John Derbyshire Famous Quotes
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The job of conservatives is to keep the Republican Party driving on the right-hand side of the road. There are many ways we do this. We argue, we publish, we lobby, we campaign for conservative candidates. Another thing we do is, when the GOP goes off the rails on really key issues - size of government, the National Question, Wilsonian adventures - we stay home on election day.
I preach that odd defiant melancholy that sees the dreadful loneliness of the human soul and the pitiful disaster of human life as ever redeemable and redeemed by compassion, friendship and love.
Asked if Stalin was an antisemite, Robert Conquest replied: Yes, but it hardly noticed. He was broadly and generously anti-human.
A very civilized thing, glass - almost an index of civilization. When civilization retreats, it leaves behind broken glass.
Conservatism is pessimistic, with a negative tendency - which we mostly resist - towards despair. Liberals are optimists, with a negative tendency, rarely resisted, towards utopianism.
Politics, as any observer of the modern world knows, is the enemy of economics, everywhere and always.
In matters editorial, I am a believer in totalitarian despotism. Most writers are lazy, difficult, selfish, thoughtless, and unreliable.
Education is a vast sea of lies, waste, corruption, crackpot theorizing, and careerist log-rolling.
You are inhuman brutes determined to rob us of our spiritual consolations and sweep away the moral foundations of our civilization, and on the other: You are obscurantist ignoramuses who'd like to shut down progress and drag us all back to the 16th century, with kings and priests telling us what to think.
The sympathies of a well-adjusted person can easily be aroused by the plight of strangers. Indeed, the skillful writer of a novel, a play, or an opera can engage our emotions on behalf of people who are not only strangers to us, but who do not even exist! And a person whose emotions cannot be so aroused is not behaving normally.
I never ponder counterfactuals.
Ultimately, however, as the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter pointed out, a powerful bureaucratic class is in the same relation to commerce as was the scorpion in Aesop to the dog on whose back he crossed the river. They will destroy commerce and establish socialism, even if it kills them, because that is their nature.
The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b. who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.
Puritans don't laugh - except at the sight of a burning witch.
The more depressed and maladjusted you are, the more likely it is that you are seeing things right, with minimal bias
If you're not thinking about numbers, you're probably not thinking.
Biophobia is as much a part of a politician's basic equipment as a sharp suit.
What does the Right have to show for eight years of a Republican presidency? I supported George W. Bush in 2000 because I thought he had a conservative bone in his body somewhere. I supported him in 2004 because I thought him the lesser of two evils. At this point, I wouldn't let the fool park his car in my driveway. Bruce Bartlett was right, every damn word.
I tell you, with complex numbers you can do anything.
Books, in the plural lose their solidity of substance and become a gas, filling all available space.
The problem is hedonism. The problem is the preening vanity and selfishness of 'coming out,' of parading private inclinations, of a kind that repel normal people, as if those inclinations were, all by themselves, marks of authenticity and virtue, of suffering and oppression.
Practically anything you read or hear about racism, sexism, and homophobia is cant.
A few decades back one could get a pretty good idea of someone's overall political stance by finding out how much he hates rich people; the equivalent today is finding out how much he hates white people.
Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.
