Mark Steyn Quotes
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When the family dies, the nation follows.
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Like most people, I have no wish to live in a community organized by community organizers.
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How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. How do you get away from it? Improvise.
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The Democrats smell blood and don't want to be told that it's their own.
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For states in demographic decline with ever more lavish social programs, the question is a simple one: Can they get real? Can they grow up before they grow old? If not, then they'll end their days in societies dominated by people with a very different worldview.
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A decade and a half after victory in the Cold War and end-of-history triumphalism, the 'what do you leave behind' question is more urgent than most of us expected. The Western world, as a concept, is dead and the West, as a matter of demographic fact, is dying.
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When you're taxing bovine flatulence emissions, there's nothing left to tax.
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Once you accept you're a child in the government nursery, why shouldn't Nanny tell you what to do?
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CNN? Oh, that's that network with Larry King, who, like the Son of Sam, is a native of Brooklyn. Used to be owned by Ted Turner, who, like the Cincinnati Strangler, is a native of Cincinnati. Now part of Time Warner, founded by the Warner Brothers, the oldest of whom, Harry Warner, like many Auschwitz guards, was a native of Poland.
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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.
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Alternatively, suppose Qaddafi winds up hanging from a lamppost in his favorite party dress. If you're a Third World dictator, what lessons would you draw? Qaddafi was the thug who came in from the cold, the one who (in the wake of Saddam's fall) renounced his nuclear program and was supposedly rehabilitated in the chancelleries of the West. He was a strong partner in the war on terrorism, according to U.S. diplomats. And what did Washington do? They overthrew him anyway.
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One lesson of Sept. 11 is that a government that tries to do everything is likely to do most of it badly.
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You can't uninvent things, you can only make them obsolete... Ronald Reagan understood that the surest method of neutralising any weapon is to make it obsolete.
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Jokes are one of the things that bind the culture. If you can't have jokes about everybody in society and if one group is hedged off and protected then that group can never truly be integrated.
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Those who can do. Those who can't form a supercommittee.
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"Moderate" Republicans such as Arnold Schwarzenegger like to boast that they're fiscal conservatives and social liberals. But the social liberalism always ends up burying the fiscal conservatism.
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Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not all European countries.
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The Democratic Party is uniquely virulently racist and pro-slavery to a degree unseen anywhere in the English-speaking world!
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Multiculturalism is a unicultural phenomenon.
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The United Auto Workers is AARP in an Edsel: It has three times as many retirees and widows as 'workers' (I use the term loosely). GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people.
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To expect the government to save you is to be a bystander in your own fate.
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The greatest crime of welfare isn't that it's a waste of money, but that it's a waste of people.
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In 1897, troops from the greatest empire the world had ever seen marched down London’s mall for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee. Seventy years later, Britain had government health care, a government-owned car industry, massive government housing, and it was a shriveled high-unemployment socialist basket-case living off the dwindling cultural capital of its glorious past. In 1945, America emerged from the Second World War as the preeminent power on earth. Seventy years later . . . Let’s not go there.
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For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ's Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population.