John Derbyshire Quotes & Sayings

Practically anything you read or hear about racism, sexism, and homophobia is cant. — John Derbyshire

Steve Sailer gives us the real Barack Obama, who turns out to be very, very different - and much more interesting - than the bland healer/uniter image stitched together out of whole cloth this past six years by Obama's packager, David Axelrod. Making heavy use of Obama's own writings, which he admires for their literary artistry, Sailer gives the deepest insights I have yet seen into Obama's lifelong obsession with 'race and inheritance,' and rounds off his brilliant character portrait with speculations on how Obama's personality might play out in the Presidency. — John Derbyshire

Ninety percent of paid work is time-wasting crap. The world gets by on the other ten. — John Derbyshire

A very civilized thing, glass - almost an index of civilization. When civilization retreats, it leaves behind broken glass. — John Derbyshire

Education is a vast sea of lies, waste, corruption, crackpot theorizing, and careerist log-rolling. — John Derbyshire

The problem is hedonism. The problem is the preening vanity and selfishness of 'coming out,' of parading private inclinations, of a kind that repel normal people, as if those inclinations were, all by themselves, marks of authenticity and virtue, of suffering and oppression. — John Derbyshire

I never ponder counterfactuals. — John Derbyshire

Our political system is now run by the Big People for their own interests. If they ever deign to notice the Little People, it is with disdain and contempt. — John Derbyshire

The job of conservatives is to keep the Republican Party driving on the right-hand side of the road. There are many ways we do this. We argue, we publish, we lobby, we campaign for conservative candidates. Another thing we do is, when the GOP goes off the rails on really key issues - size of government, the National Question, Wilsonian adventures - we stay home on election day. — John Derbyshire

In matters editorial, I am a believer in totalitarian despotism. Most writers are lazy, difficult, selfish, thoughtless, and unreliable. — John Derbyshire

It was in 1742 that Christian Goldbach put forward his famous conjecture that every even number greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes. — John Derbyshire

I tell you, with complex numbers you can do anything. — John Derbyshire

Ultimately, however, as the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter pointed out, a powerful bureaucratic class is in the same relation to commerce as was the scorpion in Aesop to the dog on whose back he crossed the river. They will destroy commerce and establish socialism, even if it kills them, because that is their nature. — John Derbyshire

Asked if Stalin was an antisemite, Robert Conquest replied: Yes, but it hardly noticed. He was broadly and generously anti-human. — John Derbyshire

The sympathies of a well-adjusted person can easily be aroused by the plight of strangers. Indeed, the skillful writer of a novel, a play, or an opera can engage our emotions on behalf of people who are not only strangers to us, but who do not even exist! And a person whose emotions cannot be so aroused is not behaving normally. — John Derbyshire

What does the Right have to show for eight years of a Republican presidency? I supported George W. Bush in 2000 because I thought he had a conservative bone in his body somewhere. I supported him in 2004 because I thought him the lesser of two evils. At this point, I wouldn't let the fool park his car in my driveway. Bruce Bartlett was right, every damn word. — John Derbyshire

I preach that odd defiant melancholy that sees the dreadful loneliness of the human soul and the pitiful disaster of human life as ever redeemable and redeemed by compassion, friendship and love. — John Derbyshire

He [Mencken] was an autodidact, with all the misplaced confidence and all the astonishing gaps that characterize that breed. Not many of us would venture to write a book about democracy without ever having read de Tocqueville, nor embark on a translation of Nietzsche with only a sketchy knowledge of German. — John Derbyshire

Biophobia is as much a part of a politician's basic equipment as a sharp suit. — John Derbyshire

Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy. — John Derbyshire

Books, in the plural lose their solidity of substance and become a gas, filling all available space. — John Derbyshire

(which has inspired at least one novel, Apostolos Doxiadis's Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture29). — John Derbyshire

If you're not thinking about numbers, you're probably not thinking. — John Derbyshire

You are inhuman brutes determined to rob us of our spiritual consolations and sweep away the moral foundations of our civilization, and on the other: You are obscurantist ignoramuses who'd like to shut down progress and drag us all back to the 16th century, with kings and priests telling us what to think. — John Derbyshire

Conservatism is pessimistic, with a negative tendency - which we mostly resist - towards despair. Liberals are optimists, with a negative tendency, rarely resisted, towards utopianism. — John Derbyshire

Razib Khan Hired And Fired By The New York Times, Both On The Same Day! — John Derbyshire

The more depressed and maladjusted you are, the more likely it is that you are seeing things right, with minimal bias — John Derbyshire

The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b. who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list. — John Derbyshire

I am a homophobe, though a mild and tolerant one, and a racist, though an even more mild and tolerant one, and those things are going to be illegal pretty soon, the way we are going. — John Derbyshire

As a result of these news stories, millions of people must have become aware of "niggardly," who otherwise would never have heard it, let alone thought to use it. If this is right, and the word has a new currency, it is probably not the currency I would wish for. The word's new lease of life is probably among manufacturers and retailers of sophomoric humor. I bet that even as I write, some adolescent boys, in the stairwell of some high school somewhere in America, are accusing each other of being niggardly, and sniggering at their own outrageous wit. I bet ... Wait a minute. Sniggering? Oh, my God ... — John Derbyshire

A few decades back one could get a pretty good idea of someone's overall political stance by finding out how much he hates rich people; the equivalent today is finding out how much he hates white people. — John Derbyshire

The arts and humanities are not mere entertainment, to be turned to for relaxation after a busy day spent solving differential equations; they are our templates for living, for governing ourselves and our societies. Nor can science offer any help with the knottier problems besetting the human race. It can remedy bad smells, bad pains, and bad roads, but not bad behavior, bad government, or bad ideas. — John Derbyshire

Politics, as any observer of the modern world knows, is the enemy of economics, everywhere and always. — John Derbyshire