It’s great to be with William Buckley, because you don’t have to think. He takes a position and you automatically take the opposite one and you know you’re right.
Economic stimulation that works through the increased outlays to the affluent has, inevitably, an aspect of soundness and sanity that is lacking in expenditure on behalf of the undeserving poor.
Of late I have searched diligently to discover the advantages of age, and there is, I have concluded, only one. It is that lovely women treat your approaches with understanding rather than with disdain.
Only foolish people are completely secure.
There are a significant number of learned men and women who hold that any successful effort to make ideas lively, intelligible and interesting is a manifestation of deficient scholarship. This is the fortress behind which the minimally coherent regularly find refuge.
The stock market is but a mirror which provides an image of the underlying or fundamental economic situation. Cause and effect run from the economy to the stock market, never the reverse. In 1929 the economy was headed for trouble. Eventually that trouble was violently reflected in Wall Street.
Getting on the cover of TIME guarantees the existence of opposition in the future.
A wrong decision isn’t forever; it can always be reversed. The losses from a delayed decision are forever; they can never be retrieved.
A more important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality.
No nice philosophical point has ever been so decisively resolved as this: that those who are not conceived do not miss the pleasure of consuming the goods they do not get born to enjoy.
Talk of revolution is one of avoiding reality.
The huge capacity to purchase submission that goes with any large sum of money, well, this we have. This is a power of which we should all be aware.
Both we and the Soviets face the common threat of nuclear destruction and there is no likelihood that either capitalism or communism will survive a nuclear war.
This is a world inhabited not by people who have to be persuaded to believe but by people who want an excuse to believe.
All crises have involved debt that, in one fashion or another, has become dangerously out of scale in relation to the underlying means of payment.
I react to what is necessary. I would like to eschew any formula.
I predict, not because I know, but because I’m asked.
But now, as throughout history, financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated.
All writers know that on some golden mornings they are touched by the wand; they are on intimate terms with poetry and cosmic truth. I have experienced these moments myself. Their lesson is simple: It’s a total illusion. And the danger in the illusion is that you will wait for those moments.
One must always have in mind one simple fact – there is no literate population in the world that is poor, and there is no illiterate population that is anything but poor.