Mark Steyn Quotes

Big Government is erecting a panopticon state - one that sees everything, and regulates everything. It’s great “customer service,” except that you can never get out of the store.

Big Government is the small option: it's the guarantee of smaller freedom, smaller homes, smaller cars, smaller opportunities, smaller lives.

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?

The spirit of the age is: Ask not what your country can do for you, demand it.

Question: How much do you have to invest in the future before you've spent it and no longer have one?

LBJ held up Detroit as a model of what the Great Society could accomplish. He was right.

There may be many things wrong with the United States but only a blind fool who hasn't been paying attention for the last twenty years would hold up Europe as the alternative.

Those who can do. Those who can't form a supercommittee.

The Democratic Party is uniquely virulently racist and pro-slavery to a degree unseen anywhere in the English-speaking world!

The long-term cost of a welfare society is the infantilization of the population.

[We] assume that social progress is like technological progress: one cannot uninvent the internal combustion engine, so how could one uninvent liberty?

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.

The minute health care becomes a huge, unwieldy, expensive government bureaucracy it's a permanent feature of life and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

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.

The industrial powerhouse of 1950 [Detroit] is now a crime-ridden wasteland with a functioning literacy rate equivalent to West African basket-cases.

A big chunk of Western civilization, consciously or otherwise, has given the impression that it's dying to surrender to somebody, anybody. Reasonably enough, Islam figures: Hey, why not us?

Appeasement is a vote to live in the present tense, to hold the comforts of the moment.

When you're taxing bovine flatulence emissions, there's nothing left to tax.

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.

Hollywood gave us far more Muslim terrorists in the Eighties and Nineties than it has since 9/11.

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.

Government health care changes the relationship between the citizen and the state, and, in fact, I think it's an assault on citizenship.

The most basic of conservative principles is that if you reward bad behavior you get more of it.

It is surely only a matter of time before some federal judge finds the Constitution unconstitutional.

Long before they slump into poverty, great powers succumb to a poverty of ambition.

To expect the government to save you is to be a bystander in your own fate.

When Cromwell instructed his portraitist to paint him 'warts and all', he meant both halves of that equation. To teach the warts alone is morbid and unhealthy.

General Motors, like the other two geezers of the Old Three, is a vast retirement home with a small money-losing auto subsidiary.

[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.

The senator's actions in the hours and days after emerging from that pond tell us something ugly about Kennedy the man. That he got away with it tell us something ugly about American public life.

Obama's Nobel Peace Prize is an exquisite act of condescension from Norwegians, a dog biscuit and a pat on the head to the American hyperpower for agreeing to spay itself into a hyperpoodle.

One lesson of Sept. 11 is that a government that tries to do everything is likely to do most of it badly.

Anything that shifts power from the individual judgment of free citizens to government is a bad thing.

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.

Unchecked, government social programs are a security threat because they weaken the ultimate line of defense: the free-born citizen whose responsibilities are not subcontracted to the government.

But a society that has nothing to die for has nothing to live for . . .

It's not that I place less value on Palestinian lives, but that Chairman Arafat and his chums in Hamas do.

So-called "progressives" actively wage war on progress. . . . Ultimately, progressives are at war with mass prosperity.

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.

Absolute welfare corrupts absolutely.

In Britain, everything is policed except crime.

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.

...discussing cultural relativism with cultural relativists is like playing tennis with some guy who says, "Your ace is just a social construct.

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.

There is no conceivable amount of money worth telling the world that you were beaten up by Liza Minnelli.

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.

The president has borrowed more money to spend to less effect than anybody on the planet.

On the Continent and elsewhere in the West, native populations are aging and fading and being supplanted remorselessly by a young Muslim demographic.

The law functions as formal embodiment of a moral code, not as free-standing substitute for it.

“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.