William F. Buckley Jr. Quotes

[National Review] 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.

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.

Everything I do and say and the way I do and say it annoys me.

A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling 'Stop!

I think Mr. Bush faces a singular problem best defined, I think, as the absence of effective conservative ideology — with the result that he ended up being very extravagant in domestic spending, extremely tolerant of excesses by Congress, and in respect of foreign policy, incapable of bringing together such forces as apparently were necessary to conclude the Iraq challenge. There will be no legacy for Mr. Bush. I don't believe his successor would re-enunciate the words he used in his second inaugural address because they were too ambitious. So therefore I think his legacy is indecipherable.

A second marked characteristic of the Liberal in debate with the conservative is the tacit premise that debateis ridiculous....Many people shrink from arguments over facts because facts are tedious, because they require a formal familiarity with the subject under discussion, and because they can be ideologically dislocative. Many Liberals accept their opinions, ideas, and evaluations as others accept revealed truths.

The cost of the drug war is many times more painful, in all its manifestations, than would be the licensing of drugs combined with intensive education of non-users and intensive education designed to warn those who experiment with drugs.

Truth is a demure lady, much too ladylike to knock you on your head and drag you to her cave. She is there, but people must want her, and seek her out.

It was rumored, in 1946, that the hangman in Nuremberg adjusted the nooses of some of the condemned to magnify the pain of suffocation. Such sadism was not called for then and is not called for now. But if fornication is wrong, there is no denying that it can bring pleasure. The death of Saddam Hussein at rope's end brings a pleasure that is undeniable, and absolutely chaste in its provenance.

I Would Rather Be Governed By the First 2,000 People in the Telephone Directory than by the Harvard University Faculty.

We find that in the absence of demonstrable truth, the best we can do is to exercise the greatest diligence, humility, insight, intelligence, and industry in trying to arrive at the nearest values to truth. I hope, of course, to argue convincingly that having done this, we have an inescapable duty to seek to inculcate others with these values.

I would like to take you seriously but to do so would affront your intelligence.

The loneliness of flight is not entirely overwhelmed by cabin movies, the drinks, the Gemütlichkeit of shoulder-to-shoulder life.

Decent people should ignore politics, if only they could be confident that politics would ignore them

I catch fire and find the reserves of courage and assertiveness to speak up. When that happens I get quite carried away. My blood gets hot my brow wet I become unbearably and unconscionably sarcastic and bellicose I am girded for a total showdown.