William F. Buckley Jr.
Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.
"Capitalism and a Free Society"
With Margaret Thatcher in London
Famous for these quotes:
“I won't insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
tags: hypocrisy
“Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
tags: liberalism, liberals, politics
“The amount of money and of legal energy being given to prosecute hundreds of thousands of Americans who are caught with a few ounces of marijuana in their jeans simply makes no sense - the kindest way to put it. A sterner way to put it is that it is an outrage, an imposition on basic civil liberties and on the reasonable expenditure of social energy.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
tags: civil-liberties, civil-rights, drug-laws, drugs, marijuana, prohibition
“I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
tags: democracy, diversity, political-philosophy
“Decent people should ignore politics, if only they could be confident that politics would ignore them”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
tags: politics
“Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“To fail to experience gratitude when walking through the corridors of the Metropolitan Museum, when listening to the music of Bach or Beethoven, when exercising our freedom to speak, or ... to give, or withhold, our assent, is to fail to recognize how much we have received from the great wellsprings of human talent and concern that gave us Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, our parents, our friends. We need a rebirth of gratitude for those who have cared for us, living and, mostly, dead. The high moments of our way of life are their gifts to us. We must remember them in our thoughts and in our prayers; and in our deeds.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“I would like to take you seriously but to do so would affront your intelligence.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“Liberals, it has been said, are generous with other peoples' money, except when it comes to questions of national survival when they prefer to be generous with other peoples' freedom and security.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“The academic community has in it the biggest concentration of alarmists, cranks and extremists this side of the giggle house.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“Back in the thirties we were told we must collectivize the nation because the people were so poor. Now we are told we must collectivize the nation because the people are so rich.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“Truth is a demure lady, much too ladylike to knock you on your head and drag you to her cave. She is there, but people must want her, and seek her out.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling 'Stop!”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“There is an inverse relationship between reliance on the state and self-reliance.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“Industry is the enemy of melancholy”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“Conservatives should be adamant about the need for the reappearance of Judeo-Christianity in the public square.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“The obvious differences apart, Karl Marx was no more a reliable prophet than was the Reverend Jim Jones. Karl Marx was a genius, an uncannily resourceful manipulator of world history who shoved everything he knew, thought, and devised into a Ouija board from whose movements he decocted universal laws. He had his following, during the late phases of the Industrial Revolution. But he was discredited by historical experience longer ago than the Wizard of Oz: and still, great grown people sit around, declare themselves to be Marxists, and make excuses for Gulag and Afghanistan.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“I had much more fun criticizing than praising.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“I profoundly believe it takes a lot of practice to become a moral slob.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“The more complicated and powerful the job, the more rudimentary the preparation for it.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“I catch fire and find the reserves of courage and assertiveness to speak up. When that happens I get quite carried away. My blood gets hot my brow wet I become unbearably and unconscionably sarcastic and bellicose I am girded for a total showdown.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“Halfway through the second term of Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal braintrusters began to worry about mounting popular concern over the national debt. In those days the size of the national debt was on everyone’s mind. Indeed, Franklin Roosevelt had talked himself into office, in 1932, in part by promising to hack away at a debt which, even under the frugal Mr. Hoover, the people tended to think of as grown to menacing size. Mr. Roosevelt’s wisemen worried deeply about the mounting tension ...
And then, suddenly, the academic community came to the rescue. Economists across the length and breadth of the land were electrified by a theory of debt introduced in England by John Maynard Keynes. The politicians wrung their hands in gratitude. Depicting the intoxicating political consequences of Lord Keynes’s discovery, the wry cartoonist of the Washington Times Herald drew a memorable picture. In the center, sitting on a throne in front of a Maypole, was a jubilant FDR, cigarette tilted almost vertically, a grin on his face that stretched from ear to ear. Dancing about him in a circle, hands clasped together, their faces glowing with ecstasy, the braintrusters, vested in academic robes, sang the magical incantation, the great discovery of Lord Keynes: “We owe it to ourselves.” With five talismanic words, the planners had disposed of the problem of deficit spending. Anyone thenceforward who worried about an increase in the national debt was just plain ignorant of the central insight of modern economics: What do we care how much we - the government - owe so long as we owe it to ourselves? On with the spending. Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect ...”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“I find it easier to believe in God than to believe Hamlet was deduced from the molecular structure of a mutton chop.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
tags: r-i-p
“A good debater is not necessarily an effective vote-getter: you can find a hole in your opponent's argument through which you could drive a coach and four ringing jingle bells all the way, and thrill at the crystallization of a truth wrung out from a bloody dialogue - which, however, may warm only you and your muse, while the smiling paralogist has in the meantime made votes by the tens of thousands.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“I would sooner be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand members of the faculty of Harvard.”
