Mark Steyn Quotes
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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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If gun control bore any relation to homicide rates, Washington, DC would be the safest place in the country.
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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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In Europe, nothing is certain except death and welfare, and why let the former get in the way of the latter?
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How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. How do you get away from it? Improvise.
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Contemporary politics is all about phony energy, about running around slamming doors for the sake of it-or, more to the point, opening them and tossing through a huge sack of taxpayer dollars.
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In Britain, everything is policed except crime.
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Can't spell, can't spot fake Shakespeare, can't tell one wacky foreigner from another: it's increasingly obvious that Barbra is some deep sleeper planted by the Republicans to discredit the very concept of activist celebrities. Poor old Democrats, in thrall to her fundraising: people who need Barbra are the unluckiest people in the world.
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Hollywood gave us far more Muslim terrorists in the Eighties and Nineties than it has since 9/11.
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Big government makes small citizens.
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America is now a land that rewards failure - at the personal, corporate, and state level.
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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.
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Public interest criteria does not mean criteria that the public decides are in its interest. It means that the elite - via various appointed bodies - decide what the public's interest is for them.
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There's a kind of decadence about all this: If 9/11 was really an inside job, you wouldn't be driving around with a bumper sticker bragging that you were on to it. Fantasy is a by-product of security: it's the difference between hanging upside down in your dominatrix's bondage parlor after work on Friday and enduring the real thing for years on end in Saddam's prisons.
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[We] assume that social progress is like technological progress: one cannot uninvent the internal combustion engine, so how could one uninvent liberty?
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'As one is always obliged to explain when tiptoeing around this territory, I am not a racist, only a culturist. I believe Western culture - rule of law, universal suffrage - 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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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.
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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?
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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.
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Long before they slump into poverty, great powers succumb to a poverty of ambition.
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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.
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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.
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In the multicultural West, our values are that we have no values: we accord all values equal value; the wittering English feminist concerned that her tolerance is implicitly intolerant of the Sudanese wife-beater and compulsory clitorectomy scheduler.
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Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb; the grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the race who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world.