Quotes from William F. Buckley Jr.

We find that in the absence of demonstrable truth, the best we can do is to exercise the greatest diligence, humility, insight, intelligence, and industry in trying to arrive at the nearest values to truth. I hope, of course, to argue convincingly that having done this, we have an inescapable duty to seek to inculcate others with these values.

Curiously, the failures of Communism are more often treated as a joke than as a tragedy.

Modern formulations are necessary even in defense of very ancient truths. Not because of any alleged anachronism in the old ideas – the Beatitudes remain the essential statements of the Western code – but because the idiom of life is always changing

Conservatism aims to maintain in working order the loyalties of the community to perceived truths and also to those truths which in their judgment have earned universal recognition.

I Would Rather Be Governed By the First 2,000 People in the Telephone Directory than by the Harvard University Faculty.

But how reassuring it was for us, you remember, every now and then ("Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall"), to vibrate to the music of the very heartstrings of the Leader of the Free World who, to qualify convincingly as such, had after all to feel a total commitment to the Free World.

National Review will support the rightwardmost viable candidate.

To Buckley, she embodied the worst of what in subsequent decades would be called political correctness: the mindless application to every issue of a platitudinous egalitarianism whose practical effect invariably is to expand the reach of totalitarianism.

If he was, somehow at the margin deficient, it was because the country did not rise to ask of him the performance of a thunderbolt. He gave what he was asked to give. And he leaves us (or "will leave") if not exactly bereft, lonely; lonely for the quintessential American. END.

Khrushchev murders people without regard to race, color, or creed, and therefore whatever he is guilty of, he is not guilty of discrimination?

She [Ayn Rand] had to declare that....altruism was despicable, that only self-interest is good and noble. (About Ayn Rand)

Birch fallacy is the assumption that you can infer subjective intention from objective consequence: we lost China to the Communists, therefore the President of the United States and the Secretary of State wished China to go to the Communists.

Yes, Murray Rothbard believed in freedom, and yes, David Koresh believed in God.

There is a man who has won the decathlon of human existence."*

Parsifal is the opera that begins at five-thirty and when you look at your watch three hours later, it is only five forty-five.

What did Miss Rand in was her anxiety to theologize her beliefs. She was an eloquent and persuasive antistatist, and if only she had left it at that—but no, she had to declare that God did not exist, that altruism was despicable, that only self-interest is good and noble. She risked, in fact, giving to capitalism that bad name that its enemies have done so well in giving it; and that is a pity.

the genius of Churchill was his union of affinities of the heart and of the mind, the total fusion of animal and spiritual energy"—but

The world is a giant ashtray we put things into.

He told us that most of our civic problems were problems brought on or exacerbated by government, not problems that could be solved by government. That, of course, is enduringly true. Only government can cause inflation, preserve monopoly, and punish enterprise.

The executioner proper, the official who would place the nooses around the necks of the condemned, was a practiced hangman, his occupation begun in his youth in Texas, where he apprenticed under the regular hangman.

I do not, in short, myself believe it is in the least bit undignified to confess to having been critically influenced in one's thinking by a teacher, or a faculty, or a book; but the accent these days is so strong on atomistic intellectual independence that to suggest such a thing is, as I have noted, highly inflammatory.

Though Marx's proletariat may be somewhat better fed than it was a century ago, its individual members have made little if any progress toward that personal liberty and independence on which the dignity of man is founded.

Dr. King's flouting of the law does not justify the flouting by others of the law, but it is a terrifying thought that, most likely, the cretin who leveled his rifle on the head of Martin Luther King, may have absorbed the talk, so freely available, about the supremacy of the individual conscience, such talk as Martin Luther King, God rest his soul, had so widely, and so indiscriminately, made.

The danger comes when a distrust of doctrinaire social systems eases over into a dissolute disregard for principle. A disregard for enduring principle delivers a society, eviscerated, over to the ideologists.