Quotes from Mark Steyn

What is there to hold a post-prosperity, constrained-liberty, un-dreamt America together? The nation's ruling class has, in practical terms, already seceded from the idea of America. In the ever more fractious, incoherent polity they're building as a substitute, why would they expect their discontented subjects not to seek the same solution as Slovenes and Uzbeks?

Under Big Government, the ruling class get power and perks,...but others among the ruled class just get unruly.

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".

So instead of unilateral Bush cowboyism, we elected President Outreach, a man happy to apologize for the entirety of American policy pre-January 2009. How's that working out?

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.

That's the most basic truth the young could impose on the old--the immorality of spending now and charging it to Junior. Next time Obama tells Joe the Plumber he wants to spread the wealth around, it should be pointed out that you can't spend it until you've earned it. Redistribution from the future to the present is a crock, and if you happen to have been assigned to the future half of that equation, you should be merciless in your contempt for the present-tensers who've done that to you.

You can live as free men, but if you choose not to, your society will surely die.

Americans face a choice: you can rediscover the animating principles of the American idea--of limited government, a self-reliant citizenry, and the opportunities to exploit your talents to the fullest--or you can join most of the rest of the western world in terminal decline. To rekindle the spark of liberty once it dies is very difficult.

But that's Islam in the third millennium: they want the certainties of seventh-century society with the conveniences of the twenty-first century.

There's an extremely fine line between "boldly transgressive" and spiritually barren

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.

the nationalization of the family proceeds apace, and America is as well advanced on that path as anywhere else. "The west has nationalized families over the last 60 years," writes Vaidyanathan. "Old age, ill health, single motherhood—everything is the responsibility of the state.

We're the endangered species, not the spotted owl. The population explosion is a prop of the Western progressive's bizarre death-cultism. We are so bad, so polluting, so exploitative, so violent, so destructive that we owe it to the world not to be born in the first place.

One reason why the developed world has a difficult job grappling with the Islamist threat is that it doesn't take religion seriously. It condescends to it. In Europe's wholly secularized environment, the enduring religiosity of America is not just odd, but primitive.

In 2008, America elected a man with no hands-on experience of anything who promptly cocooned himself within a circle of advisors with less experience of business, of the private sector, of doing than any previous administration in American history. You want change, so you vote for a bunch of guys who've never done nuthin' but sit around talking?

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.

You can't help noticing that since abandoning its faith in the unseen world Europe seems also to have lost its faith in the seen one. Consider this poll taken in 2002 for the first anniversary of September 11: 61 percent of Americans said they were optimistic about the future, as opposed to 43 percent of Canadians, 42 percent of Britons, 29 percent of the French, 23 percent of Russians, and 15 percent of Germans. I wouldn't reckon those numbers will get any cheerier over the years.

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.

The unhealthiness of Dependistan underlines the real problem with the modern welfare state: it's not that it's a waste of money but that it's a waste of people.

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

I saw a fellow in a Don't Tread on Me T-shirt the other day. He was at LaGuardia and he was being trod all over, by the obergropinfuhrers of the TSA, who had decided to subject him to one of their enhanced pat-downs. There are few sights more dismal than that of a law-abiding citizen having his genitalia pawed by state commissars, but having them pawed while wearing a Don't Tread on Me T-shirt is certainly one of them.

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.

Multiculturalism is really a suicide cult conceived by the western elites not to celebrate all cultures, but to deny their own. And that's particularly unworthy of the British, whose language, culture, and law have been the single greatest force for good in this world.

Taliban: Americans have all the watches, but we have all the time.