A Quote by Mark Steyn

LBJ held up Detroit as a model of what the Great Society could accomplish. He was right. — © Mark Steyn
LBJ held up Detroit as a model of what the Great Society could accomplish. He was right.
For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ's Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population.
Back when Detroit was the head of auto manufacturing, it was clear where profits were created. Right? A car was made in Detroit. There was little argument that you could make that some of the money from that should be sent overseas to Ireland.
Detroit is a great deli city. If only GM could learn from what the delis in Detroit are doing! The best rye bread anywhere - double-baked, crispy, warm rye that they serve their sandwiches with - and great corned beef. It's a passionate deli town.
There was much in such a society that was primitive and insecure and it certainly could never measure up to the demands of the present epoch. But in such a society are contained the seeds of revolutionary democracy in which none will be held in slavery.
The ‘Great Society’ has not worked and it’s put us into the modern welfare state. If you look at China, they don’t have food stamps. If you look at China, they’re in a very different situation. They save for their own retirement security…they don’t have the modern welfare state and China’s growing. And so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us with the Great Society and they’d be gone.
Yeah, but look, who really provided the world's information to everybody on Earth? That was Wikipedia, right? And if you're asking what could we do to make the digital world work for people, the Wikipedia model is great. It's a donation model.
Many times people will say, you know, you're such a great role model. Well, that's great, but at the end of the day, you have to learn to be your own best role model and learn what makes you happy, not necessarily what society thinks you're supposed to be or women that you look up to, what they're doing. I look at that as being a symbol in a blueprint, but never forget that who you are is what's most important.
I do think the Obama agenda is the furthest left agenda we've seen since probably LBJ and the Great Society. And the differences have been that instead of him trying to go center-left, he's gone - in my estimation - more left. He's shown the country a much more aggressive liberal, more European style agenda, and that's on a center-right country.
By God's help, and the intelligent use of their own strong right arms they could accomplish great things.
Being a resident of the city and spending most of my time in the city, I've always been perplexed with how people could say there's nothing to do and nothing going on in Detroit, and how could you raise your family in Detroit. My reality is that I hang around with some of the most interesting creative people in the world, people doing things that could only be done in Detroit.
I grew up on the west side of Detroit - 6 mile and Wyoming - so I was really in the 'hood. And I would go to school at Detroit Waldorf, and that was not the 'hood. Growing up in Detroit was good. I had a good perspective, a well-rounded one, and not being one-sided.
If you want to land a punchline for how bad something is, you say 'Detroit,' even, like, in conversation. 'Oh, well, things could be worse. You could be in Detroit.' It makes me so mad.
You know, I do believe that China is emerging as a competitor, not just a competitor but, in many ways, an adversary. And, you know, the Chinese model is also being held up globally as an alternative power model, and I very much believe in our model versus theirs.
In building up a democratic model I think that Cuba's contribution, little by little, has contributed to getting closer to the ideals of those philosophers, of those Greeks who thought about how a society could be fairer, how a society could really represent the interests of the people. We have tried to get closer to that from a Latin-American perspective and from the Cuban perspective.
I have found that being honest is the best technique I can use. Right up front, tell people what you're trying to accomplish and what you're willing to sacrifice to accomplish it.
Detroit right now is virtually abandoned at its core to the degree that a lot of what had been slums thirty years ago are now wildflower meadows. The rebuilding of Detroit will occur a much smaller scale. It remains to be seen what will become of Detroit's vast suburbs.
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