215 Quotes by Mark Steyn

Big government is a national security threat: it increases your vulnerability to threats like Islamism, and makes it less likely you’ll be able to summon the will to rebuff it.

America is the brokest country in history. We owe more money than anyone has ever owed anyone. And Obama and Reid say relax, that’s no reason not to spend more – because the world hasn’t yet concluded we have no intention of paying it back. When they do, the dollar will collapse.

America has potholed roads and decrepit airports, but it builds state-of-the-art offices for regulatory bureaucrats – and their enforcers. The federal Department of Education doesn’t employ a single teacher, but it does have a SWAT team.

The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government ‘security,’ large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time – the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and a ton of other stuff.

We’ve elevated the secondary impulses over the primary ones: national defense, self-reliance, family, and, most basic of all, reproductive activity. If you don’t “go forth and multiply” you can’t afford all those secondary-impulse programs, like lifelong welfare, whose costs are multiplying a lot faster than you are.

If you’re 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you’re graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade. There has been no global warming this century. None.

For a century, Edison’s light bulb was regarded as a beacon of American genius; then it became a ‘climate criminal.” That transformation is American decline in a nutshell.

The essence of a government health care system – for people who have never lived under it and don’t know – is waiting, waiting, waiting. You wait for everything. You wait for years for operations that are routine in America.

Those who can do. Those who can’t form a supercommittee.