“The history of which peoples, nations, or civilizations have conquered or enslaved which other peoples, nations, or civilizations has been largely a history of who has been in a position to do so.”

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don’t like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don’t expect freedom to survive very long.

The only people I truly envy are those who can play a musical instrument and those who can eat anything they want without gaining weight.

If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.

No matter how much people on the left talk about compassion, they have no compassion for the taxpayers.

One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.

Economics is more than just a way to see patterns or to unravel puzzling anomalies.

Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.

People who pride themselves on their “complexity” and deride others for being “simplistic” should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.

The really painful surprise is that so many people based their hopes on his words, rather than on the record of his deeds.

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did.

No amount of taxation is ever described as “greed” on the part of government or the clientele of government.

What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less.

A society in which such decisions can only be made by males has thrown away half of its knowledge, talents, and insights.

If politicians stopped meddling with things they don’t understand, there would be a more drastic reduction in the size of government than anyone in either party advocates.

Everyone may be called “comrade,” but some comrades have the power of life and death over other comrades.

National security is the first duty of government but we are also committed to reversing the substantial erosion of civil liberties.

I do not believe that defending traditional marriage between one man and one woman excludes anybody or usurps anybody’s civil rights and denies anybody their civil rights.

Give a civil servant a good case and he’ll wreck it with clichés, bad punctuation, double negatives, and convoluted apology.

These latter institutions [the civil service, trade unions, media of all kinds], notably of course television.

A war of words escalated between the president-elect and a civil rights icon.

I got interested in politics during the civil rights movement and then Vietnam.

The United States, per capita, at a certain period in its history, had the most junkies of any country ever in the world – right after the Civil War.

I like the liberal tradition; I like the Hubert Humphrey tradition fighting for civil rights.