Ilana Mercer Quotes & Sayings

Demonstrators for a government takeover of medicine have a right to discuss their demands, but no right to enact these demands ... 'Rights, as our founding fathers conceived them, are not claims to economic goods, but freedoms of action. — Ilana Mercer

[M]embers of the media-monetary-military-congressional complex are immoral and have an allergy to the truth. — Ilana Mercer

Whatever open-border libertarians think about immigration law, once the immigration scofflaw steals, trespasses, or vandalizes private property, said alien is guilty of crimes. To say, moreover, that the state's laws made masses of men and women commit such crimes is to voice the philosophy of determinism, not individualism. — Ilana Mercer

A depraved culture supports a depraved politics and vice versa. — Ilana Mercer

In the rare event that the Supreme Court refuses to play along there is always a perfectly legal, extra-constitutional, quasi-legislative, quasi-executive, quasi-judicial, 'independent' regulatory commission or executive agency to kill off or override constitutional protections. — Ilana Mercer

The only time Republicans will shake fists and point fingers is over a war delayed, one that isn't led by the US, or a war waged without the necessary conviction (read collateral damage). — Ilana Mercer

We're not all the same. A common liberal refrain ... is that differences between individuals are statistically more significant than those between cultural, ethnic, and racial groups. I don't see why the fact of inter-individual differences would nullify inter-group variance. That's liberal logic for you. — Ilana Mercer

From the fact that most Americans want others to fund or subsidize their healthcare, it does not follow that they have such a right. A need is not a right. A man's life, liberty and the products of his labor were not intended to be up for grabs by grubby, greedy majorities. — Ilana Mercer

A balanced-budget requirement implies is that government has the constitutional right to spend as much as it takes in; that government is permitted to waste however much revenue it can extract from wealth producers, and that the bums must merely bring into balance what was stolen (taxes) with what is squandered (spending). — Ilana Mercer

The Big-Media collective is slow, stupid and shackled by ideology. Reality must bite them before they'll recognize it, much less report it. — Ilana Mercer

Liberals can always be trusted to see God in Mumia Abu-Jamal and the devil in the Pope. — Ilana Mercer

The strength of ideas rests on their relationship to reality. — Ilana Mercer

On the unfalsifiable theory of global warming:Evidence that contradicts the global warming theory, climate kooks enlist as evidence for the correctness of their theory; every permutation in weather patterns warm or cold is said to be a consequence of that warming or proof of it. — Ilana Mercer

To Donal Trump, making America great means making the people great. To the political cast, conversely, making America great means making government great. — Ilana Mercer

In the service of statist sameness, the male-vs.-female biological imperatives are rapidly, if reflexively, being dissolved. Dissolving 'The Constitution of Man' is dangerous to civilization, for a subservient, effete civilization will not survive the onslaught of Islam. — Ilana Mercer

In a free society, the 'vision thing' is left to private individuals; civil servants are kept on a tight leash, because free people understand that a 'visionary' bureaucrat is a voracious one and that the grander the government ... the poorer and less free the people. — Ilana Mercer

A silly society is a youth-obsessed society: To the Chinese, who appreciate the value of experience, the greater the ratio in a team of grey 'hairs and no-hairs' to 'black hairs' the faster and better a task will be completed. The opposite assumption obtains in the youth-obsessed U.S. — Ilana Mercer

The Republican Party under Genghis Bush did the devil's work. Bar the sainted Ron Paul, not a dog of a Republican lifted his leg in protest of the unjust war on Iraq. — Ilana Mercer

Adding an overarching tier of tyrants the EU to European governments has benefited Europeans as a second hangman enhances the health of a condemned man. — Ilana Mercer

A crucial difference between lite libertarians and the Right kind is that to the former, the idea of liberty is propositional - a deracinated principle, unmoored from the realities of history, hierarchy, biology, tradition, culture, values. Conversely, the paleolibertarian grasps that ordered liberty has a civilizational dimension, stripped of which the libertarian non-aggression axiom, by which we all must live, cannot endure. — Ilana Mercer

Donald Trump is acting as a political Samson that threatens to bring the den of iniquity crashing down on its patrons. — Ilana Mercer

The neoconservative pseudo-conservatives speak like Tocqueville but act like Robespierre. — Ilana Mercer

