Mark Steyn Quotes & Sayings

While Barack Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand new, even more unsustainable entitlement at the health care 'summit,' thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen - because they're part of the same story. It's just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They're at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is further upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided, instead, that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe. — Mark Steyn

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. — Mark Steyn

Apparently the pro-choice types who jump up and down in the street demanding that you keep your rosaries off their ovaries are entirely relaxed about the government getting its bureaucratics all over your lymphatics. — Mark Steyn

I don't think Donald Trump is a conservative. I think his line on China for example, that he's going to talk tough to China. China didn't create Social Security, Medicare. China isn't spending a fifth of a billion dollars every hour that it doesn't have. — Mark Steyn

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? — Mark Steyn

How ridiculous! You're going to have the first black president apologize for slavery? — Mark Steyn

Indeed, if I understand this global-warming business correctly, the danger is that the waters will rise and drown the whole of Massachusetts, New York City, Long Island, the California coast and a few big cities on the Great Lakes - in other words, every Democratic enclave will be wiped out leaving only the solid Republican heartland. Politically speaking, for conservatives there's no downside to global warming. — Mark Steyn

But in practice the lack of belief in divine presence is just as likely to lead to humans avoiding responsibility: if there's nothing other than the here and now, who needs to settle disputes at all? All you have to do is manage to defer them till after you're dead--which is the European electorates' approach to their unaffordable social programs. The meek's prospects of inheriting the earth are considerably diminished in a post-Christian society: chances are they'll just get steamrollered by more motivated types. — Mark Steyn

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. — Mark Steyn

A few weeks after the Climategate emails were released, Dr Sprigg spoke at the 13th Energy & Environment Expo in Phoenix177: Focusing closely on the Climategate scandal, in which leaked emails revealed IPCC gatekeepers hid, manipulated, and destroyed scientific data that contradicted claims of substantial human-induced global warming, Sprigg said the scandal has harmed the movement's scientific credibility. — Mark Steyn

The United States has the most powerful government, with the longest reach, of any nation in history. It is also the Brokest Nation in History. Resolving that contradiction is unlikely to be pretty. — Mark Steyn

The free world is shuffling into a psychological bondage whose chains are mostly of our own making. — Mark Steyn

The state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood - health care, child care, care of the elderly - to the point where it's effectively severed its citizens from humanity's primal instincts, not the least the survival instinct...They corrode the citizen's sense of self-reliance to a potentially fatal degree. — Mark Steyn

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. — Mark Steyn

The greatest crime of welfare isn't that it's a waste of money, but that it's a waste of people. — Mark Steyn

If the IMF is correct (a big if), China will be the planet's No.1 economy by 2016. That means whoever's elected in November next year will be the last president of the United States to preside over the world's dominant economic power. — Mark Steyn

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

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. — Mark Steyn

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. — Mark Steyn

I think at a certain level compared - as was pointed out earlier, compared to what is happening in Europe, the United States still gets the safe-haven money. But underlying that, the United States is not the safe haven but perhaps the most dangerous place of all. — Mark Steyn

I mean, Iceland is Iceland. It can't do damage to anybody unless you're Icelandic. But the United States can drag down the entire western economy. And I think what we are seeing is simply a reflection of reality. This is not, I'm sorry, but this is not a AAA nation. — Mark Steyn

Even if you don't mind Romneycare, or the abortion flip-flop, or any of the rest, there's a more basic problem: He's not a natural campaigner, and on the stump he instinctively recoils from any personal connection with the voters. — Mark Steyn

The Western front is the important one in this war - the intersection between Islam and a liberal democratic tradition so mired in self-loathing it would rather destroy our civilization just to demonstrate its multicultural bona fides. — Mark Steyn

It's an Irish Republican rebel ballad from the 1840s. The reason I know is because I was once in a bar in Liverpool and a couple of lads started singing it and a couple others objected and a fight broke out. As a loyal subject of the Crown, I was on the side of the objectors. We eventually prevailed, but, even if we hadn't, 'A Nation Once Again' is a fine song to get your head kicked into, at least when compared to 'Believe' by Cher, which would rank pretty high on the list of numbers I'd least like to be listening to as my eye's gouged out and I fall into a coma, although it would be a merciful release. — Mark Steyn

