William Francis Buckley Quotes
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Boredom is the deadliest poison.
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In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.
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The more complicated and powerful the job, the more rudimentary the preparation for it.
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Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.
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Kennedy after all has lots of glamour - Gregory Peck with an atom bomb in his holster.
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When it is not possible to reason with holy warriors, it is necessary to immobilize them or crush them.
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They [Theodore White and Lou Harris] took turns weeping, and finally concluded that Rockefeller got the votes of everyone in California who is a Negro, a Jew, a Mexican, and a college graduate, while Goldwater got the votes of every millionaire. Which certainly makes California the land of opportunity.
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I profoundly believe it takes a lot of practice to become a moral slob.
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I get satisfaction of three kinds. One is creating something, one is being paid for it and one is the feeling that I haven't just been sitting on my ass all afternoon.
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Liberals, it has been said, are generous with other peoples' money, except when it comes to questions of national survival when they prefer to be generous with other people's freedom and security.
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Presley brought an excitement to singing, in part because rock and roll was greeted as his invention, but for other reasons not so widely reflected on: Elvis Presley had the most beautiful singing voice of any human being on earth.
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Old ladies photographed by CBS who announced that they would die of malnutrition if Reagan's bill were passed could probably have saved themselves their impending penury by the simple device of applying to the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists for scale every time they were featured by Dan Rather or whoever.
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The largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques which, in education as well as the arts, are out to impose upon the nation their modish fads and fallacies, and have nearly succeeded in doing so. In this cultural issue, we are, without reservations, on the side of excellence (rather than "newness") and of honest intellectual combat (rather than conformity).
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Decent people should ignore politics, if only they could be confident that politics would ignore them
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They are men and women who tend to believe that the human being is perfectible and social progress predictable, and that the instrument for effecting the two is reason; that truths are transitory and empirically determined; that equality is desirable and attainable through the action of state power; that social and individual differences, if they are not rational, are objectionable, and should be scientifically eliminated; that all people and societies strive to organize themselves upon a rationalist and scientific paradigm.
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All adventure is now reactionary.
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I grew up, as reported, in a large family of Catholics without even a decent ration of tentativeness among the lot of us about our religious faith.
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Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.
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Enthusiasm for conservation can be fashioned into a nasty weapon for those who dislike business on general principles.
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A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling 'Stop!'
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Conservatism is the tacit acknowledgement that all that is finally important in human experience is behind us; that the crucial explorations have been undertaken, and that it is given to man to know what are the great truths that emerged from them.
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One must recently have lived on or close to a college campus to have a vivid intimation of what has happened. It is there that we see how a number of energetic social innovators, plugging their grand designs, succeeded over the years in capturing the liberal intellectual imagination. And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things. Run just about everything. There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals'.
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He was a conservative all right, but invariably he gave the impression that he was a conservative because he was surrounded by liberals; that he had been a revolutionist if that had been required in order to be socially disruptive.
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Everything I do and say and the way I do and say it annoys me.