Top 61 Quotes & Sayings by Conrad Black

Eastern Muslim countries, such as Indonesia and Malaysia, are relative success stories, as they are not afflicted by the Arab heritage of retreat and humiliation at the hands of the French, Spanish, British, Turks, and Persians.

The argument of socialists, that people really want to share, beyond a reasonable level of charity, is rubbish, though it is espoused by a lot of rich, pious hypocrites who want to share only enough to avoid widespread starvation, mob violence, and government seizure of more of their incomes.

For all history up to the end of the Cold War, summit meetings were historic and dramatic occasions, when leaders who controlled the destiny of much of the world met to change the world.

The United States is a proud, determined, hard-working, talented, patriotic nation and people, and it is not over-extended in the manner of empires of the past that took over the lands of others and eventually collapsed under the weight of the over-ambitious hegemon.

Economics is half psychology and half Grade Three arithmetic, and the U.S. does not now have either half right.

No one could seriously dispute that almost all of sub-Saharan Africa, all of North Africa except Morocco, all of the Middle East except Israel and Jordan and most of the oil-rich states, and the entire former British Indian Empire were better governed by Europeans.

Terrorists cannot threaten the survival of a great nation.

All my life, Americans have been accustomed to thinking of theirs as 'the richest, freest' country in the world. By most measurements, it was long a contender for that honor, and - among the larger countries, if equal weight were given to wealth and indices of freedom - probably did deserve to be so described.

Israel expanded beyond its original boundaries only because the Arab powers attacked Israel and the U.N. demarcation unsuccessfully in 1948. The endless caterwauling about the 1967 borders is rubbish.

Although his personality is generally quite agreeable, Mr Murdoch has no loyalty to anyone or anything except his company.

I don't go around trying to stir up foreign wars.

The balance between faith and reason is for the determination of each individual, and of the people as a whole, not of unauthorized government officials uttering impious humbug as they arbitrarily try to define that balance.

The facts of Watergate have been wildly exaggerated.

A quest for knowledge is not a war with faith; spirituality is not usually an infelicitous amalgam of superstition and philistinism; and moral relativism, taken outside midfield, leads inexorably both to heresy and to secular wickedness, which are often identical.

The Arabs could have peace tomorrow if sufficient numbers of Palestinians were not content to be used as cannon fodder in fruitless assaults on Israel, even as the surrounding Arab powers distract the Arab masses with the red herring of Israel while retarding their countries with their repression and corruption.

Given the genocidal belligerence of Iranian threats against Israel, it is hard to take issue with Israel's right to preemptive self-defense.

Rupert Murdoch is probably the most successful media proprietor and operator in history.

Guerrilla wars, and even more so terrorist assaults, are conducted only by forces with insufficient strength to carry out a real war.

Unionized teachers have destroyed much of the state school system.

The vicar of Christ is an individual, not an electorate.

For decades, I have been a militant anti-declinist in terms of America's place in the world.

Private-sector firms are increasingly active in the prison industry and they and the militantly unionized correctional officers, almost all unskilled labor, constantly lead public demands for more criminal statutes and more draconian penalties.

I do not at all have the mind of a bully... in my mind bullies are intolerant of contrary opinion, domineering and rather cowardly. I would hope that none of those terms could be fairly used in describing me.

The greenhouse effect of carbon-dioxide emissions does produce gentle warming if it is not counteracted by unpredictable natural phenomena, but it cannot be measured directly against the volume of such emissions.

The American legal industry is a medieval guild in which the prosecutors, bar, and bench join hands to ensure that legal invoices are paid, no matter how excessive.

I don't have any shame.

Maximising my wealth was never my chief thing.

At least 80 percent of American prisoners are grossly over-sentenced. The Supreme Court knows this, but shows scant concern for this human side of criminal justice.

There are some people whose opinion I value and respect and it would be very bothersome if I forfeited their respect. But the general public? I'm not preoccupied with the opinions of others.

From the early Seventies to the mid-Eighties, I approached Rome at a snail's pace. Having concluded that God existed, I could not seriously entertain the thought of not trying to be in contact with Him.