Alternatively, suppose Qaddafi winds up hanging from a lamppost in his favorite party dress. If you're a Third World dictator, what lessons would you draw? Qaddafi was the thug who came in from the cold, the one who (in the wake of Saddam's fall) renounced his nuclear program and was supposedly rehabilitated in the chancelleries of the West. He was a strong partner in the war on terrorism, according to U.S. diplomats. And what did Washington do? They overthrew him anyway. — Mark Steyn

[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. — Mark Steyn

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

When a man doesn't know the meaning of the word 'fear', that might just be a deficiency in his education. — Mark Steyn

Those who can do. Those who can't form a supercommittee. — Mark Steyn

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

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. — Mark Steyn

So there was President Obama giving his bazillionth speech on health care, droning yet again that 'now is the hour when we must seize the moment,' the same moment he's been seizing every day of the week for the past year, only this time his genius photo-op guys thought it would look good to have him surrounded by men in white coats. — Mark Steyn

The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government 'security,' large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time - the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and a ton of other stuff. — Mark Steyn

Once a fellow's enjoying the fruits of government health care and all the rest, he couldn't give a hoot about the general societal interest; he's got his, and if it's going to bankrupt the state of a generation hence, well, as long as they can keep the checks coming till he's dead, it's fine by him. — Mark Steyn

They have our soul who have our bonds - and the world was more fortunate in who had London's bonds than America is seventy years later. Britain's eclipse by its wayward son was a changing of the guard, not a razing of the palace. — Mark Steyn

Three quotes from the same column:
Self-reliance
"work"
is intimately connected to human dignity
"purpose."
"Work" and "purpose" are intimately connected: Researchers at the University of Michigan, for example, found that welfare payments make one unhappier than a modest income honestly earned and used to provide for one's family.
If you're wondering why every Big Government program assumes you're a feeble child, that's because a citizenry without "work and purpose" is ultimately incompatible with liberty. — Mark Steyn

The end-game for statists is very obvious. If you expand the bureaucratic class and you expand the dependent class, you can put together a permanent electoral majority. In political terms, a welfare check is a twofer: you're assuring yourself of the votes of both the welfare recipient and of the mammoth bureaucracy required to process his welfare. — Mark Steyn

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

Nixon's avowedly 'square' White House was, in fact, less cheesy than Clinton's Lite FM programming and more confident than the Kennedys' culturally craven collect-the-set approach. — Mark Steyn

If gun control bore any relation to homicide rates, Washington, DC would be the safest place in the country. — Mark Steyn

We live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are children if they're serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President Clinton's Oval Office ... — Mark Steyn

For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ's Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population. — Mark Steyn

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. — Mark Steyn

Once it's no longer accepted that something is wrong, all the laws in the world will avail you naught. The law functions as a formal embodiment of a moral code, not as a free-standing substitute for it. — Mark Steyn

But, in an "Islamophobic" West, the new ground rules were quickly established: Islam trumped feminism, trumped homosexuality, trumped everything. In speeches around the globe, the 44th President of the United States affected a cool equidistance between his national interests and those of others. He was less "the leader of the Free World" than the Bystander-in-Chief, and thus the perfect emblem of a western world content to be spectators in their own fate. — Mark Steyn

Americans and other Westerners who want their families to enjoy the blessings of life in a free society should understand that the life we've led since 1945 in the Western world is very rare in human history. Our children are unlikely to enjoy anything so placid, and may well spend their adult years in an ugly and savage world unless we decide that who and what we are is worth defending. — Mark Steyn

He loved Minnesota's flora and fauna and seemed ill-suited as either a fawner or floorer, a — Mark Steyn

Welfare culture is bad not just because, as in Europe, it's bankrupting the state, but because it enfeebles the citizenry, it erodes self-reliance and resourcefulness. — Mark Steyn

We immigrants can sometimes sound a little hysterical about this because we come from places that have tried this and we know where it leads. Anybody who's lived in countries with socialized health care knows that it becomes the dominant political issue. — Mark Steyn

Jesse Jackson's living depends on the maintenance of an African-American victim culture — Mark Steyn

Mitt has a ton of consultants, and not one of them thought he needed a credible answer on Bain or taxes? — Mark Steyn

What happened to those men and women at Fort Hood had a horrible symbolism: Members of the best trained, best equipped fighting force on the planet gunned down by a guy who said a few goofy things no one took seriously. And that's the problem: America has the best troops and fiercest firepower, but no strategy for throttling the ideology that drives the enemy - in Afghanistan and in Texas. — Mark Steyn

