Milbank Quotes & Sayings

New exit, new entry! — Lailah Gifty Akita

Skousen's movement (it changed its name from the Freemen Institute to the National Center for Constitutional Studies after militia groups began to use the "freemen" label) persisted. Skousen, claiming to represent the beliefs of the Founding Fathers, called for the abolition of Social Security, farm subsidies, and education and welfare funding; pulling out of the United Nations; and eliminating federal income taxes and most federal regulatory agencies. Skousen's ideas might have died with him, but all that changed when Beck turned The 5,000 Year Leap into his manifesto. Skousen, — Dana Milbank

What Zograffi would have to realize was that Elie had come to the end, and there was no farther-on for him. Nothing. Emptiness.
They could do anything to him they liked. They could prescribe any punishment. But they mustn't force him to leave. That was beyond him. he would rather sit down on the curbstone and let himself die there in the sun.
He was tired. For the others, for a man like Zograffi, did that word have the terrible significance it had for him? — Georges Simenon

Parents can't indulge our fears. We're supposed to make our kids feel safe, even if we don't feel safe ourselves. — Dana Milbank

It is hard to violate somebody's privacy if the person is completely anonymous. — Dana Milbank

Living in the capital, I worry about terrorism, but I no longer panic. For this I have my child to thank. — Dana Milbank

Once one has realized, following the great English literary visionaries William Shakespeare and Thomas Nashe, that sexual puritanism, political disciplinarianism, and abuse of the poor are the result of the refusal of true Christianity ... one is led to articulate a more incarnate, more participatory, more aesthetic, more erotic, more socialized, even a more 'Platonic' Christianity. — John Milbank

Wealth and honours, which most men pursue, easily change masters; they desert to the side which excels in virtue, industry, and endurance of toil, and they abandon the slothful. — John Milton

By journalistic custom and D.C. law, of course, reporters don't carry guns to news conferences
and certainly not when the person at the lectern is the NRA's Asa Hutchinson, an unremarkable former congressman and Bush administration official whom most reporters couldn't pick out of a lineup. But the NRA wasn't going to leave any doubt about its superior firepower. — Dana Milbank

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

After the 9/11 attacks, I dutifully stocked up on rolls of duct tape and N-95 masks, as the government recommended. — Dana Milbank

The proper role of the judiciary is one of interpreting and applying the law, not making it. — Sandra Day O'Connor

The clock over the mantel in the beau parlor at the Milbank House ticked — Adriana Trigiani

Sometimes, humor makes more sense than reasoning. — Toba Beta

I told my daughter that terrorists would love to attack Washington, but we, unlike the French, are an ocean away from Syria, that lots of smart people are working very hard to stop the terrorists, and that the terrorists are not very sophisticated. — Dana Milbank

Christian theology is a hair's breadth away from nihilism. — John Milbank

President Bush is often out there talking about the importance of staying the course, and about the sacrifice, but he has not attended a funeral of a soldier who has fallen in Iraq. — Dana Milbank

Our own self-awareness arises not in the Cartesian cogito, but in our finding ourselves in relation to other beings in whom we both actively recognize and do not recognize our own subjectivity, in an inexhaustible dialectic. — John Milbank