Category: Quote of the Day

This is a perfect snapshot of the West at twilight. On the one hand, governments of developed nations microregulate every aspect of your life in the interests of ‘keeping you safe.’ … On the other hand, when it comes to ‘keeping you safe’ from real threats, such as a millenarian theocracy that claims universal jurisdiction, America and its allies do nothing. … It is now certain that Tehran will get its nukes, and very soon. This is the biggest abdication of responsibility by the Western powers since the 1930s.

Mark Steyn

The best reason to diminish social programs is not to put more money in people’s pockets but to put more responsibility in people’s pockets.

Mark Steyn

The industrial powerhouse of 1950 [Detroit] is now a crime-ridden wasteland with a functioning literacy rate equivalent to West African basket-cases.

Mark Steyn

For all the casual slurs about ‘cultural imperialism’, British imperialists were more interested in other cultures than anybody before or since, and, if they hadn’t dug it up and taken care of it, we’d know hardly anything about the ancient world. What’s important about a nation’s past is not what it keeps walled up in the museum but what it keeps outside, living and breathing as every citizen’s inheritance.

Mark Steyn

[We] assume that social progress is like technological progress: one cannot uninvent the internal combustion engine, so how could one uninvent liberty?

Mark Steyn

If you look at the range of Hollywood movies playing in most cities in the developing world, you’d hate the America they portray, too.

Mark Steyn

Popular culture as a whole is popular, but in today’s fragmented market it’s a jostle of competing unpopular popular cultures. As the critic Stanley Crouch likes to say, if you make a movie and 10 million people go see it, you’ll gross $100 million – and 96 per cent of the population won’t have to be involved. That alone should caution anyone about reading too much into individual examples of popular culture.

Mark Steyn