He who saves you from war is better than he who sends you to war. — Ilana Mercer

Big media are all about the angle, the spin. Look to the overarching theme that runs through each and every news story. Be hip to the meta-narrative peddled. — Ilana Mercer

Quotas are a perfectly logical, if diabolical, extension of the regulation of private property courtesy of the Civil Rights Act, whereby in an attempt to shape American society in politically pleasing ways, people have been coerced into liking, hiring or renting against their will or better judgment. — Ilana Mercer

Republicans are the drag queens of politics. Peel away the pules for family, faith and fetuses and one discovers either neoconservative welfare-warfare statists or global social democrats ... — Ilana Mercer

Men in authority are now a threatened minority. — Ilana Mercer

Inviting an invasion by foreigners and instigating one against them are two sides of the same neoconservative coin. — Ilana Mercer

Speaker Ryan, who voted for the $1.1 trillion 2016 Omnibus Spending Bill, demanding Trump show him his conservative credentials is as though a guy who never built a thing were to mock a man who has built lots of things. — Ilana Mercer

Barack the boy was raised by his white maternal grandparents; his Kenyan father abandoned him. The qualities Americans appeared to find universally appealing in the ambitious, affable Obama his confidence and calm, and his commitment to community and kin, education and excellence these came from Kansas, not Kenya. — Ilana Mercer

The original Constitution is a dead letter, having suffered decades of legislative, executive and judicial usurpation. The natural- and common law traditions, once loadstars for lawmakers, have been buried under the rubble of legislation and statute. However much one shovels the muck of lawmaking aside, natural justice and the Founders' original intent remain buried too deep to exhume. — Ilana Mercer

In the bureaucracy, incentives will forever be inverted. Failure results in success: in more funds, more training, more time off. — Ilana Mercer

The free flow of people across borders is not to be confused with the free flow of goods across borders. Free trade is a positive-sum game. Contrary to illegal immigration, it is always invited, consensual and hence mutually beneficial to the parties involved. — Ilana Mercer

Progressive policies lead to a regressive society. — Ilana Mercer

But public works, economic protectionism, cheap money, 'deficit-financed government spending,' and 'the animal spirits of the spendthrift' in the service of boosting 'consumption demand' ... Doesn't Keynesianism simply appeal to the worst in human nature? — Ilana Mercer

Obamacare is a marketplace in the same way the Knockout Game is a game. — Ilana Mercer

Incarcerating people for their [drug] consumption choices has the consistency of arresting a survivor of suicide for attempted murder . — Ilana Mercer

The great Roman statesman Cicero observed that, 'Not to know what happened before one was born is to be always a child.' In our ignorance of the values that form part of our history and heritage, we Americans have become perpetual children. — Ilana Mercer

The nice men in periwigs who came up with the Fourth Amendment were recklessly naive to imagine that branches of a government, each of whose power is enhanced when the power of the other branches grows, would serve to check one another. — Ilana Mercer

Any opinion writer worth his salt would have rejected the quaint notion that certain eternally aggrieved identity groups have exclusive linguistic rights to words in the English language. — Ilana Mercer

Think of mass immigration into America as a global 'right of return. — Ilana Mercer

Dance, in general, has become more atavistic than artistic. — Ilana Mercer

By going on the defensive ... libertarians are, inadvertently, conceding that speech should be policed for propriety, and that those who violate standards set by the PC set are somehow defective on those grounds alone and deserve to be purged from "polite" company. — Ilana Mercer

To listen to the nation's psychiatric gurus is to come to believe that crimes are caused, not committed. Perpetrators don't do the crime, but are driven to their dirty deeds by a confluence of uncontrollable factors, victims of societal forces or organic brain disease. — Ilana Mercer

Profits and prices are the street signs of the economy. Only fools flout them. The much-maligned price system works not only to secure supply but to conserve. — Ilana Mercer

The proposition that economist Ludwig von Mises was a feminist is an apodictic impossibility. — Ilana Mercer

From dwarf tossing to drug taking: The legislator has no place in voluntary exchanges between consenting adults, as dodgy and as dangerous as these might be. — Ilana Mercer

The world mistakes Palestinian military weakness for moral innocence . — Ilana Mercer

Our unhappy trek through the wreck of the New South Africa begins with the facts, nothing but the facts. — Ilana Mercer

Breaking into a country signals quite reliably a willingness to break yet more of the invaded country's laws. — Ilana Mercer

