This isn’t the Democratic party of our fathers and grandfathers. This is the party of Woodstock hippies. I was at Woodstock — I built the stage. And when everything fell apart, and people were fighting for peanut-butter sandwiches, it was the National Guard who came in and saved the same people who were protesting them. So when Hillary Clinton a few years ago wanted to build a Woodstock memorial, I said it should be a statue of a National Guardsman feeding a crying hippie.
Speech: Scott Brown rally (2010)
“If you believed in equality of the races in the 1960s, you were called a liberal. If you believe in it in the 1990s, they call you a conservative.”
I had thought of calling the next sort of superficial people the Idealists; but I think this implies a humility towards impersonal good they hardly show; so I call them the Autocrats. They are those who give us generally to understand that every modern reform will “work” all right, because they will be there to see. Where they will be, and for how long, they do not explain very clearly. I do not mind their looking forward to numberless lives in succession; for that is the shadow of a human or divine hope. But even a theosophist does not expect to be a vast number of people at once. And these people most certainly propose to be responsible for a whole movement after it has left their hands. Each man promises to be about a thousand policemen. If you ask them how this or that will work, they will answer, “Oh, I would certainly insist on this”; or “I would never go so far as that”; as if they could return to this earth and do what no ghost has ever done quite successfully – force men to forsake their sins. Of these it is enough to say that they do not understand the nature of a law any more than the nature of a dog. If you let loose a law, it will do as a dog does. It will obey its own nature, not yours. Such sense as you have put into the law (or the dog) will be fulfilled. But you will not be able to fulfill a fragment of anything you have forgotten to put into it.
Book: Eugenics and Other Evils
We live in an age in which we know precisely what recycle bin our newsprint and soda bottles belong. But we have no idea what a human being is, what it’s supposed to do, or who or what it is permissible to sleep with. So, this is the lesson of our time: the “good” man is the one who treats his garbage with greater care than his own soul. This is why, for our cultural gatekeepers, Ms. Chambers is an icon and the Rev. Falwell did not die soon enough.
Without moral clarity, humanity has little chance of avoiding a dark future.
Essay: Why Doesn’t Communism Have as Bad a Name as Nazism?
Men who lose traditions abandon themselves to conventions.
Essay: The Romance of a Rascal
For what is the matter with most of what calls itself the modern mind is simply grooves; and our habit of being content in the grooves, because we are told that they are grooves of change… Its only form of progress is going quicker and quicker along one line in one direction. It has not the curiosity to stop, nor the adventurous courage to go backwards… Now, in spite of the wildest claims to independence, the intellectual life of today still strikes me as being mainly symbolized by the train or the track or the groove. There is any amount of fuss and vivacity about certain fixed fashions or directions of thought; just as there is any amount of rapidity along the fixed rails of the railway-track. But if we begin to think about really getting off the track, we shall find that what is true of the train is equally true of the truth. We shall find it is actually harder to get out of the groove, when the train is going fast, than when the train is going slowly. We shall find that rapidity is rigidity; that the very fact of some social or political or artistic movement going quicker and quicker means that fewer peopole have the courage to move against it. And at last perhaps nobody will make a leap for real intellectual liberty, just as nobody will jump out of a railway-train at eighty miles an hour. This seems to me the primary mark of what we call progressive thought in the modern world.
Essay: The New Groove
That’s what’s wrong with liberalism. While it pretends not to preach, it quietly decides who lives and dies.
Political correctness employs the means of traditional morality, especially shame, less to silence certain opinions than to make them unthinkable.
Every one of the popular modern phrases and ideals is a dodge in order to shirk the problem of what is good. We are fond of talking about “liberty;” that, as we talk of it, is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about “progress:’ that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about “education;” that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. The modern man says, “Let us leave all these arbitrary standards and embrace liberty.” That is, logically rendered, “Let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it.” He says, “Away with your old moral formulae; I am for progress.” This, logically stated, means, “Let us not settle what is good; but let us settle whether we are getting more of it.” He says, “Neither in religion nor morality, my friend, lie the hopes of the race, but in education.” This, clearly expressed means, “We cannot decide what is good, but let us give it to our children.”
Book: Heretics
The right to privacy never appears in the Constitution, but they say it must be there somewhere. The [Supreme] Court invented a false constitutional right to allow people to make the choices they want to make, as opposed to honoring laws meant to defend what is good and guide people to the truth.
Article: National Catholic Register, “‘Privacy Rights’ Election”
Modern “broadmindedness” has a quality that can only be called sneakish; it endeavors to win without giving itself away, even after it has won. It desires to be victorious without betraying even the name of the victor. For all sane men have intellectual doctrines and fighting theories; and if they will not put them on the table, it can only be because they wish to have the advantage of a fighting theory which cannot be fought.
Essay: Rabelaisian Regrets
If the basic act of commutative justice is called “re-stitution,” the very word implies that it is never possible for men to realize an ideal and definitive condition. What it means is, rather, that the fundamental condition of man and his world is provisory, temporary, non-definitive, tentative, as is proved by the “patchwork” character of all historical activity, and that, consequently, any claim to erect a definitive and unalterable order in the world must of necessity lead to something inhuman
Book: Anthology