Mark Steyn Quotes
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While Barack Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand new, even more unsustainable entitlement at the health care 'summit,' thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen - because they're part of the same story. It's just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They're at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is further upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided, instead, that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe.
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Big Government is the small option: it's the guarantee of smaller freedom, smaller homes, smaller cars, smaller opportunities, smaller lives.
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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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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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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.
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Like most people, I have no wish to live in a community organized by community organizers.
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It's not that I place less value on Palestinian lives, but that Chairman Arafat and his chums in Hamas do.
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“Secretary of State Clinton dared Iran on Monday to let her hold a town-hall meeting in Tehran.” That’s telling ’em. If the ayatollahs had a sense of humor, they’d call her bluff.
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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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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.
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[To] the progressive mind, the very concept of "the enemy" is obsolescent: there are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven't yet accommodated.
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[Charles] Manson wanted to start a race war. Nobody said he was leading some sort of charge about white supremacy.
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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.
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Those who can do. Those who can't form a supercommittee.
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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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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.
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How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. How do you get away from it? Improvise.
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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.
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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.
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Welfare culture is bad not just because, as in Europe, it's bankrupting the state, but because it enfeebles the citizenry, it erodes self-reliance and resourcefulness.
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The Democrats smell blood and don't want to be told that it's their own.
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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 story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government 'security,' large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time - the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and a ton of other stuff.
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No family of an American hostage has ever been prosecuted for paying a ransom for the return of their loved ones. The last thing we should ever do is to add to a family's pain.