All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
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
The spirit of the age is: Ask not what your country can do for you, demand it.
Mark Steyn
It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
H. L. Mencken
When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental – men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost… All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre.
H. L. Mencken
People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist?
H. L. Mencken
The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.
H. L. Mencken
“Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.”
H. L. Mencken