Top 141 Quotes & Sayings by Jonah Goldberg
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American journalist Jonah Goldberg.
Last updated on December 23, 2024.
Obama did inherit a deficit when he came into office. Why this fact justifies racking up vastly more debt and bigger deficits is a logical mystery.
If power made one evil, then God would be the Devil.
And it's the President of the United States who said he wasn't going to spike the football and all this, we shouldn't gloat about it, running campaign ads, gloating about it and saying the other guy isn't good enough to do the tough things that I did, which I think is, one reprehensible.
I think as - all in all, it's better to have a cool president than a not cool president.
The main difference between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives are honest about it. We're kind of dorks about it. We are kind of like Dungeons and Dragons geeks.
Republican politics have been off-kilter for several years now because a large segment of the conservative base does not look back fondly on the Bush presidency.
I would also say Barack Obama has spent much, much, much, much more money than the Republicans.
Social distinctions tend to matter only at your own level and above.
The GOP needs to figure out a way to become more appealing to new constituencies.
If you spend any time in Washington you'll find nerds. What happens is most of them sublimate their fixations with comics, or baseball cards, or 1960s British comedies to policy minutiae and political arcana. But, like Christians in ancient Rome, you can still spot them if you know the signals.
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.
If we say that anyone who 'moralizes' must be perfect morally then we are in effect saying no one can moralize.
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.
But you're never taught in schools - we don't teach anyone in public schools that government is the problem. We don't teach anyone in college that government is the problem - except maybe a handful of sort of unique, conservative schools. But mainstream media never talks as if government is the problem.
The premise of my book is that everyone is a bit ideological to some extent. Everyone comes from a ideological perspective.
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.
One of the things that really drove me crazy was the way in which college kids, in particular, are educated to think that ideology is dangerous and bad.
Our fear of hypocrisy is forcing us to live in a world where gluttons are fine, so long as they champion gluttony.
There was no intellectual movement in American history called social Darwinism. The people who were supposedly the leaders of the social Darwinist movement never embraced something called social Darwinism. It didn't exist.
The problem with the United Nations is that while democracy within nations is the best available form of government, democracy among nations can be a moral disaster - especially if some nations are not democracies.
But if the choice is a cool president and 8 or 10 percent unemployment in a declining economy and a country that seems to be going in the wrong direction and structural unemployment for young people at 50 percent, I'd rather have a dorky president who fixed those problems.
Getting the support of Syria is the moral equivalent of winning the Klan's endorsement - it might be useful but it doesn't necessarily speak well of you.
We are a species that must try to impose and find systems - systems of thought, ways of organizing and categorizing reality.
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.
Hypocrisy is bad, but it's not the worst vice in the world. If I declared “murder is wrong” and then killed somebody, I would hope that the top count against me would be homicide, not hypocrisy. Liberal elites ' particularly in Hollywood ' believe that hypocrisy is the gravest sin in the world, which is why they advocate their own lifestyles for the entire world: Sleep with whomever you want, listen to your own instincts, be true to yourself, blah, blah, blah. Our fear of hypocrisy is forcing us to live in a world where gluttons are fine, so long as they champion gluttony.
When you treat reprehensible and ludicrous arguments with respect you have elevated the reprehensible and made the ludicrous a bit more reasonable. Having a serious argument with a Nazi makes the horror of the Holocaust a debatable point. Don't wrestle in the mud with pigs. You get dirty and the pig likes it.
Facts are mere speed bumps on the road to lefty moral outrage.
Progressivism, liberalism, or whatever you want to call it has become an ideology of power. So long as liberals hold it, principles don't matter.
One of the overriding points of Liberal Fascism is that all of the totalitarian "isms" of the left commit the fallacy of the category error. They all want the state to be something it cannot be. They passionately believe the government can love you, that the state can be your God or your church or your tribe or your parent or your village or all of these things at once. Conservatives occasionally make this mistake, libertarians never do, liberals almost always do.
If there is ever a fascist takeover in America, it will come not in the form of storm troopers kicking down doors but with lawyers and social workers saying. "I'm from the government and I'm here to help.
Hollywood's martyr-mythology leaves out the fact that the famed Hollywood Ten, for example, were in fact members of the Communist Party, which advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government in violation of the Smith Act and which took orders directly from Moscow.
Champions of Liberty get called Fascists by Champions of Statism
John Kerry is a sphincter. Okay, that's a bit juvenile.
And in the minds of progressives you are free to live anyway you want so long as it's progressive.