Faced with public discontent about the statist agenda, the Condescendi look out the window at the unlovely mob in their "Don't treat on me" T-shirts and sneer, "The peasants are revolting." You oppose illegal immigration? You're a xenophobe. Gay marriage? Homophobe. The Ground Zero mosque? Islamaphobe. If that's the choice, I'd rather be damned as a racist and sexist. The evolution from -isms to phobias is part of the medicalization of dissent: the Conformicrats simply declare your position as a form of mental illness. — Mark Steyn

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. — Mark Steyn

Everyone's for a free Tibet, but no one's for freeing Tibet. So Tibet will stay unfree - as unfree now as it was when the first Free Tibet campaigner slapped the very first "FREE TIBET" sticker on the back of his Edsel. Idealism as inertia is the hallmark of the movement...He's [the guy with the bumper sticket] advertising his moral superiority, not calling for action. If Rumsfeld were to say, "Free Tibet? Jiminy, what a swell idea! The Third Infantry Division goes in on Thursday," the bumper-sticker crowd would be aghast. They'd have to bend down and peel off the "FREE TIBET" stickers and replace them with "WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER. — Mark Steyn

CNN? Oh, that's that network with Larry King, who, like the Son of Sam, is a native of Brooklyn. Used to be owned by Ted Turner, who, like the Cincinnati Strangler, is a native of Cincinnati. Now part of Time Warner, founded by the Warner Brothers, the oldest of whom, Harry Warner, like many Auschwitz guards, was a native of Poland. — Mark Steyn

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. — Mark Steyn

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. — Mark Steyn

This is a perfect snapshot of the West at twilight. On the one hand, governments of developed nations microregulate every aspect of your life in the interests of 'keeping you safe.' ... On the other hand, when it comes to 'keeping you safe' from real threats, such as a millenarian theocracy that claims universal jurisdiction, America and its allies do nothing ... It is now certain that Tehran will get its nukes, and very soon. This is the biggest abdication of responsibility by the Western powers since the 1930s. — Mark Steyn

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

Barack Obama is a symptom rather than the problem. He didn't declare himself president; America chose him. — Mark Steyn

How do you 'invest in the future'? By borrowing $188 million every hour. That's what the Government of the United States is doing. It's spending one-fifth of a billion dollars it doesn't have every hour of every day of every week - all for your future! — Mark Steyn

The Democrats smell blood and don't want to be told that it's their own. — Mark Steyn

...when you hit the expressway to Declinistan there are few exit ramps. That America's animating principles should require a defense at all is a melancholy reflection on how far we've already gone. Live free--or die from a thousand soothing caresses of nanny-state sirens. — Mark Steyn

Big Government depends on going around the country stirring up apathy - creating the sense that problems are so big, so complex, so intractable that even attempting to think about them for yourself gives you such a splitting headache it's easier to shrug and accept as given the proposition that only government can deal with them. — Mark Steyn

Every power grab is the new base camp for the next power grab. — Mark Steyn

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. How do you get away from it? Improvise. — Mark Steyn

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

When people make certain statements and their acts conform to those statements I tend to take them at their word. — Mark Steyn

For Al Gore and Paul Ehrlich and Co., whatever the problem, the solution is always the same. Whether it's global cooling, global warming, or overpopulation, we need bigger government, more regulation, higher taxes, and a massive transfer of power from the citizens to some unelected self-perpetuating crisis lobby. — Mark Steyn

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? — Mark Steyn

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. — Mark Steyn

America is the brokest country in history. We owe more money than anyone has ever owed anyone. And Obama and Reid say relax, that's no reason not to spend more - because the world hasn't yet concluded we have no intention of paying it back. When they do, the dollar will collapse. — Mark Steyn

If you're 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you're graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade. There has been no global warming this century. None — Mark Steyn

With Clinton, of course, the term "world stage" was peculiarly literal: he had a fading vaudevillian's desperation to be loved. — Mark Steyn

Bisexuality is the proportional representation of sexuality in a world where most of us - straight or gay - operate a first-past-the-post system. — Mark Steyn

In his book "Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift", Paul Rahe writes, "Human dignity is bound up with taking responsibility for conducting one's own affairs." But today the state cocoons "one's own affairs" so thoroughly as to remove almost all responsibility from modern life, and much of human dignity with it. And, if personal consequences have been all but abolished, societal consequences are harder to dodge ... A society of children cannot survive, no matter how all-embracing the government nanny. — Mark Steyn

