generalization, big businesses have no moral objections to being whores. Getting into bed with Uncle Sam is all a question of price, not principle.

  • Not reassuring when weathermen say 'Today will be terrible but don't worry it won't be as terrible as tomorrow or Friday.

  • Today's unions are less Mobbed-up than those of yesteryear to be sure, but they're hardly above tactics that would be considered intimidating and coercive.

  • We are a species that must try to impose and find systems - systems of thought, ways of organizing and categorizing reality.

  • Obama did inherit a deficit when he came into office. Why this fact justifies racking up vastly more debt and bigger deficits is a logical mystery.

  • One of the things that really drove me crazy was the way in which college kids, in particular, are educated to think that ideology is dangerous and bad.

  • The GOP needs to figure out a way to become more appealing to new constituencies.

  • But it is one of these sort of mythologies about America and its intellectual history, that the right embraced this thing called social Darwinism, when it never did so.

  • If we say that anyone who 'moralizes' must be perfect morally then we are in effect saying no one can moralize.

  • America's political system used to be about the pursuit of happiness. Now More and more of us want to stop chasing it and have it delivered.

  • I think what we're seeing on a lot of parts of the right is people bending their positions and their principles on account of the fact that Donald Trump won.

  • Cultures grow on the vine of tradition.

  • Governing involves choosing and making choices between competing goods.

  • Nothing drives your opponents more crazy than being utterly reasonable. And nothing makes demonizing or delegitimizing your opponents easier than letting them shriek unreasonable things for you. The Republicans need to get back to being the party that elicits unreasonable shrieking from their opponents. Not the other way around.

  • Someone once noted that a 'gaffe' in Washington is when a politician accidentally tells the truth.

  • A lot of the things that Trump needs to do to be a popular president requires annoying his biggest fans.

  • Historians write favorably, you know, for example, about Stalin because he was doing big things.

  • I think there needs to be a meeting to set an agenda for more meetings about meetings.

  • The logical upshot of liberalism's hatred of hypocrisy is that it is better for the liar to champion lying, the glutton to advocate gluttony, the adulterer to celebrate adultery, than for someone to preach the right thing if he himself occasionally does the wrong thing. Better to let your failings define you and be happy about it, than to let your ideals define you but then fall short of them, for that opens you up to the charge of hypocrisy.

  • Whenever a Republican gets in office, all of a sudden progressives realize that federalism and state's rights aren't necessarily only about defending slavery or Jim Crow. They're actually about maximizing freedom.

  • But this is the kind of ass-clownery that stems from the fact that all philosophy looks weird when you don't have one.

  • Everyone understands that [democrat Senator Harry Reid] is deliberately lying. The man reads his lies from prepared texts. You can't read from a script and then claim you misspoke.

  • Fascism isn't a libertarian doctrine! It just isn't, never will be and it can't be cast as one.

  • [C]ontemporary liberalism stands on a foundation of assumptions and ideas integral to the larger fascist movement.

  • Are you a producer or a looter? If diversity were always and everywhere good we would be clamoring for more midgets in the NBA.

  • When I see hipsters wearing Mao hats or Lenin T-shirts, I'm grateful. It's like truth-in-labeling. For now I know you are: Woefully ignorant, morally stunted, purposively asinine, or all three.

  • The more you socialize the costs of personal liberty, the more license you give others to regulate it.

  • (T)he most important reason American leftists love France is that French elites say bad things about America. French intellectuals call us racist, stupid, imperialistic, simplistic, etc. ' and that alone is proof of their intellectualism. So long as you call America "racist," you could add that an enema is as good as a toothbrush and some professor of "communications theory" would applaud.

  • Capitalism is the greatest system ever created for alleviating general human misery, and yet it breeds ingratitude.

  • Americans are very smart about the things they care about, and ignorant about the things they don't.

  • There's nothing within science per se that says medical researchers must not experiment on human subjects; it is the imposition of ethical dogma that constrains the scientist.

  • The search for a moral equivalent of war continues to define American liberalism to this day.

  • [A] country without a word to describe its love for what is best within it is a country ill-equipped to defend what is best within it.

  • [American] liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say.

  • I think as - all in all, it's better to have a cool president than a not cool president.

  • Government money only pays for the "liberties" the government thinks you should have, and therefore it can determine how you exercise them. That turns liberties into privileges dispensed at the whim of the state.

  • Liberals are Nazis, and Nazis are liberals. And if you don't agree with me, you're a Nazi too.

  • The white male is the Jew of liberal fascism.

  • Christian socialism"). This is a difficult concept for modern liberals to grasp because they are used to thinking of the progressives as the people who cleaned up the food supply, pushed through the eight hour workday, and ended child labor. But liberals often forget that the progressives were imperialists, at home and abroad. They were the authors of Prohibition, the Palmer Raids, eugenics, loyalty oaths, and, in its modern incarnation, what many call "state capitalism.