Christian socialism”). This is a difficult concept for modern liberals to grasp because they are used to thinking of the progressives as the people who cleaned up the food supply, pushed through the eight hour workday, and ended child labor. But liberals often forget that the progressives were imperialists, at home and abroad. They were the authors of Prohibition, the Palmer Raids, eugenics, loyalty oaths, and, in its modern incarnation, what many call “state capitalism.
If you’re too stupid to understand that a philosophy that favors a federally structured republic, with numerous restraints on the scope and power of government to interfere with individual rights or the free market, is a lot different from an ethnic-nationalist, atheistic, and socialist program of genocide and international aggression, you should use this rule of thumb: If someone isn’t advocating the murder of millions of people in gas chambers and a global Reich for the White Man you shouldn’t assume he’s a Nazi and you should know it’s pretty damn evil to call him one.
Those who say they dislike dogma, or 'certainty', tend to be liars, hypocrites, or simply wrong. What they really dislike is the dogma of those they disagree with. A society that was certain, certain beyond all certainty, that putting its citizens in death camps was wrong, would never put people in death camps. Such things are only possible when you're open to new ideas.
Someone once noted that a 'gaffe' in Washington is when a politician accidentally tells the truth.
Progressivism was a sister movement of fascism, and today's liberalism is the daughter of Progressivism.
America's political system used to be about the pursuit of happiness. Now More and more of us want to stop chasing it and have it delivered.
Liberals are Nazis, and Nazis are liberals. And if you don't agree with me, you're a Nazi too.
Bill Maher is anything but an impartial host. He sucks up to Hollywood liberals because A) he needs to get them back on the show, B) he usually agrees with them, and C) they tend to be wildly ignorant.
Look, I think liberals have reasonable gripes with Fox News. It does lean to the right, primarily in its opinion programming but also in its story selection (which is fine by me) and elsewhere. But it's worth remembering that Fox is less a bastion of ideological conservatism and more a populist, tabloidy network.
Nothing drives your opponents more crazy than being utterly reasonable. And nothing makes demonizing or delegitimizing your opponents easier than letting them shriek unreasonable things for you. The Republicans need to get back to being the party that elicits unreasonable shrieking from their opponents. Not the other way around.
The Founders understood that democracy was important, but if you didn't filter it through a republican system you'd be just as likely to end up with a tyranny of the majority as you would with a healthy society. Don't worry, I won't quote the Federalist Papers, but trust me, it's in there.
Capitalism is the greatest system ever created for alleviating general human misery, and yet it breeds ingratitude.
I don't think twice about picking up my dog's poop, but if another dog's poop is next to it, I think, 'Eww, dog poop!
Cultures grow on the vine of tradition.
Why is it fair game to question conservatives' love or loyalty to children or to their fellow man, but beyond the pale to question liberals' love of country?
The mainstream perception that conservatives are close-minded and dogmatic while liberals are open-minded and free-thinking has it almost exactly backward. Liberal dogma is settled: The government should do good, where it can, whenever it can. That is President Obama's idea of pragmatism and bipartisanship: He's open to all ideas, from either side of the aisle, about how best to expand government and get the state more involved in our lives.
[Libertarianism] is about curbing state power to let people be and do what they want. Liberalism is about using state power to make people do and be what liberals want. And that makes all the difference in the world.
The suggestion that liberals aren't moralizers is so preposterous it makes it hard for me to take any of them seriously when they wax indignant about "moralizers." Almost every day, they tell us what is moral or immoral to think and to say about race, taxes, abortion - you name it. They explain it would be immoral for me to spend more of my own money on my own children when that money could be spent by government on other people's children. In short, they think moralizing is fine. They just want to have a monopoly on the franchise.
The white male is the Jew of liberal fascism.
Keep Hope alive, particularly if Hope is the name of a very cute puppy and not some ill-defined abstraction that is in fact code for big government.
Conservatives value economic liberty and moral security, while the liberal values economic security and moral liberty.
The logical upshot of liberalism's hatred of hypocrisy is that it is better for the liar to champion lying, the glutton to advocate gluttony, the adulterer to celebrate adultery, than for someone to preach the right thing if he himself occasionally does the wrong thing. Better to let your failings define you and be happy about it, than to let your ideals define you but then fall short of them, for that opens you up to the charge of hypocrisy.
You can see why the Marxist left would resist the idea that Hitler was a revolutionary. Because if he was, then either Hitler was a force for good, or revolutions can be bad.
The government cannot love you, and any politics that works on a different assumption is destined for no good.
Simply because the nanny-state wants to hug you doesn't mean it's not tyrannical if you don't want to be hugged.
Joe Biden says the Wall Street crisis is the result of George W. Bush's tax cuts, which makes as much sense as blaming the rising price of fairy dust. But as a wise man once asked, Who gives a rat's patoot what Joe Biden thinks?
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