The 'Occupy' movement has no real solutions, except more government, more spending, more regulation, more bureaucracy, more unsustainable lethargic pseudo-university with no return on investment, more more more of what got us into this hole. — Mark Steyn

In the Western world, countries that were once the crucible of freedom are slipping remorselessly into a thinly disguised serfdom in which an ever higher proportion of your assets are annexed by the state as superlandlord. Big government is where nations go to die - not in Keynes' 'long run,' but sooner than you think. — Mark Steyn

I like Mitch Daniels on the fiscal conservative issues. You disagree with him on this idea that social issues, you takeoff the table. I do that for two reasons. I think the fiscal issues in a sense are a symptom of a lot of the deeper cultural issues in America. I don't think they are as disconnected as he thinks. — Mark Steyn

Her Majesty's government is engaging not merely in Orwellian Newspeak but in self-defeating Orwellian Newspeak. The broader message it sends is that ours is a weak culture so unconfident and insecure that if you bomb us and kill us our first urge is to find a way to flatter and apologize to you. — Mark Steyn

Popular culture as a whole is popular, but in today's fragmented market it's a jostle of competing unpopular popular cultures. As the critic Stanley Crouch likes to say, if you make a movie and 10 million people go see it, you'll gross $100 million - and 96 per cent of the population won't have to be involved. That alone should caution anyone about reading too much into individual examples of popular culture. — Mark Steyn

"Moderate" Republicans such as Arnold Schwarzenegger like to boast that they're fiscal conservatives and social liberals. But the social liberalism always ends up burying the fiscal conservatism. — Mark Steyn

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

But that's Islam in the third millennium: they want the certainties of seventh-century society with the conveniences of the twenty-first century. — Mark Steyn

The populations of wealthy democratic societies expect to have total choice over their satellite TV packages, yet think it perfectly normal to allow the state to make all the choices in respect of their health care. It's a curious inversion of citizenship to demand control over peripheral leisure activities but to contract out the big life-changing stuff to the government. — Mark Steyn

Incidentally, over half the illegal population supposedly came to America after September 11, 2001.95 That's to say, they broke into a country on Code Orange alert. Odd that. — Mark Steyn

The cradle-to-grave welfare society enfeebles the citizenry to such a degree you can never generate enough money. — Mark Steyn

Byrd, the former Klu [sic] Klux Klan Kleagle, is taking a stand over states' rights, or his rights over State, or some such. Whatever the reason, the sight of an old Klansman blocking a little colored girl from Birmingham from getting into her office contributed to the general retro vibe that hangs around the Democratic Party these days. — Mark Steyn

But in reality the point of free speech is for the stuff that's over the line, and strikingly unbalanced. If free speech is only for polite persons of mild temperament within government-policed parameters, it isn't free at all. So screw that. — Mark Steyn

Big government makes small citizens. — Mark Steyn

Reverend Jesse Jackson, President-for-Life of the People's Republic of Himself. — Mark Steyn

When is the Democratic Party going to apologize for being the biggest slave-holding-supporting institution on the planet and sticking with racism for the century after the abolition of slavery? — Mark Steyn

In Europe, nothing is certain except death and welfare, and why let the former get in the way of the latter? — Mark Steyn

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. — Mark Steyn

The roots of ISIS do not lie in the actions America took in 2003. Bush made mistakes in Iraq, and left a ramshackle state that functioned less badly than any of its neighbors. Obama walked away, pulled out a cigarette, tossed the match over his shoulder, and ignited a fuse that, from Damascus to Baghdad to Amman and beyond, will blow up the entire Middle East. — Mark Steyn

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

If any "white supremacist" were really a "supremacist", he wouldn't be living in his mom's basement. — Mark Steyn

Almost by definition, secularism cannot be a future: it's a present-tense culture that over time disconnects a society from cross-generational purpose. Which is why there are no examples of sustained atheist civilizations. "Atheistic humanism" became inhumanism in the hands of the Fascists and Communists and, in its less malign form in today's European Union, a kind of dehumamism in which a present-tense culture amuses itself to extinction. Post-Christian European culture is already post-cultural and, with its surging Muslim populations, will soon be post-European. — Mark Steyn

Big government is a national security threat: it increases your vulnerability to threats like Islamism, and makes it less likely you'll be able to summon the will to rebuff it. — Mark Steyn