Steyn Quotes

#1. There are two bowlers who I think are very tough to play against - Dale Steyn and Morne Morkel.

Virat Kohli

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

Mark Steyn

#3. 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

#4. 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

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

Mark Steyn

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

Mark Steyn

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. The law functions as formal embodiment of a moral code, not as free-standing substitute for it.

Mark Steyn

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

Mark Steyn

#14. 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

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

Mark Steyn

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

Mark Steyn

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

Mark Steyn

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. How ridiculous! You're going to have the first black president apologize for slavery?

Mark Steyn

#21. 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

#22. Big government makes small citizens.

Mark Steyn

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

Mark Steyn

#24. 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

#25. 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

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

Mark Steyn

#27. There is no conceivable amount of money worth telling the world that you were beaten up by Liza Minnelli.

Mark Steyn

#28. 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

#29. The spirit of the age is: Ask not what your country can do for you, demand it.

Mark Steyn

#30. 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

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

Mark Steyn

#32. When is black America going to forgive white America for slavery?

Mark Steyn

#33. 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

#34. Sometimes societies become too stupid to survive. A nation that takes Barack Obama's current rhetorical flourishes seriously is certainly well advanced along that dismal path.

Mark Steyn

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

Mark Steyn

#36. 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

#37. LBJ held up Detroit as a model of what the Great Society could accomplish. He was right.

Mark Steyn

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

Mark Steyn

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

Mark Steyn

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. [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

#47. 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

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

Mark Steyn

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. Every power grab is the new base camp for the next power grab.

Mark Steyn

#52. 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

#53. There was less private-sector business experience in Obama's cabinet than in any administration going back a century.30

Mark Steyn

#54. 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

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

Mark Steyn

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

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

Mark Steyn

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

Mark Steyn

#61. 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

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

Mark Steyn

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. Those who can do. Those who can't form a supercommittee.

Mark Steyn

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. 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

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

Mark Steyn

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

Mark Steyn

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. In Britain, everything is policed except crime.

Mark Steyn

#75. 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

#76. ...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

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. 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

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

Mark Steyn

#81. 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

#82. 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

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

Mark Steyn

#84. 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

#85. 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

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

Mark Steyn

#87. ...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

#88. The industrial powerhouse of 1950 [Detroit] is now a crime-ridden wasteland with a functioning literacy rate equivalent to West African basket-cases.

Mark Steyn

#89. 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

#90. 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

#91. 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

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

Mark Steyn

#93. The Democrats smell blood and don't want to be told that it's their own.

Mark Steyn

#94. 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

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

Mark Steyn

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

Mark Steyn

#97. Washington, D.C., has become the favorite area for wealthy young adults, with the nation's highest percentage of 25-34 year-olds making more than $100,000 a year.7

Mark Steyn

#98. 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

#99. 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

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

Mark Steyn