Mark Steyn Quotes

#1. The long-term cost of a welfare society is the infantilization of the population.

Mark Steyn

#2. I believe Western culture
rule of law, universal suffrage, etc.
is preferable to Arab culture: that's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I support immigration, but with assimilation.

Mark Steyn

#3. 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

#4. When the family dies, the nation follows ...

Mark Steyn

#5. The right to evaluate risk for oneself is part of what it means to be a functioning human being.

Mark Steyn

#6. Ron Paul's crazy talk about the Federal Reserve makes more sense these days. Right now, every - all this debt issued by the United States people assume the Chinese are buying, no they don't want any more American debt. Ron Paul has a point there.

Mark Steyn

#7. 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

#8. General Motors, like the other two geezers of the Old Three, is a vast retirement home with a small money-losing auto subsidiary.

Mark Steyn

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. It is surely only a matter of time before some federal judge finds the Constitution unconstitutional.

Mark Steyn

#12. 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

#13. The greatest crime of welfare isn't that it's a waste of money, but that it's a waste of people.

Mark Steyn

#14. Big Government is the small option: it's the guarantee of smaller freedom, smaller homes, smaller cars, smaller opportunities, smaller lives.

Mark Steyn

#15. Question: How much do you have to invest in the future before you've spent it and no longer have one?

Mark Steyn

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. We have been shirking too long, and that's unworthy of a great civilization. To see off the new Dark Ages will be tough and demanding. The alternative will be worse.

Mark Steyn

#19. Big government makes small citizens.

Mark Steyn

#20. Reverend Jesse Jackson, President-for-Life of the People's Republic of Himself.

Mark Steyn

#21. The essence of a government health care system - for people who have never lived under it and don't know - is waiting, waiting, waiting. You wait for everything. You wait for years for operations that are routine in America.

Mark Steyn

#22. Like most people, I have no wish to live in a community organized by community organizers.

Mark Steyn

#23. For states in demographic decline with ever more lavish social programs, the question is a simple one: Can they get real? Can they grow up before they grow old? If not, then they'll end their days in societies dominated by people with a very different worldview.

Mark Steyn

#24. 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

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

Mark Steyn

#26. Public interest criteria does not mean criteria that the public decides are in its interest. It means that the elite - via various appointed bodies - decide what the public's interest is for them.

Mark Steyn

#27. Appeasement is a vote to live in the present tense, to hold the comforts of the moment.

Mark Steyn

#28. Secretary of State Clinton dared Iran on Monday to let her hold a town hall meeting in Tehran. That's telling 'em. If the ayatollahs had a sense of humor, they'd call her bluff.

Mark Steyn

#29. The free world is shuffling into a psychological bondage whose chains are mostly of our own making.

Mark Steyn

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

Mark Steyn

#31. 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

#32. Nobel Prize winner Ivar Giaever reminds us that "in pseudoscience you begin with a hypothesis which is very appealing to you, and then you only look for things which confirm the hypothesis".

Mark Steyn

#33. The Romney candidacy is better than it was four years ago, but it's not clear that it's good. Mitt needs to get good real fast: A real speech, real plan, real responses, and real fire in the belly.

Mark Steyn

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. [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

#37. Modern 'liberalism' is strikingly illiberal; the high priests of 'tolerance' are increasingly intolerant of even the mildest dissent; and those who profess to 'celebrate diversity' coerce ever more ruthlessly a narrow homogeneity.

Mark Steyn

#38. [Charles] Manson wanted to start a race war. Nobody said he was leading some sort of charge about white supremacy.

Mark Steyn

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. One day the UN Secretary General proposes that, in the interest of global peace and harmony, the world's soccer players should come together and form one United Nations global soccer team.

"Great idea," says his deputy. "Er, but who would we play?"

"Israel, of course.

Mark Steyn

#42. But a society that has nothing to die for has nothing to live for ...

Mark Steyn

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. The most consequential act of state ownership in the twentieth-century western world was not the nationalization of airlines or the nationalization of railways or the nationalization of health care, but the nationalization of the family.

Mark Steyn

#46. The most basic of conservative principles is that if you reward bad behavior you get more of it.

Mark Steyn

#47. The trouble with the social-democratic state is that, when government does too much, nobody else does much of anything.

Mark Steyn

#48. Last month, 80,000 Americans signed on to new jobs, but 85,000 Americas signed on for Social Security disability checks. Most of these people are not 'disabled' as that term is generally understood. Rather, it's the U.S. economy that's disabled, and thus Obama incentivizes dependency.

Mark Steyn

#49. Jesse Jackson's living depends on the maintenance of an African-American victim culture

Mark Steyn

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. America is now a land that rewards failure - at the personal, corporate, and state level.

Mark Steyn

#56. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. How do you get away from it? Improvise.

Mark Steyn

#57. The state of our civilization manifests itself both in the non-problems that terrify us beyond all reason - rising sea levels - and in the real problems we pay no heed to [population decline] ... In reality, much of the planet will be uninhabited long before it's uninhabitable

Mark Steyn

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. Long before they slump into poverty, great powers succumb to a poverty of ambition.

Mark Steyn

#64. The United Auto Workers is AARP in an Edsel: It has three times as many retirees and widows as 'workers' (I use the term loosely). GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people.

Mark Steyn

#65. 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

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

Mark Steyn

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. To expect the government to save you is to be a bystander in your own fate.

Mark Steyn

#70. ...but instead of the can-do spirit we now have the can-do-with-some-government-funding spirit. And it's hard to get an inspirational heart-warmer out of that.

Mark Steyn

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. 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

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

Mark Steyn

#75. 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

#76. The president has borrowed more money to spend to less effect than anybody on the planet.

Mark Steyn

#77. 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

#78. When Cromwell instructed his portraitist to paint him 'warts and all', he meant both halves of that equation. To teach the warts alone is morbid and unhealthy.

Mark Steyn

#79. Mitt has a ton of consultants, and not one of them thought he needed a credible answer on Bain or taxes?

Mark Steyn

#80. 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

#81. When people make certain statements and their acts conform to those statements I tend to take them at their word.

Mark Steyn

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. Discussing cultural relativism with cultural relativists is like playing tennis with some guy who says, Your ace is just a social construct.

Mark Steyn

#85. Anything that shifts power from the individual judgment of free citizens to government is a bad thing.

Mark Steyn

#86. much of the western world has a big hole where its sense of identity ought to be.

Mark Steyn

#87. When you're taxing bovine flatulence emissions, there's nothing left to tax.

Mark Steyn

#88. 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

#89. The first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death.

Mark Steyn

#90. 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

#91. He loved Minnesota's flora and fauna and seemed ill-suited as either a fawner or floorer, a

Mark Steyn

#92. There's an extremely fine line between "boldly transgressive" and spiritually barren,

Mark Steyn

#93. It's not that I place less value on Palestinian lives, but that Chairman Arafat and his chums in Hamas do.

Mark Steyn

#94. Hollywood gave us far more Muslim terrorists in the Eighties and Nineties than it has since 9/11.

Mark Steyn

#95. Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb. The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone.

Mark Steyn

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

Mark Steyn

#97. We are the source of our problems not mysterious sinister foreigners overseas.

Mark Steyn

#98. Having done an impressive job of demolishing the basic societal building block of the family, the ambitious liberal is now moving on to demolishing the basic building block of the sexes.

Mark Steyn

#99. Once you accept you're a child in the government nursery, why shouldn't Nanny tell you what to do?

Mark Steyn

#100. "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