85 quotes
What youth considers liberation, maturity considers tasteless excess.
New Criterion (2000)
In a corporate state, all attempts to reduce bureaucracy increase it.
The Social Affairs Unit (2006)
Where tax is solidarity, the national sport is tax evasion.
The Social Affairs Unit (2006)
Mere absurdity has never prevented the triumph of bad ideas, if they accord with easily aroused fantasies of an existence freed of human limitations.
City Journal (1998)
It is surely almost self-evident that the strongest political emotions are negative: for example, the rich are hated much more than the poor are loved.
Modernity is the most transient of qualities.
The Social Affairs Unit (2006)
The appeal of political correctness is that it attempts to change men’s souls by altering how they speak. If one sufficiently reforms language, certain thoughts become unthinkable, and the world moves in the approved direction.
City Journal (1998)
Political abstractions can disguise or change the meaning of the most elementary realities.
City Journal (1998)
Where hopes are unrealistic, fears often become exaggerated; where dreams alone are blueprints, nightmares result.
City Journal (1998)
We are like creatures so dazzled with our own technological prowess that we no longer think it necessary to consider the obvious.
City Journal (1998)
Civilization is the sum total of all those activities that allow men to transcend mere biological existence and reach for a richer mental, aesthetic, material, and spiritual life.
City Journal (1998)
Where fashion in clothes, bodily adornment, and music are concerned, it is the underclass that increasingly sets the pace. Never before has there been so much downward cultural aspiration.
For the sake of democracy, vigorous, civilized debate must replace the law of silence that political correctness has imposed.
City Journal (1998)
Stupidity multiplies unnecessary procedure, intelligence decreases it; therefore stupidity is the more functional from the bureaucratic point of view.
How Dare You Volunteer! (2021)
Education is not a shield against stupidity, much less against brutality. Indeed, one might almost define an intellectual as someone who can witness a massacre and see a principle.
The nearer emotional life approaches to hysteria, to continual outward show, the less genuine it becomes. Feeling becomes equated with vehemence of expression, so that insincerity becomes permanent.
City Journal (1998)
Henceforth there are to be no fixed or inviolable principles of law at all—only an endlessly changing legal response to the fashionable causes of the moment.
City Journal (1998)
It is better to be opposed by an enemy than to be adrift in meaninglessness, for the simulacrum of an enemy lends purpose to actions whose nihilism would otherwise be self-evident.
City Journal (1998)
If a lack of money had prevented people from improving their lot, then mankind would still be living in the caves: unless you believe that investment capital first arrived from outer space.
The Social Affairs Unit (2006)
Unilateral tolerance in a world of intolerance is like unilateral disarmament in a world of armed camps: it regards hope as a better basis for policy than reality.
City Journal (1998)