12 Quotes by James Burnham

Independence, the first condition of liberty, can be secured in the last analysis only by the armed strength of the citizenry itself, never by mercenaries or allies or money; consequently arms are the first foundation of liberty. There is no lasting safeguard for liberty in anything but one’s own strength.

Just as we seldom realize that we are growing old until we are already old, so do the contemporary actors in a major social change seldom realize that society is changing until the change has already come.

There is no one force, no group, and no class that is the preserver of liberty. Liberty is preserved by those who are against the existing chief power. Oppositions which do not express genuine social forces are as trivial, in relation to entrenched power, as the old court jesters.

Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide. When once this initial and final sentence is understood, everything about liberalism - the beliefs, emotions and values associated with it, the nature of its enchantment, its practical record, its future - falls into place.

He remembered the forceful hand that cast him to the earth. He'd fallen like a shooting star, his flesh burning until his wings fell away. Pain was something he had never known before. But even worse than the physical affliction was the knowledge that he would forevermore be denied Heaven.

Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide.

Where there is no alternative there is no problem.

An ideologue – one who thinks ideologically – can’t lose. He can’t lose because his answer, his interpretation and his attitude have been determined in advance of the particular experience or observation. They are derived from the ideology, and not subject to the facts.

Armaments do not, generally speaking, cause wars. This notion, the logical crux of all arguments in favor of disarmament, turns the causal relationship upside down. Actually, it is wars, or conflicts threatening war, that cause armaments, not the reverse.