Quotes from William F. Buckley, Jr.

Scientists are people who build the Brooklyn Bridge and then buy it.

Enthusiasm for conservation can be fashioned into a nasty weapon for those who dislike business on general principles.

To buy very good wine nowadays requires only money. To serve it to your guests is a sign of fatigue.

Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.

The Beatles are not merely awful. They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music.

The socialized state is to justice, order, and freedom what the Marquis de Sade is to love.

Conservatism is the politics of reality

The academic community has in it the biggest concentration of alarmists, cranks and extremists this side of the giggle house.

Boredom is the deadliest poison.

The superstition that the hounds of truth will rout the vermin of error seems, like a fragment of Victorian lace, quaint, but too brittle to be lifted out of the showcase.

Conservatives pride themselves on resisting change, which is as it should be. But intelligent deference to tradition and stability can evolve into intellectual sloth and moral fanaticism, as when conservatives simply decline to look up from dogma because the effort to raise their heads and reconsider is too great.

It is safe to say that if the Communists took over the Sahara Desert tomorrow, two things would happen. First, nothing. And second, with their centralized approach to the market, there would be a shortage of sand.

The cost of the drug war is many times more painful, in all its manifestations, than would be the licensing of drugs combined with intensive education of non-users and intensive education designed to warn those who experiment with drugs.

The largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques which, in education as well as the arts, are out to impose upon the nation their modish fads and fallacies, and have nearly succeeded in doing so. In this cultural issue, we are, without reservations, on the side of excellence (rather than "newness") and of honest intellectual combat (rather than conformity).

I've always subconsciously looked out for the total Christian and when I found him he turned out to be a non-practicing Jew.

Democracy can itself be as tyrannical as a dictatorship, since it is the extent, not the source, of government power that impinges on freedom.

Liberals, it has been said, are generous with other peoples' money, except when it comes to questions of national survival when they prefer to be generous with other peoples' freedom and security.

Christianity finds all its doctrines stated in the Bible, and Christianity denies no part, nor attempts to add anything to the Word of God.

I find it easier to believe in God than to believe Hamlet was deduced from the molecular structure of a mutton chop.

Only government can cause inflation, preserve monopoly, and punish enterprise.

People are beginning to wish that the voters had been given breathometer tests when they voted in the present government.

Earlier this month the State Department gave the umpteenth performance of its popular play, Please Tread on Me, with Ceylon as guest star, and the usual cast.

One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed - different plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgement of defeat.

There is an inverse relationship between reliance on the state and self-reliance.