― William F. Buckley Jr., Happy Days Were Here Again: Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist
“Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“For people who like that sort of thing, that's the sort of thing they like.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
tags: acceptance, humor, reality
“[D]emocracy can itself be as tyrannical as a dictatorship, since it is the extent, not the source, of government power that impinges on freedom."
-William F Buckley”
― William F. Buckley Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of 'Academic Freedom'
tags: democracy, freedom, government, tyranny-of-majority
“The largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques which, in education as well as the arts, are out to impose upon the nation their modish fads and fallacies, and have nearly succeeded in doing so. In this cultural issue, we are, without reservations, on the side of excellence (rather than "newness") and of honest intellectual combat (rather than conformity).”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“The loneliness of flight is not entirely overwhelmed by cabin movies, the drinks, the Gemütlichkeit of shoulder-to-shoulder life.”
― William F. Buckley Jr., The Lexicon: A Cornucopia of Wonderful Words for the Inquisitive Word Lover
“There will be no legacy for Mr. Bush. I don't believe his
successor would re-enunciate the words he used in his
second inaugural address because they were too ambitious.
So therefore I think his legacy is indecipherable.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“Conservatism aims to maintain in working order the loyalties of the community to perceived truths and also to those truths which in their judgment have earned universal recognition.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“Human progress is achieved by taking exact measurements.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
tags: goals, progress
“...my beloved Eudosia [a member of Buckley's household staff], who is Cuban, very large, quite old, and altogether superstitious, and speaks only a word or two of English (even though she has been with us for 19 years), is quite certain that the gentleman who raped the 16-year-old girl in New Caanan three years ago and escaped has successfully eluded the police only because of his resourceful determination to ravage Eudosia before he dies. Accordingly she demanded, and I gave her, a shotgun, into which I have inserted two empty shells. Still, Eudosia with blank cartridges is more formidable than Eugene McCarthy with The Bomb.”
― William F. Buckley Jr., Cruising Speed--A Documentary
“The individualist insists that drastic depressions are the result of credit inflation; (not excessive savings, as the Keynesians would have it) which at all times in history has been caused by direct government action or by government influence. As for aggravated unemployment, the individualist insists that it is exclusively the result of government intervention through inflation, wage rigidities, burdensome taxes, and restrictions on trade and production such as price controls and tariffs. The inflation that comes inevitably with government pump-priming soon catches up with the laborer, wipes away any real increase in his wages, discourages private investment, and sets off a new deflationary spiral which can in turn only be counteracted by more coercive and paternalistic government policies. And so it is that the "long run" is very soon a-coming, and the harmful effects of government intervention are far more durable than those that are sustained by encouraging the unhampered free market to work out its own destiny.”
― William F. Buckley Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of 'Academic Freedom'
tags: big-government, capitalism, conservative, economics, economy, free-market, inflation, keynes, keynesian
“Modern formulations are necessary even in defense of very ancient truths. Not because of any alleged anachronism in the old ideas – the Beatitudes remain the essential statements of the Western code – but because the idiom of life is always changing”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
tags: argument, conservatism, persuasion, phrasing, relevance, timelessness
“He was a conservative all right, but invariably he gave the impression that he was a conservative because he was surrounded by liberals; that he had been a revolutionist if that had been required in order to be socially disruptive.”
― William F. Buckley Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of 'Academic Freedom'
tags: argumentative, contrarian, ideologue
“I believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.”
― William F. Buckley Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of 'Academic Freedom'
tags: atheism, christianity, collectivism, individualism
“[Professor Greene's] reaction to GAMAY, as published in the Yale Daily News, fairly took one's breath away. He fondled the word "fascist" as though he had come up with a Dead Sea Scroll vouchsafing the key word to the understanding of God and Man at Yale. In a few sentences he used the term thrice. "Mr. Buckley has done Yale a great service" (how I would tire of this pedestrian rhetorical device), "and he may well do the cause of liberal education in America an even greater service, by stating the fascist alternative to liberalism. This fascist thesis . . . This . . . pure fascism . . . What more could Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin ask for . . . ?" (They asked for, and got, a great deal more.)
