Quotes from Jonah Goldberg

It is faith that moves mountains, not reason. Reason is a tool, but it can never be the motive force of the crowd." This

Because there is something about tyranny, monarchy, and authoritarianism that "works," by which I mean there is something in our wiring that finds such systems natural.

For progressives fascist is a conservative who is winning an argument.

Free speech, too, is under relentless assault where it matters most—around elections—and it is being sanctified where it matters least, around strippers' poles and on terrorist Web sites.

The fascist moment that gave birth to the "Russian-Italian method" was in reality a religious awakening in which Christianity was to be either sloughed off and replaced or "updated" by the new progressive faith in man's ability to perfect the world.

In Germany the socialists in the Reichstag voted in favor of the war. In Britain the socialists voted in favor of the war. In America the socialists and progressives voted in favor of the war. This didn't make them right-wingers; it made them shockingly bloodthirsty and jingoistic left-wingers. This is just one attribute of the progressives that has been airbrushed from popular history.

Yes, of course enormous profits were made from both slavery and empire, but neither "created" capitalism... if capitalism is dependent on the sort of mass-scale exploitation implicit in slavery and imperialism, why did capitalism take so long to materialize? The ancient Chinese, Persians, Romans and Aztecs all had empires and slaves, yet none were capitalist.

As Mussolini said in an interview in 1932, "It is faith that moves mountains, not reason. Reason is a tool, but it can never be the motive force of the crowd.

have had trouble articulating what liberalism is, beyond the conviction that the federal government should use its power to do nice things wherever and whenever it can.

The American Revolution was a successful revolution precisely because it was grounded in both realism and idealism. Written deep into the structure of our Constitution is a profound comfort with contradiction. It sets faction against faction, pits each branch of government against the other, dilutes the excesses of democracy, and holds the executive accountable to the people. By being so grounded in realism, it can hold the weight of our ideals.

Nazi ideology cannot be summarized in a program or platform. It can be better understood as a maelstrom of prejudices, passions, hatreds, emotions, resentments, biases, hopes, and attitudes that, when combined, most often resembled a religious crusade wearing the mask of a political ideology.4

Often, what we think are the facts of the past are in reality simply reflections of what we want to believe about the present.

socialism preceded Marxism, and socialism has survived Marxism, in part because Marxism was subjected to a real-world test for nearly a century and failed on an epic scale. Soviet revolutionaries did not engage in Fabian incrementalism; they got their country and their empire and their worldwide movement, and they worked their will without opposition.

When God "died" in the 19th century, "social-ism" took the form of materialist scientism (hence the philosopher Eric Voegelin's observation that under Marxism, "Christ the Redeemer is replaced by the steam engine as the promise of the realm to come"). It's worth recalling that both Marx and Engels came to their socialism via their atheism, not the other way around.

Much of the environmental movement is a Trojan Horse for socialist assumptions and ambitions (the British like to call environmentalists "watermelons"—green on the outside, red on the inside).

Three decades ago, Robert Nisbet recognized that environmentalism was poised to become "the third great redemptive struggle in Western history, the first being Christianity, the second modern socialism." Western society, wrote Nisbet, was moving from "the Gospel of Capitalist Efficiency to the Gospel of Utopianism." One need not wade too deeply into the literature of a "steady state" or carbon-free economy to see the wisdom in Nisbet's prediction.

But at the same time, progressives want to claim that any effort to resist the forces of "progress" is an act of aggression in the culture war. From abortion and gay marriage to the hot fad for transgender rights, progressives want every institution and community to bend the knee to their movement. And when anyone refuses, the resisters are cast as the aggressors.

Despite the fact that the New Deal was a failure, it remains the gold standard in liberal policy making.

Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction.

Taken on its own terms, pragmatism's folly is that it separates intelligence from wisdom. Its greatest sins are arrogance and deceit, including self-deceit. It is arrogant because it assumes the individual—particularly the expert—can know everything he needs to know without reference to received wisdom

Hayek, more than anyone else, illuminated the knowledge problem. Simply put: No one person can ever know enough. Planners who think they can process all of the data from disparate sources across vast expanses of geography and culture are, quite simply, educated fools.

Virtue requires denying one's baser instincts—i.e., human nature—and doing what is right.

Sartre's remark: "Tomorrow, after my death, certain people may decide to establish fascism, and the others may be cowardly or miserable enough to let them get away with it. At that moment, fascism will be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us. In reality, things will be as much as man has decided they are."1

My tribe deserves more than your tribe.