William F. Buckley Jr. Quotes

Parsifal is the opera that begins at five-thirty and when you look at your watch three hours later, it is only five forty-five.

Industry is the enemy of melancholy

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.

I would sooner be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand members of the faculty of Harvard.

Radical conservatives in this country have an interesting time of it, for when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those of the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity. There are, thank Heaven, the exceptions. There are those of generous impulse and a sincere desire to encourage a responsible dissent from the Liberal orthodoxy. And there are those who recognize that when all is said and done, the market place depends for a license to operate freely on the men who issue licenses — on the politicians. They recognize, therefore, that efficient getting and spending is itself impossible except in an atmosphere that encourages efficient getting and spending. And back of all political institutions there are moral and philosophical concepts, implicit or defined. Our political economy and our high-energy industry run on large, general principles, on ideas — not by day-to-day guess work, expedients and improvisations. Ideas have to go into exchange to become or remain operative; and the medium of such exchange is the printed word.

The Americans? These are people who invaded Texas and California with ethnic savagery. What do they have against us?” *

The amount of money and of legal energy being given to prosecute hundreds of thousands of Americans who are caught with a few ounces of marijuana in their jeans simply makes no sense - the kindest way to put it. A sterner way to put it is that it is an outrage, an imposition on basic civil liberties and on the reasonable expenditure of social energy.

The executioner proper, the official who would place the nooses around the necks of the condemned, was a practiced hangman, his occupation begun in his youth in Texas, where he apprenticed under the regular hangman.

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.

Students who come to college with strong religious convictions will take an active part in one or more . . . undergraduate activities. The majority, however, will unconsciously look to see what the authorities judge to be important. If religion is relegated to the role of a not-too-important sideshow, if its part in our intellectual and emotional tradition is ignored, and if the members of the faculty act with indifference, whether deliberate or unconscious, toward those questions of ultimate import which no discipline can escape and on which religion has had much to say, then it is small wonder that a majority of students will go their way, troubled perhaps and a little uneasy in the absence of answers, upon the assumption that religion does not matter.

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

[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.

the genius of Churchill was his union of affinities of the heart and of the mind, the total fusion of animal and spiritual energy” — but

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 are men and women who tend to believe that the human being is perfectible and social progress predictable, and that the instrument for effecting the two is reason; that truths are transitory and empirically determined; that equality is desirable and attainable through the action of state power; that social and individual differences, if they are not rational, are objectionable, and should be scientifically eliminated; that all people and societies strive to organize themselves upon a rationalist and scientific paradigm.