What survives, from such stuff as this, is ne-plus-ultra relativism, idiot nihlism. "What is required," Professor Greene spoke, "is more, not less tolerance--not the tolerance of indifference, but the tolerance of honest respect for divergent convictions and the determination of all that such divergent opinions be heard without administrative censorship. I try my best in the classroom to expound and defend my faith, when it is relevant, as honestly and persuasively as I can. But I can do so only because many of my colleagues are expounding and defending their contrasting faiths, or skepticisms, as openly and honestly as I am mine."
A professor of philosophy! Question: What is the 1) ethical, 2) philosophical, or 3) epistemological argument for requiring continued tolerance of ideas whose discrediting it is the purpose of education to effect? What ethical code (in the Bible? in Plato? Kant? Hume?) requires "honest respect" for any divergent conviction?”
― William F. Buckley Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of 'Academic Freedom'
tags: fascism, fascist, higher-education, relativism, tolerance, yale, yalie
“How can one deduce the cause of "Hamlet" or "Saint Matthew's Passion"? What is the cause of inspiration? ”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“They [progressives] are men and women who tend to believe that the human being is perfectible and social progress predictable, and that the instrument for effecting the two is reason; that truths are transitory and empirically determined; that equality is desirable and attainable through the action of state power; that social and individual differences, if they are not rational, are objectionable, and should be scientifically eliminated; that all people and societies strive to organize themselves upon a rationalist and scientific paradigm.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“Liberals don’t care what you do so long as it’s compulsory.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“We find that in the absence of demonstrable truth, the best we can do is to exercise the greatest diligence, humility, insight, intelligence, and industry in trying to arrive at the nearest values to truth. I hope, of course, to argue convincingly that having done this, we have an inescapable duty to seek to inculcate others with these values.”
― William F. Buckley Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of 'Academic Freedom'
tags: education, higher-education, relativism, teaching, truth
“What would happen if the Communists occupied the Sahara? Answer: Nothing—for 50 years. Then there would be a shortage of sand.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“Pentagon ought to win the Nobel Peace Prize every year, because the U.S. military is the world’s foremost guarantor of peace”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“Do you favor mandated free tuition?” I answered: “Most positively not.” The crowd unanimously and lustily booed me. “Do you realize,” I persisted, “that you are asking men and women who are, many of them poorer than you, and poorer than your parents; many of whom earn less money than you yourselves will be earning in the course of a few years, to make sacrifices in your behalf?” Boo! “If you don’t believe me,” I said, “go to your economics teachers and ask them.” Boo! “All right,” I said, “don’t go to your economics teachers, and don’t discover the economic realities—you’ll find it much easier on the conscience not to know who is sustaining the hardship for your free education.” Applause!—as a matter of fact. On”
― William F. Buckley Jr., The Unmaking of a Mayor
“One must recently have lived on or close to a college campus to have a vivid intimation of what has happened. It is there that we see how a number of energetic social innovators, plugging their grand designs, succeeded over the years in capturing the liberal intellectual imagination. And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things. Run just about everything. There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals'.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“Our political economy and our high-energy industry run on large, general principles, on ideas — not by day-to-day guess work, expedients and improvisations. Ideas have to go into exchange to become or remain operative; and the medium of such exchange is the printed word.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“when both can’t be true. In 1946, in the days after World War II, presidential advisor Bernard Baruch said, “Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.” Variations have been uttered by U.S. Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger, U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and others. Today this seemingly indisputable truth no longer holds. Propaganda is indistinguishable from fact and we find ourselves living in the frightening pages of a George Orwell novel.”
― William F. Buckley Jr., Buckley vs. Vidal: The Historic 1968 ABC News Debates
“National Review will support the rightwardmost viable candidate.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“People die, God endures.”
― William F. Buckley Jr., A Torch Kept Lit: Great Lives of the Twentieth Century
“for December 19 and for a day or two bracketing the”
― William F. Buckley Jr., Miles Gone by: A Literary Autobiography
“Birch fallacy is the assumption that you can infer subjective intention from objective consequence: we lost China to the Communists, therefore the President of the United States and the Secretary of State wished China to go to the Communists.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“But is God a Yale man?”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“Curiously, the failures of Communism are more often treated as a joke than as a tragedy.”
― William F. Buckley Jr. [/b]
Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.
