Ilana Mercer Quotes

#1. The strength of ideas rests on their relationship to reality.

Ilana Mercer

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. Think of mass immigration into America as a global 'right of return.

Ilana Mercer

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

Ilana Mercer

#9. 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

#10. The psychiatric endeavor - voodoo, really - is premised on the medicalization of misconduct.

Ilana Mercer

#11. He who saves you from war is better than he who sends you to war.

Ilana Mercer

#12. 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

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

Ilana Mercer

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. The neoconservative pseudo-conservatives speak like Tocqueville but act like Robespierre.

Ilana Mercer

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. A depraved culture supports a depraved politics and vice versa.

Ilana Mercer

#20. 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

#21. The cable commentariat is a cog in the corpulent D.C. fleshpot.

Ilana Mercer

#22. 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

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

Ilana Mercer

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. The United States has already passed on as the world's economic leader. Having flouted Thomas Jefferson for too long, America has succumbed to public debt, the 'fore horse for oppression and despotism,' after which 'taxation will follow, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.

Ilana Mercer

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. The West has its share of liars and poseurs, the ablest of whom congregate in government.

Ilana Mercer

#35. Socialism is humanity's second nature. All politicians do is turn human vice into votes.

Ilana Mercer

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. Government commissions are where accountability goes to die.

Ilana Mercer

#39. 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

#40. 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

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

Ilana Mercer

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. Breaking into a country signals quite reliably a willingness to break yet more of the invaded country's laws.

Ilana Mercer

#45. 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

#46. Inviting an invasion by foreigners and instigating one against them are two sides of the same neoconservative coin.

Ilana Mercer

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. The National Education Association is the al-Qaida of education.

Ilana Mercer

#50. 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

#51. The rights to life, liberty and property were not meant to be subject to the vagaries of majority rule.

Ilana Mercer

#52. Islamic terrorism is the handiwork of people who've heeded, not hijacked, Islam.

Ilana Mercer

#53. Like environmentalists, politicians generally privilege flora and fauna over folks.

Ilana Mercer

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. Liberals can always be trusted to see God in Mumia Abu-Jamal and the devil in the Pope.

Ilana Mercer

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. If women with the same skills as men were getting only 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, men would have long-since priced themselves out of the market.

Ilana Mercer

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket of Africa, is now its dust bowl.

Ilana Mercer

#66. 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

#67. Liberals retain a totemic attachment to the Freudian idea that traumatic toilet training is destiny.

Ilana Mercer

#68. B. B. King is no match for Johann Sebastian Bach.

Ilana Mercer

#69. A brave nation fights because it must ; a cowardly nation fights because it can.

Ilana Mercer

#70. Dance, in general, has become more atavistic than artistic.

Ilana Mercer

#71. Government jobs are not an addition to the country's payroll; they are an increase in the nation's payload.

Ilana Mercer

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. The world mistakes Palestinian military weakness for moral innocence .

Ilana Mercer

#75. [G]lobal warming, that manufactured monomania.

Ilana Mercer

#76. Men in authority are now a threatened minority.

Ilana Mercer

#77. Chinese mercantilism is not free trade, but it is far better than American militarism.

Ilana Mercer

#78. 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

#79. In democratic South Africa, dispossession is nine-tenths of the law.

Ilana Mercer

#80. Progressive policies lead to a regressive society.

Ilana Mercer

#81. 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

#82. Whether it is committed by a group operating within or without the law, terrorism is still terrorism.

Ilana Mercer

#83. 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

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

Ilana Mercer

#85. Obamacare is a marketplace in the same way the Knockout Game is a game.

Ilana Mercer

#86. 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

#87. Hamas hides among unwitting civilians, who have no way of controlling its activities. This fact does not give Israel the right to kill innocent non-combatants, not even unintentionally. Besides, murder is not 'unintentional' when you know it is inevitable.

Ilana Mercer

#88. The proposition that economist Ludwig von Mises was a feminist is an apodictic impossibility.

Ilana Mercer

#89. 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

#90. Our unhappy trek through the wreck of the New South Africa begins with the facts, nothing but the facts.

Ilana Mercer

#91. 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