Nobody who’s ever been to Gulag is a pacifist.
A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.
Conservatism is the tacit acknowledgement that all that is finally important in human experience is behind us; that the crucial explorations have been undertaken, and that it is given to man to know what are the great truths that emerged from them.
A relatively small and eternally quarrelsome country in Western Europe, fountainhead of rationalist political manias, militarily impotent, historically inglorious during the past century, democratically bankrupt, Communist-infiltrated from top to bottom.
I am, I fully grant, a phenomenon, but not because of any speed in composition. I asked myself the other day, “Who else, on so many issues, has been so right so much of the time?” I couldn’t think of anyone.
They told me if I voted for Goldwater, he would get us into a war in Vietnam. Well, I voted for Goldwater and that’s what happened.
Why should any country continue, forever, to be “great”?
Reagan is both too fatalistic and too modest to be a crudaser. He doesn’t have that darkness around the eyes of a George McGovern.
I’ve always believed that conservatism is the politics of reality, and that reality ultimately asserts itself in a reasonably free society, in behalf of the conservative position.
People are beginning to wish that the voters had been given breathometer tests when they voted in the present government.
The anti-marijuana campaign is a cancerous tissue of lies, undermining law enforcement, aggravating the drug problem, depriving the sick of needed help and suckering well-intentioned conservatives and countless frightened parents.
Scientists are people who build the Brooklyn Bridge and then buy it.
We are, always, reminded of the old saw: What would happen if the Soviet Union took over the Sahara Desert? Answer: Nothing for 50 years. After that there would be a shortage of sand.
Not everything that is legal is reputable.
Arlen Specter is the man who voted in favor of Bill Clinton during impeachment, voted against Robert Bork for the Supreme Court, voted against school choice for the District of Columbia, endorses an absolutist interpretation of abortion rights. He is bright and he is tough and he belongs elsewhere.
Before there was Ronald Reagan there was Barry Goldwater, and before there was Barry, there was National Review, and before there was National Review there was Bill Buckley with a spark in his mind.
If only the left hated crime as much as they hated hate.
The superstition that the hounds of truth will rout the vermin of error seems, like a fragment of Victorian lace, quaint, but too brittle to be lifted out of the showcase.
You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.
We view our atomic arsenal as proudly and as devotedly as any pioneer ever viewed his flintlock hanging over the mantel as his children slept, and dreamed.