"Capitalism and a Free Society"
With Margaret Thatcher in London
Famous for these quotes:
“I won't insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
tags: hypocrisy
“Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
tags: liberalism, liberals, politics
“The amount of money and of legal energy being given to prosecute hundreds of thousands of Americans who are caught with a few ounces of marijuana in their jeans simply makes no sense - the kindest way to put it. A sterner way to put it is that it is an outrage, an imposition on basic civil liberties and on the reasonable expenditure of social energy.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
tags: civil-liberties, civil-rights, drug-laws, drugs, marijuana, prohibition
“I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
tags: democracy, diversity, political-philosophy
“Decent people should ignore politics, if only they could be confident that politics would ignore them”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
tags: politics
“Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“To fail to experience gratitude when walking through the corridors of the Metropolitan Museum, when listening to the music of Bach or Beethoven, when exercising our freedom to speak, or ... to give, or withhold, our assent, is to fail to recognize how much we have received from the great wellsprings of human talent and concern that gave us Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, our parents, our friends. We need a rebirth of gratitude for those who have cared for us, living and, mostly, dead. The high moments of our way of life are their gifts to us. We must remember them in our thoughts and in our prayers; and in our deeds.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“I would like to take you seriously but to do so would affront your intelligence.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“Liberals, it has been said, are generous with other peoples' money, except when it comes to questions of national survival when they prefer to be generous with other peoples' freedom and security.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“The academic community has in it the biggest concentration of alarmists, cranks and extremists this side of the giggle house.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“Back in the thirties we were told we must collectivize the nation because the people were so poor. Now we are told we must collectivize the nation because the people are so rich.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“Truth is a demure lady, much too ladylike to knock you on your head and drag you to her cave. She is there, but people must want her, and seek her out.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling 'Stop!”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“There is an inverse relationship between reliance on the state and self-reliance.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“Industry is the enemy of melancholy”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“Conservatives should be adamant about the need for the reappearance of Judeo-Christianity in the public square.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“The obvious differences apart, Karl Marx was no more a reliable prophet than was the Reverend Jim Jones. Karl Marx was a genius, an uncannily resourceful manipulator of world history who shoved everything he knew, thought, and devised into a Ouija board from whose movements he decocted universal laws. He had his following, during the late phases of the Industrial Revolution. But he was discredited by historical experience longer ago than the Wizard of Oz: and still, great grown people sit around, declare themselves to be Marxists, and make excuses for Gulag and Afghanistan.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“I had much more fun criticizing than praising.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“I profoundly believe it takes a lot of practice to become a moral slob.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“The more complicated and powerful the job, the more rudimentary the preparation for it.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“I catch fire and find the reserves of courage and assertiveness to speak up. When that happens I get quite carried away. My blood gets hot my brow wet I become unbearably and unconscionably sarcastic and bellicose I am girded for a total showdown.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“Halfway through the second term of Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal braintrusters began to worry about mounting popular concern over the national debt. In those days the size of the national debt was on everyone’s mind. Indeed, Franklin Roosevelt had talked himself into office, in 1932, in part by promising to hack away at a debt which, even under the frugal Mr. Hoover, the people tended to think of as grown to menacing size. Mr. Roosevelt’s wisemen worried deeply about the mounting tension ...
And then, suddenly, the academic community came to the rescue. Economists across the length and breadth of the land were electrified by a theory of debt introduced in England by John Maynard Keynes. The politicians wrung their hands in gratitude. Depicting the intoxicating political consequences of Lord Keynes’s discovery, the wry cartoonist of the Washington Times Herald drew a memorable picture. In the center, sitting on a throne in front of a Maypole, was a jubilant FDR, cigarette tilted almost vertically, a grin on his face that stretched from ear to ear. Dancing about him in a circle, hands clasped together, their faces glowing with ecstasy, the braintrusters, vested in academic robes, sang the magical incantation, the great discovery of Lord Keynes: “We owe it to ourselves.” With five talismanic words, the planners had disposed of the problem of deficit spending. Anyone thenceforward who worried about an increase in the national debt was just plain ignorant of the central insight of modern economics: What do we care how much we - the government - owe so long as we owe it to ourselves? On with the spending. Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect ...”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“I find it easier to believe in God than to believe Hamlet was deduced from the molecular structure of a mutton chop.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
tags: r-i-p
“A good debater is not necessarily an effective vote-getter: you can find a hole in your opponent's argument through which you could drive a coach and four ringing jingle bells all the way, and thrill at the crystallization of a truth wrung out from a bloody dialogue - which, however, may warm only you and your muse, while the smiling paralogist has in the meantime made votes by the tens of thousands.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“I would sooner be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand members of the faculty of Harvard.”
