Quotes from Mark Steyn

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

I like Mitch Daniels on the fiscal conservative issues. You disagree with him on this idea that social issues, you takeoff the table. I do that for two reasons. I think the fiscal issues in a sense are a symptom of a lot of the deeper cultural issues in America. I don't think they are as disconnected as he thinks.

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

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.

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.

It is a basic rule of life that if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it.

Multicultural societies are so invested in "tolerance" that they'll tolerate the explicitly intolerant (and avowedly unicultural) before they'll tolerate anyone pointing out that intolerance.

Micro-regulation is micro-tyranny, a slithering, serpentine network of insinuating Ceaucescu and Kim Jong-Il mini-me's. It's time for the mass rejection of their diktats. A political order that subjects you to the caprices of faceless bureaucrats or crusading judges merits no respect. To counter the Bureau of Compliance, we need an Alliance of Non-Compliance to help once free people roll back the regulatory state.

In his book Men to boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity, Gary Cross asks simply: Where have all the men gone? Like George Will, Victor David Hanson, and others who've posed that question, Professor Cross is no doubt aware that he sounds old and square. But in a land of middle-aged teenagers somebody has to.

Big Government means small citizens: it corrodes the integrity of a people, catastrophically.

About half the global economy is living beyond not only its means but its diminished number of children's means. Instead of addressing that fact, countries with government debt of 125 percent of GDP are being rescued by countries with government debt of 80 percent of GDP. Good luck with that.

Almost by definition, secularism cannot be a future: it's a present-tense culture that over time disconnects a society from cross-generational purpose. Which is why there are no examples of sustained atheist civilizations. Atheistic humanism became inhumanism in the hands of the Fascists and Communists and, in its less malign form in today's European Union, a kind of dehumanism in which a present-tense culture amuses itself to extinction.

Unfortunately, magnanimity is often seen as weakness by those on the receiving end. It's easy to be sensitive, tolerant, and multicultural--it's the default mode of the age---yet, when you persist in being sensitive to the insensitive, tolerant of the intolerant, and impeccably multicultural about the avowedly unicultural, don't be surprised if they take it for weakness.

Demographically and psychologically, Europeans have chosen to commit societal suicide, and their principal heir and beneficiary will be Islam.

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

In his book Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift, Paul Rahe writes, Human dignity is bound up with taking responsibility for conducting one's own affairs. But today the state cocoons one's own affairs so thoroughly as to remove almost all responsibility from modern life, and much of human dignity with it. And, if personal consequences have been all but abolished, societal consequences are harder to dodge...A society of children cannot survive, no matter how all-embracing the government nanny.

The end-game for statists is very obvious. If you expand the bureaucratic class and you expand the dependent class, you can put together a permanent electoral majority. In political terms, a welfare check is a twofer: you're assuring yourself of the votes of both the welfare recipient and of the mammoth bureaucracy required to process his welfare.

In Europe, where dependency, decadence, and demographic decline are extinguishing some of the oldest nations on earth, a successor population is already in place in the restive Muslim housing projects.

Applied globally, political correctness obliges us to forswear sovereignty.

Google and Apple and other latter day American success stories started in somebody's garage--the one place where innovation isn't immediately buried by bureaucracy, or at least in most states, not until some minor municipal functionary discovers you neglected to apply for a Not Sitting Around on My Ass All Day permit.

Leave corporate America and get a non-job as a diversity enforcement officer: that's where the big bucks are.

At bottom, today's Democrats from Baucus to Waters are united in only two beliefs, and they demand that American citizens believe in only two things: diversity and rights.

When the desirable jobs are spending other people's money, reporting on spending other people's money and lobbying to spend other people's money then you know that the society is f***ed.

We give far more to charity per capita than Europeans do. Why? Are we born better? No. The bigger the government the worse the citizen. They are preoccupied in Europe with how much time off. Where will they vacation? When will they retire? These are selfish questions, these are not altruistic questions. So the goodness that America created is jeopardized by our not knowing what we stand for. That's our greatest threat. We are our problem.