Quotes from Jonah Goldberg

whenever liberalism goes off the tracks and turns into something bad or despotic, it's because real liberals have abandoned the project. The

Particularly when a prolonged period of peace and stability gives way to financial and/or military crisis, these entrenched patrimonial groups extend their sway, or else prevent the state from responding adequately.

That's why liberals are constantly discovering new crises that require more government solutions.

Few figures represent the foreign, particularly German influence on Progressivism better than [President Woodrow] Wilson himself. Wilson's faith that society could be bent to the will of social planners was formed at Johns Hopkins, the first American university to be founded on the German model. Virtually all of Wilson's professors had studied in Germany--as had almost every one of the school's fifty-three faculty members.

There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. Here

Head Start, among the holiest of social programs, has never worked, and each time this unwelcome fact presents itself it is greeted as proof that the program simply requires more money.

Corruption isn't about giving in to the seduction of bribery; it is about giving in to the seduction of human nature, the angry drumbeats of our primitive brains and the inner whispers of our feelings.

Doctors make no such exceptions to the Hippocratic Oath—save, of course, when it comes to abortion—and only then when another dogmatic obsession trumps their oath. Alas

Lord Acton's famous observation that "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely" has long been misunderstood. Acton was not arguing that power causes powerful leaders to become corrupt (though he probably believed that, too). Rather, he was noting that historians tend to forgive the powerful for transgressions they would never condone by the weak.

The Nazi ideologist—and Hitler rival—Gregor Strasser put it quite succinctly: "We are socialists. We are enemies, deadly enemies, of today's capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, its unfair wage system, its immoral way of judging the worth of human beings in terms of their wealth and their money, instead of their responsibility and their performance, and we are determined to destroy this system whatever happens!

The natural state of mankind is grinding poverty punctuated by horrific violence terminating with an early death.

the most important legacy of the 1960s has to be liberal guilt. Guilt over their inability to create the Great Society. Guilt over leaving children, blacks, and the rest of the Coalition of the Oppressed "behind." Guilt is among the most religious of emotions and has a way of rapidly devolving into a narcissistic God complex. Liberals were proud of how guilty they felt.

The government cannot love you, and any politics that works on a different assumption is destined for no good. And yet ever since the New Deal, liberals have been unable to shake this fundamental dogma that the state can be the instrument for a politics of meaning that transforms the entire nation into a village.

what the market does. It introduces luxuries for the wealthy, and the wealthy subsidize innovations that turn luxuries—cell phones, cars, medicine, computers, nutritious food, comfortable homes, etc.—into necessities. It is the greatest triumph of alchemy in all of human experience, and the response from many in every generation is ingratitude and entitlement.

In other words, every effort to do away with liberal democratic capitalism is reactionary, because they all attempt to restore the unity of purpose that defines the premodern or tribal mind. Socialism, nationalism, communism, fascism, and authoritarianisms of every stripe are forms of tribalism.

In America, where hostility to big government is central to the national character, the case for statism must be made in terms of "pragmatism" and decency. In other words, our fascism must be nice and for your own good.

a brief perusal of the last hundred years of economic journalism from the left would have you believe that the most prosperous century in human history was one long, extended economic crisis. But

You can make a very good argument that society would be much worse off if you let 10 rapists and murderers free rather than put one poor, wrongly accused accountant in prison. And so my only point on that is that it should open up an argument. It should not sort of settle one, because nobody disagrees with it.

You know those Navy SEALs, they weren't Democrats and Republicans. They were just doing what was best for America. Wouldn't that be a great country if all of you Americans were just like that? You followed orders, you marched in step and you followed my agenda.

Our fear of hypocrisy is forcing us to live in a world where gluttons are fine, so long as they champion gluttony.

But it is one of these sort of mythologies about America and its intellectual history, that the right embraced this thing called social Darwinism, when it never did so.

Our country, if you read the 'Federalist Papers,' is about disagreement. It's about pitting faction against faction, divided government, checks and balances. The hero in American political tradition is the man who stands up to the mob - not the mob itself.

Someone once noted that a 'gaffe' in Washington is when a politician accidentally tells the truth.

When I see hipsters wearing Mao hats or Lenin T-shirts, I'm grateful. It's like truth-in-labeling. For now I know you are: Woefully ignorant, morally stunted, purposively asinine, or all three.