― William F. Buckley Jr., Happy Days Were Here Again: Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist
“Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“For people who like that sort of thing, that's the sort of thing they like.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
tags: acceptance, humor, reality
“[D]emocracy can itself be as tyrannical as a dictatorship, since it is the extent, not the source, of government power that impinges on freedom."
-William F Buckley”
― William F. Buckley Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of 'Academic Freedom'
tags: democracy, freedom, government, tyranny-of-majority
“The largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques which, in education as well as the arts, are out to impose upon the nation their modish fads and fallacies, and have nearly succeeded in doing so. In this cultural issue, we are, without reservations, on the side of excellence (rather than "newness") and of honest intellectual combat (rather than conformity).”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“The loneliness of flight is not entirely overwhelmed by cabin movies, the drinks, the Gemütlichkeit of shoulder-to-shoulder life.”
― William F. Buckley Jr., The Lexicon: A Cornucopia of Wonderful Words for the Inquisitive Word Lover
“There will be no legacy for Mr. Bush. I don't believe his
successor would re-enunciate the words he used in his
second inaugural address because they were too ambitious.
So therefore I think his legacy is indecipherable.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“Conservatism aims to maintain in working order the loyalties of the community to perceived truths and also to those truths which in their judgment have earned universal recognition.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“Human progress is achieved by taking exact measurements.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
tags: goals, progress
“...my beloved Eudosia [a member of Buckley's household staff], who is Cuban, very large, quite old, and altogether superstitious, and speaks only a word or two of English (even though she has been with us for 19 years), is quite certain that the gentleman who raped the 16-year-old girl in New Caanan three years ago and escaped has successfully eluded the police only because of his resourceful determination to ravage Eudosia before he dies. Accordingly she demanded, and I gave her, a shotgun, into which I have inserted two empty shells. Still, Eudosia with blank cartridges is more formidable than Eugene McCarthy with The Bomb.”
― William F. Buckley Jr., Cruising Speed--A Documentary
“The individualist insists that drastic depressions are the result of credit inflation; (not excessive savings, as the Keynesians would have it) which at all times in history has been caused by direct government action or by government influence. As for aggravated unemployment, the individualist insists that it is exclusively the result of government intervention through inflation, wage rigidities, burdensome taxes, and restrictions on trade and production such as price controls and tariffs. The inflation that comes inevitably with government pump-priming soon catches up with the laborer, wipes away any real increase in his wages, discourages private investment, and sets off a new deflationary spiral which can in turn only be counteracted by more coercive and paternalistic government policies. And so it is that the "long run" is very soon a-coming, and the harmful effects of government intervention are far more durable than those that are sustained by encouraging the unhampered free market to work out its own destiny.”
― William F. Buckley Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of 'Academic Freedom'
tags: big-government, capitalism, conservative, economics, economy, free-market, inflation, keynes, keynesian
“Modern formulations are necessary even in defense of very ancient truths. Not because of any alleged anachronism in the old ideas – the Beatitudes remain the essential statements of the Western code – but because the idiom of life is always changing”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
tags: argument, conservatism, persuasion, phrasing, relevance, timelessness
“He was a conservative all right, but invariably he gave the impression that he was a conservative because he was surrounded by liberals; that he had been a revolutionist if that had been required in order to be socially disruptive.”
― William F. Buckley Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of 'Academic Freedom'
tags: argumentative, contrarian, ideologue
“I believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.”
― William F. Buckley Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of 'Academic Freedom'
tags: atheism, christianity, collectivism, individualism
“[Professor Greene's] reaction to GAMAY, as published in the Yale Daily News, fairly took one's breath away. He fondled the word "fascist" as though he had come up with a Dead Sea Scroll vouchsafing the key word to the understanding of God and Man at Yale. In a few sentences he used the term thrice. "Mr. Buckley has done Yale a great service" (how I would tire of this pedestrian rhetorical device), "and he may well do the cause of liberal education in America an even greater service, by stating the fascist alternative to liberalism. This fascist thesis . . . This . . . pure fascism . . . What more could Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin ask for . . . ?" (They asked for, and got, a great deal more.)