I never ask for mercy and seek no one's sympathy.

There is no doubt that the second President Bush inherited a very serious terrorist threat, though not such a threat as had been represented by the totalitarian Great Powers, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

I'm not a xenophobe - I think immigration is a good thing for most countries - but they transmute the foibles of their native tongues into English in a way that's difficult to figure out.

I am proud of being in a U.S. federal prison and surviving it.

Perhaps the gravest under-publicized atrocity in the world is the persecution of Christians.

There is a legitimate concern about wealth distribution in the United States, but the answer is not to scapegoat any individual who makes over $200,000 per year and to try to sell the fraud that the government can equitably take the money of those who have earned it and give it to those who haven't.

Most American media outlets that are controlled by Jews seem to be reflexively, or at least habitually, anti-Israel.

The U.S. prosecution service is eating at the soul of the American republic. It is an absolute danger to everyone.

I may have made a mistake in renouncing my Canadian citizenship, which I have never ceased to promise to try to regain.

I always keep a firewall between my own travails and my perception of public-policy issues; otherwise I would retain no credibility as a commentator.

Walter Cronkite was a personally decent and convivial man, who literally couldn't kill a fly, was kind to his children, generally helpful to juniors, authentically curious about the news, and, in his time, an energetic reporter.

All the other members of the U.N. were admitted, at the outset or subsequently, but Israel was created by the U.N. as a Jewish state, on the motion of Stalin's ambassador, seconded by President Truman's.

Nixon's full term was one of the most successful in U.S. history, which is why he was re-elected by the largest plurality in the country's history.

Watergate enabled the Democrats to cut off all aid to South Vietnam and ensure American defeat in a war their party entered and had effectively lost, before Nixon salvaged a non-Communist South Vietnam while effecting a complete American withdrawal.

I am a passport-carrying citizen of the E.U.

The whole nuclear-arms-control and non-proliferation policy of the nuclear powers is a fraud: The Americans could not prevent the Soviets from replicating their weaponry, and then could not object when the British did the same.

All emphasis in American prisons is on punishment, retribution, and disparagement, and almost none is on rehabilitation.

I made 50 million bucks yesterday. That's a flameout I could get used to.

Like all fads, corporate governance has its zealots.

The destructive fixation of the envious English-Canadian mind requires that the highest, happiest most agile flyers be laid low. [It is] a sadistic desire corroded by soul-destroying envy, to intimidate all those who might aspire to anything the slightest exceptional.

Greed has been severely underestimated and denigrated - unfairly so, in my opinion.

[Canada's social welfare system is] an overgenerous reinsurance policy for an underachieving people.

We're going to try and recruit the very best people we can and produce the best papers we can, and publish them to the highest standards we can .

It is galling to see such mendacious hypocrites as Kennedy and Biden at the Senate Judiciary Committee sitting in judgment on distinguished jurists.

We must express the view, based on our empirical observations, that a substantial number of journalists are ignorant, lazy, opinionated, and intellectually dishonest. The profession is heavily cluttered with aged hacks toiling through a miasma of mounting decrepitude and often alcoholism, and even more so with arrogant and abrasive youngsters who substitute 'commitment' for insight. The product of their impassioned intervention in public affairs is more often confusion than lucidity.

There can be no return to prosperity while the government (of Ontario) believes that taking money from the people who have earned it and giving it away to the people who haven't, in exchange for their votes and regardless of merit, is the essence of fairness.

While few judges or prosecutors would be afraid to exercise their perfectly legitimate discretion in favour of an ordinary man, not to mention a minority group member, most would be terrified to exercise the same discretion for someone politically, financially or socially powerful.

I have long thought that his [Rupert Murdoch's] social philosophy was contained in his cartoon show, The Simpsons: all politicians and public officials are crooks, and the masses are a vast lumpen proletariat of deluded and exploitable blowhards.

Since biblical times, and probably before, the wealthy have been envied and condemned.

There is not one shred of evidence that the Internet has had any downward influence on North American or European newspaper circulation.