Christianity in our country is a lot like what the Ducksters profess. No longer doctrinaire or demanding, the mishmash of pop-religion practiced in churches across America is an extension of the therapeutic culture: festooned with feelings, mostly misdirected. Untempered by intelligent interpretation of scripture ... American pop-theology: light on doctrine, heavy on hellfire and damnation. — Ilana Mercer

The Donald has the political players rising on their hind legs in defense of their realm. And he has hitherto shattered the totems and taboos these players enforce. Debated as never before are vexations like immigration, Islam, and, yes, the legitimacy of the Republican National Committee. — Ilana Mercer

Rights give rise to legal claims. Ultimately, the more rights animals are granted, the greater the legal lien exercised on their behalf against the liberty and property of people. — Ilana Mercer

Jefferson never entertained the folly that he was of immigrant stock. He considered the English settlers of America courageous conquerors, much like his Saxon forebears, to whom he compared them. To Jefferson, early Americans were the contemporary carriers of the Anglo-Saxon project. — Ilana Mercer

Chinese mercantilism is not free trade, but it is far better than American militarism. — Ilana Mercer

Whether it is committed by a group operating within or without the law, terrorism is still terrorism. — Ilana Mercer

The end result of positively reinforcing bad behavior is that you get more of it. The culmination of a failure to punish predators is a debased, dissolute, slum-dog society in which, by legal decree, the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper. — Ilana Mercer

What is more obscene: the idea that one can apologize for the hubris and deceit that is Obama and his health care, or the actual need some have for an apology from an entity so evil that he would toy with the lives of millions as though they were insects and he God? This is hard to tell. — Ilana Mercer

B. B. King is no match for Johann Sebastian Bach. — Ilana Mercer

Free market is a market in which groups and individuals are differently represented. Parity in prosperity and performance between differently able individuals and groups can be achieved only by playing socialist leveler. — Ilana Mercer

Socialism is humanity's second nature. All politicians do is turn human vice into votes. — Ilana Mercer

The military works like government; is financed like government, and sports the same inherent malignancies and perverse incentives of government, down to the racial-spoils system. — Ilana Mercer

Think of lab rats racing through a maze, when you watch the sub-intelligent, dual-panel 'dialogue' ... Each rat runs with a designated, neatly bifurcated (Republican or Democratic) political orthodoxy. Each is a 'maze-bright' rat, and not the possessor and giver of any truth. — Ilana Mercer

Government commissions are where accountability goes to die. — Ilana Mercer

Gays have become colossal bores. Once interesting and iconoclastic, all they seem to crave nowadays is the State's pension and seal of approval. They ought to go back to the days of the Stonewall Riots, when the police's violations of privacy and private property were the object of their anger and activism. — Ilana Mercer

Government jobs are not an addition to the country's payroll; they are an increase in the nation's payload. — Ilana Mercer

Like environmentalists, politicians generally privilege flora and fauna over folks. — Ilana Mercer

The psychiatric endeavor - voodoo, really - is premised on the medicalization of misconduct. — Ilana Mercer

Because of the oil-and-water relationship governments have cultivated between ethics and political economy, speaking in plain terms - spelling it out as it is - as become foreign to the public. So here goes: When government sports a surplus, this implies that the political pickpockets have stolen more funds than they can possibly dream of spending. The property is not theirs to keep! Conversely, when deficits are reported, this means that the kleptomaniacs have not been able to steal sufficient funds to cover their profligacy. — Ilana Mercer

Like or dislike her, the British Queen is harmless. Her role is purely ceremonial. Conversely, life and death are in the hands of the monarch who sits in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. — Ilana Mercer

Liberals retain a totemic attachment to the Freudian idea that traumatic toilet training is destiny. — Ilana Mercer

Survival - of the species of the culture of the faith - has a biological dimension. What would have befallen our Hominid ancestors had they implemented gender parity in their hunter-gatherer societies - sometimes the women hunt while the men forage and mind the kids, and vice versa? — Ilana Mercer

If the Bill of Rights was intended to place strict limits on federal power and protect individual and locality from the national government the 14th Amendment effectively defeated that purpose by placing the power to enforce the Bill of Rights in federal hands, where it was never intended to be. — Ilana Mercer

Round and round will Americans be compelled to ride on a mindless, manufactured, racial carousel ... for without it, the edifice of an industry built upon grievance and excuse-making is destined to collapse. — Ilana Mercer