  • I suppose in John Kerry's world good diplomacy lets the boys in the bar finish raping the girl for fear of causing a fuss. Okay, that was unfair.

  • Dissent is morally neutral. You can correctly call yourself a dissident because you like to kick puppies, but at the end of the day, you're just a jerk who likes to kick puppies.

  • If you're uncertain when life begins, why not give the unborn the benefit of the doubt and oppose abortion?

  • The mainstream perception that conservatives are close-minded and dogmatic while liberals are open-minded and free-thinking has it almost exactly backward. Liberal dogma is settled: The government should do good, where it can, whenever it can. That is President Obama's idea of pragmatism and bipartisanship: He's open to all ideas, from either side of the aisle, about how best to expand government and get the state more involved in our lives.

  • Seriously, in 2008 we elected a community organizer, state senator, college instructor first term senator over a guy who spent five years in a Vietnamese prison. And now he's lecturing us about how America's gone "soft"? Really?

  • When you treat reprehensible and ludicrous arguments with respect you have elevated the reprehensible and made the ludicrous a bit more reasonable. Having a serious argument with a Nazi makes the horror of the Holocaust a debatable point. Don't wrestle in the mud with pigs. You get dirty and the pig likes it.

  • I would also say Barack Obama has spent much, much, much, much more money than the Republicans.

  • We're all born idiots, and we only get over that condition as we get less young.

  • A week after his State of the Union address, political observers are still trying to figure out what President Obama's game is. That's because rhetorically and substantively, he seems to be in another world. ...

  • Those who say they dislike dogma, or 'certainty', tend to be liars, hypocrites, or simply wrong. What they really dislike is the dogma of those they disagree with. A society that was certain, certain beyond all certainty, that putting its citizens in death camps was wrong, would never put people in death camps. Such things are only possible when you're open to new ideas.

  • And on Thursday, President Obama seized the opportunity of the National Prayer Breakfast to forthrightly criticize the 'terrible deeds' . . . committed 'in the name of Christ.' ...

  • But there's a fourth interpretation: Obama can't leave his comfort zone. No president since Woodrow Wilson has been as enamored of abstract ideas or more sure that disagreement with him is proof of ignorance, bad faith or dogmatism. As a candidate, he insisted his real opponent was 'cynicism,' and in his address last week, he returned to this trite formulation, insisting again he was bravely battling the cynics.

  • [In] the post-Enlightenment world, science [has] taken the place of magic, miracles, and superstition.

  • Let's treat politicians like Twinkies. They have to disclose their ingredients - i.e., where their money is from - but beyond that, let the buyer beware.

  • [Progressives] think the Constitution is like Felix the Cat's magic bag: Look in there long enough and hard enough, and you can find anything.

  • A rising economic tide is bad for people who live off of the poverty of others.

  • The suggestion that liberals aren't moralizers is so preposterous it makes it hard for me to take any of them seriously when they wax indignant about "moralizers." Almost every day, they tell us what is moral or immoral to think and to say about race, taxes, abortion - you name it. They explain it would be immoral for me to spend more of my own money on my own children when that money could be spent by government on other people's children. In short, they think moralizing is fine. They just want to have a monopoly on the franchise.

  • Public unions are the country's foremost advocates for increased taxes at all levels of government.

  • Free trade has been proven, time and again, as a reliable path to economic development. It pushes the public and private sectors alike toward greater accountability and transparency. It lifts people out of poverty, and while it can force unsettling changes on a society, those changes prove to be worthwhile in a very short time.

  • The progressive notion of the state as a loving, caring parent is becoming a bipartisan affair.

  • If you write for the critics, only the critics will read you.

  • One of the overriding points of Liberal Fascism is that all of the totalitarian "isms" of the left commit the fallacy of the category error. They all want the state to be something it cannot be. They passionately believe the government can love you, that the state can be your God or your church or your tribe or your parent or your village or all of these things at once. Conservatives occasionally make this mistake, libertarians never do, liberals almost always do.

  • And in the minds of progressives you are free to live anyway you want so long as it's progressive.

  • [Libertarianism] is about curbing state power to let people be and do what they want. Liberalism is about using state power to make people do and be what liberals want. And that makes all the difference in the world.

  • Conservatives value economic liberty and moral security, while the liberal values economic security and moral liberty.

  • [There] is something fundamentally unpatriotic in the yearning to fundamentally transform your country.

  • I like vengeance as much as the next guy, if the next guy likes vengeance a whole lot....

  • Social distinctions tend to matter only at your own level and above.

  • Champions of Liberty get called Fascists by Champions of Statism

  • Hollywood's martyr-mythology leaves out the fact that the famed Hollywood Ten, for example, were in fact members of the Communist Party, which advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government in violation of the Smith Act and which took orders directly from Moscow.

  • The truth is France has been the chief Western advocate of normalizing relations with Iraq - one of its largest trading partners - for years, partly because France holds billions in IOUs from Iraq that wouldn't be redeemable by a new regime.

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