Favourite Quotes

Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.
Adam Smith

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.
Thomas Mann

A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.
Alexis de Tocqueville

Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.
Alexis de Tocqueville


Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.
C.S. Lewis


The only legitimate reason for the state to exists is to protect pre-political rights (liberty, life, etc) and institutions (marriage, the family, etc) - it has no other justifiable purpose.
If the state fails to protect these things, its existence is unwarranted. When it attacks these things, it is lawless.
E.F. Bartlam

Democrats spent the first century of this country's existence refusing to treat black people like human beings, and the second refusing to treat them like adults.
Ann Coulter

He won't sell much ice-cream going at that speed.
Eric Morecambe, on hearing a police siren

Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends…
Isabel Paterson

Never was so much expected by so many and paid for by so few.
Laurie Graham

Rock stars – is there anything they don’t know?
Homer Simpson

An ignorant man who is not fool enough to meddle with his clock, is however sufficiently confident to think he can safely take to pieces, and put together at his pleasure, a moral machine of another guise, importance and complexity, composed of far other wheels, and springs, and balances, and counteracting and co-operating powers. Men little think how immorally they act in rashly meddling with what they do not understand. Their delusive good intention is no sort of excuse for their presumption. They who truly mean well must be fearful of acting ill.
Edmund Burke

You mean Maya Angelou is black?
Homer Simpson

Go ahead – make my day!
Det. Harry Callaghan and Ronald Reagan

No! No! No!
Mrs. Thatcher

Some chicken! Some neck!
Winston Churchill

I belong to a generation of men most of whom aren’t here any more. We all did the same thing for the same reason, no matter what we thought about politics. Well, that’s all over and done with, and we’re carrying on as best we can, as though nothing happened. But in fact several things happened, and one of them was this country suddenly got tired. She’s tired now. But the old girl’s got stamina, don’t you make any mistake about that, and it’s up to us ordinary people to keep things steady. Now, that’s your job. And just you remember it!
Noel Coward, script for “This Happy Breed”

The three laws of politics:
1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left wing.
3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
Robert Conquest

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
Thomas Sowell

Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.
Thomas Sowell

Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.
Thomas Sowell

The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.
Thomas Sowell

We want the finest wines available to humanity, we want them here and we want them now!
Withnail in Withnail & I

Stop saying that, Withnail. Of course he's the fucking farmer!
I in Withnail &  I

The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.
Thomas Sowell

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.
Milton Friedman

The two most potent post-war orthodoxies—socialist politics and modernist art—have at least one feature in common: they are both forms of snobbery, the anti-bourgeois snobbery of people convinced of their right to dictate to the common man in the name of the common man.
Roger Scruton

This is what we believe!
Margaret Thatcher brandishing a book by Friedrich Hayek

What the German and Italian who have learned the lesson above all want is protection against the monster state – not grandiose schemes for organisation on a colossal scale, but opportunity peacefully and in freedom to build up once more his own little world.
Friedrich Hayek

The purpose of society should not be to transform men into something better, but to stop them cutting each other’s throats.
Toby Young

I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it in to the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.
Grover Norquist

You have friends? When did this happen?
Joe Hallenbeck, The Last Boy Scout

The conservative response to modernity is to embrace it, but to embrace it critically, in full consciousness that human achievements are rare and precarious, that we have no God-given right to destroy our inheritance, but must always patiently submit to the voice of order, and set an example of orderly living.
Roger Scruton

"C***"
Jame's Delingpole on Ted Heath

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton

“The moment a man falls in love or has a family, he gets a desire for property. We’ll destroy that desire; we’ll resort to drunkenness, slander, denunciations; we shall resort to unheard-of depravities; we shall smother every genius in infancy. We shall reduce everything to one common denominator. Full equality.”
Dostoevsky, The Devils

It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.
Jung

Man's task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.
Jung

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Jung

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.
Jung

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
Jung

Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest. That activity, which is contemplation, is imminent and it transcends the level of sense and of discourse. Man’s guilty sense of his incapacity for this one deep activity, which is the reason for his very existence, is precisely what drives him to seek oblivion in exterior motion and desire. Incapable of the diving activity which alone can satisfy his soul, man flings himself upon exterior things, not so much for their own sake as for the sake of the agitation which keeps his spirit pleasantly numb.
Thomas Merton

We look for rest, ands overcome obstacles to obtain it. But if you overcome these obstacles, rest becomes intolerable, for we begin at once to think either of the misfortunes that are ours, or of those that threaten to descend upon us.
Pascal

We have come to the wrong star… that is what makes life at once so splendid and so strange. We don’t fit. We come from somewhere else. We have lost our way.
G.K. Chesterton

The capacity to drive a thought away once and for all is the gateway to eternity. The infinite in an instant.
Simone Weil

This too shall pass.
Sufi saying

Hell is the experience of loneliness which results because of our pride, selfishness and sin.
Ronald Rolheiser

We have to distinguish between the sinfulness which makes us constantly commit faults, and be conceited, impatient, envious etc., and the sin of persisting in these things when we need not; not trying to resist. The Seven Deadly Sins, if you look at them, are all forms of selfishness…
Evelyn Underhill

Beauty is eternity here below
Simone Weil

It is not a question of God “sending” us to hell. In each of us there is something growing up which will itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.
C.S. Lewis

I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life - that is to say, over 35 - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.
Jung

The sole condition which is required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community, is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. Thus the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced ... to a single principle.
De Tocqueville

One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programmes on their intentions rather than their results
Milton Friedman

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.
Ronald Reagan

At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child – miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosphy of sniveling brats.
P.J. O’Rourke

There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
P.J. O’Rourke