The National Education Association is the al-Qaida of education. — Ilana Mercer

In an effort to create reality on the ground - instead of reporting on it - the American media seem to color events by refracting them through a sickeningly sentimental prism. — Ilana Mercer

Demographics need not be destiny. The waning West became what it is not by out-breeding the undeveloped world. We were once great not because of huge numbers, but due to human capital people of superior ideas and abilities, capable of innovation, exploration, science, philosophy. — Ilana Mercer

A propagandized population has a hard time choosing worthy heroes. It is high time Americans celebrate the Anti-Federalists, for they were correct in predicting the fate of freedom after Philadelphia. — Ilana Mercer

According to the disease theory of delinquency, the arsonist has 'pyromania,' the thief 'kleptomania,' and Bill Clinton is not promiscuous, but a 'sex-addict. — Ilana Mercer

There is no such thing as absolute free speech; there are only absolute rights of private property. Speech is circumscribed by private property rights. You may deliver a disquisition in my virtual or actual living room only if I permit you to so do. — Ilana Mercer

Ludwig von Mises referred to Ayn Rand as 'the most courageous man in America.' If that doesn't say it all about the economist's man-centric frame of reference, I don't know what does. — Ilana Mercer

A brave nation fights because it must ; a cowardly nation fights because it can. — Ilana Mercer

There are just too many Americans grubbing for free stuff and a preponderance of Republicans eager to parcel it out in exchange for power. — Ilana Mercer

Prosperity and penury do not turn on gyno-centric and gay matters. But leftist statists and libertarians of the left place these wedge issues at the forefront of the fight for freedom. [ ... ] Every bit as bad as liberals, "libertarian" political operators are prepared to shed political blood over any imagined sign of bigotry. — Ilana Mercer

Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket of Africa, is now its dust bowl. — Ilana Mercer

By the standards of honest, if unorthodox, accounting, government workers don't pay taxes, but are paid out of taxes. In other words, they pay taxes out of money confiscated from taxpayers, who, in turn, pay taxes twice: on their own income and on the income of members of the bureaucracy. At the very least, this should disqualify state workers from voting. — Ilana Mercer

In democratic South Africa, dispossession is nine-tenths of the law. — Ilana Mercer

The cable commentariat is a cog in the corpulent D.C. fleshpot. — Ilana Mercer

If for harming himself a man forfeits his freedom, then he was never free in the first place. — Ilana Mercer

Libya is a war of the womb. A product of the romantic minds of women Samantha Power, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice who fantasize about an Arab awakening. It is estrogen-driven paternalism on steroids. — Ilana Mercer

Cognitive consonance is what writing in the Age of the idiot is all about. The key to success in the scribbling profession is to strike the right balance of mediocrity in writing and thinking, which invariably entails echoing one of two party lines, poorly. — Ilana Mercer

The rights to life, liberty and property were not meant to be subject to the vagaries of majority rule. — Ilana Mercer

Islamic terrorism is the handiwork of people who've heeded, not hijacked, Islam. — Ilana Mercer

Certain bedrock principles arguably a true conservative mindset dictate a respect for life. A life-conserving sensibility means that guns are meant for self-defense, not for needless killing[ ... ] This gun owner is no gun nut; but a right-to-self-defense fanatic. — Ilana Mercer

Still - and for all Obama's heavy hinting to the contrary - Islam has no "human rights." The ideas of individual rights and the dignity of man are distinctly Western, an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. And while dialogue is dignified; dhimmitude is not, even if it achieves a desired, if temporary, effect. — Ilana Mercer

[G]lobal warming, that manufactured monomania. — Ilana Mercer

Whether arrived at through reason or revelation ... natural law is the highest law known to man. It is anchored in the very existential nature of man and is therefore a priori just. — Ilana Mercer

Hollywood no longer offers entertainment. Instead, activism has replaced acting, and sermons have supplanted stories. Instead of a good yarn, you get a yawn. — Ilana Mercer

Antitrust laws ought to be deployed, not against business, but to bust this two-party monopoly, which subverts competition in government and rewards the colluding quislings with sinecures in perpetuity. — Ilana Mercer

You didn't build that' will be Obama's political epitaph: With these remarks, Obama has come out of the closet as a most odious collectivist, who believes religiously that government predation is a condition for production. Or, put simply, that the parasite created the host. — Ilana Mercer