Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Our leadership class's real accomplishment is résumé padding.

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.

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

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

Jokes are one of the things that bind the culture. If you can't have jokes about everybody in society and if one group is hedged off and protected then that group can never truly be integrated.

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.

The minute health care becomes a huge, unwieldy, expensive government bureaucracy it's a permanent feature of life and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

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