What survives, from such stuff as this, is ne-plus-ultra relativism, idiot nihlism. "What is required," Professor Greene spoke, "is more, not less tolerance--not the tolerance of indifference, but the tolerance of honest respect for divergent convictions and the determination of all that such divergent opinions be heard without administrative censorship. I try my best in the classroom to expound and defend my faith, when it is relevant, as honestly and persuasively as I can. But I can do so only because many of my colleagues are expounding and defending their contrasting faiths, or skepticisms, as openly and honestly as I am mine."
A professor of philosophy! Question: What is the 1) ethical, 2) philosophical, or 3) epistemological argument for requiring continued tolerance of ideas whose discrediting it is the purpose of education to effect? What ethical code (in the Bible? in Plato? Kant? Hume?) requires "honest respect" for any divergent conviction?”
― William F. Buckley Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of 'Academic Freedom'
tags: fascism, fascist, higher-education, relativism, tolerance, yale, yalie
“How can one deduce the cause of "Hamlet" or "Saint Matthew's Passion"? What is the cause of inspiration? ”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“They [progressives] are men and women who tend to believe that the human being is perfectible and social progress predictable, and that the instrument for effecting the two is reason; that truths are transitory and empirically determined; that equality is desirable and attainable through the action of state power; that social and individual differences, if they are not rational, are objectionable, and should be scientifically eliminated; that all people and societies strive to organize themselves upon a rationalist and scientific paradigm.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“Liberals don’t care what you do so long as it’s compulsory.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“We find that in the absence of demonstrable truth, the best we can do is to exercise the greatest diligence, humility, insight, intelligence, and industry in trying to arrive at the nearest values to truth. I hope, of course, to argue convincingly that having done this, we have an inescapable duty to seek to inculcate others with these values.”
― William F. Buckley Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of 'Academic Freedom'
tags: education, higher-education, relativism, teaching, truth
“What would happen if the Communists occupied the Sahara? Answer: Nothing—for 50 years. Then there would be a shortage of sand.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“Pentagon ought to win the Nobel Peace Prize every year, because the U.S. military is the world’s foremost guarantor of peace”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“Do you favor mandated free tuition?” I answered: “Most positively not.” The crowd unanimously and lustily booed me. “Do you realize,” I persisted, “that you are asking men and women who are, many of them poorer than you, and poorer than your parents; many of whom earn less money than you yourselves will be earning in the course of a few years, to make sacrifices in your behalf?” Boo! “If you don’t believe me,” I said, “go to your economics teachers and ask them.” Boo! “All right,” I said, “don’t go to your economics teachers, and don’t discover the economic realities—you’ll find it much easier on the conscience not to know who is sustaining the hardship for your free education.” Applause!—as a matter of fact. On”
― William F. Buckley Jr., The Unmaking of a Mayor
“One must recently have lived on or close to a college campus to have a vivid intimation of what has happened. It is there that we see how a number of energetic social innovators, plugging their grand designs, succeeded over the years in capturing the liberal intellectual imagination. And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things. Run just about everything. There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals'.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“Our political economy and our high-energy industry run on large, general principles, on ideas — not by day-to-day guess work, expedients and improvisations. Ideas have to go into exchange to become or remain operative; and the medium of such exchange is the printed word.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“when both can’t be true. In 1946, in the days after World War II, presidential advisor Bernard Baruch said, “Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.” Variations have been uttered by U.S. Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger, U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and others. Today this seemingly indisputable truth no longer holds. Propaganda is indistinguishable from fact and we find ourselves living in the frightening pages of a George Orwell novel.”
― William F. Buckley Jr., Buckley vs. Vidal: The Historic 1968 ABC News Debates
“National Review will support the rightwardmost viable candidate.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“People die, God endures.”
― William F. Buckley Jr., A Torch Kept Lit: Great Lives of the Twentieth Century
“for December 19 and for a day or two bracketing the”
― William F. Buckley Jr., Miles Gone by: A Literary Autobiography
“Birch fallacy is the assumption that you can infer subjective intention from objective consequence: we lost China to the Communists, therefore the President of the United States and the Secretary of State wished China to go to the Communists.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“But is God a Yale man?”
― William F. Buckley Jr.
“Curiously, the failures of Communism are more often treated as a joke than as a tragedy.”
― William F. Buckley Jr. [/b]
