William Francis Buckley Quotes
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Socialize the individual's surplus and you socialize his spirit and creativeness.
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Before there was Ronald Reagan there was Barry Goldwater, and before there was Barry, there was National Review , and before there was National Review there was Bill Buckley with a spark in his mind.
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I won't insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said.
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The amount of money and of legal energy being given to prosecute hundreds of thousands of Americans who are caught with a few ounces of marijuana makes no sense.
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I would like to electrocute everyone who uses the word 'fair' in connection with income tax policies.
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I find it easier to believe in God than to believe Hamlet was deduced from the molecular structure of a mutton chop.
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Only government can cause inflation, preserve monopoly, and punish enterprise.
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Treatment is not now available for almost half of those who would benefit from it. Yet we are willing to build more and more jails in which to isolate drug users even though at one-seventh the cost of building and maintaining jail space and pursuing, detaining, and prosecuting the drug user, we could subsidize commensurately effective medical care and psychological treatment.
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One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed - different plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgement of defeat.
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I catch fire and find the reserves of courage and assertiveness to speak up. When that happens I get quite carried away. My blood gets hot my brow wet I become unbearably and unconscionably sarcastic and bellicose I am girded for a total showdown.
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I will not cede more power to the state. I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power, as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arived at yesterday at the voting booth. That is a program of sorts, is it not? It is certainly program enough to keep conservatives busy, and Liberals at bay. And the nation free.
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There is an inverse relationship between reliance on the state and self-reliance.
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Norman Mailer decocts matters of the first philosophical magnitude from an examination of his own ordure, and I am not talking about his books.
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I am, I fully grant, a phenomenon, but not because of any speed in composition. I asked myself the other day, "Who else, on so many issues, has been so right so much of the time?" I couldn't think of anyone.
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I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard.
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Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.
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Scientists are people who build the Brooklyn Bridge and then buy it.
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It was rumored, in 1946, that the hangman in Nuremberg adjusted the nooses of some of the condemned to magnify the pain of suffocation. Such sadism was not called for then and is not called for now. But if fornication is wrong, there is no denying that it can bring pleasure. The death of Saddam Hussein at rope's end brings a pleasure that is undeniable, and absolutely chaste in its provenance.
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The Beatles are not merely awful. I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are godawful.
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As a businessman, Frank Lorenzo gives capitalism a bad name.
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Boredom is the deadliest poison.
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Some of my instincts are reprehensible.
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A relatively small and eternally quarrelsome country in Western Europe, fountainhead of rationalist political manias, militarily impotent, historically inglorious during the past century, democratically bankrupt, Communist-infiltrated from top to bottom.
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Stick me in a confessional and ask the question: Sir, if you had the authority, would you forbid smoking in America? You'd get a solemn and contrite, Yes.