William F. Buckley Jr. Quotes

Then one day, in October 1948, while Truman was campaigning feverishly for re-election, Hoover picked up the morning paper and read that the evening before, in Boston, Truman had denounced the Republican Party as desiring to reintroduce the age of Hoover, defined as the exploitation of the poor for the benefit of the greedy rich. “I vowed,” Hoover told me, “never to speak to Truman again.” But when, a few months after his election, Truman asked Hoover to drop in at the White House on an urgent matter, “I couldn’t, of course, refuse a summons from the President of the United States. But I was determined to tell him off before we got down to business, and I did: ‘Mr. President,’ I said, ‘the remarks you made about me in Boston were as dirty and unforgivable as any I ever heard in a lifetime of politics.’ ‘I couldn’t agree with you more,’ Truman replied affably. ‘When I came to that paragraph in my speech, I almost didn’t read it.

Some people turn to crime, others to ideology.

There is an inverse relationship between reliance on the state and self-reliance.

Mostly these conversations were had over the telephone, burdened by the conceptual difficulties of conflicting priorities, generals talking to engineers, political deputies to architects.

Birch fallacy is the assumption that you can infer subjective intention from objective consequence: we lost China to the Communists, therefore the President of the United States and the Secretary of State wished China to go to the Communists.

Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.

It is safe to say that if the Communists took over the Sahara Desert tomorrow, two things would happen. First, nothing. And second, with their centralized approach to the market, there would be a shortage of sand.

It is widely known that whenever Senator Johnson feels the urge to act the statesman at the cost of a little political capital,” WFB wrote in June 1958, “he lies down until he gets over 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.

Treatment is not now available for almost half of those who would benefit from it. Yet we are willing to build more and more jails in which to isolate drug users even though at one-seventh the cost of building and maintaining jail space and pursuing, detaining, and prosecuting the drug user, we could subsidize commensurately effective medical care and psychological treatment.

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.

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.

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

We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how very often it is necessary, in order to preserve freedom for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down.

They [progressives] 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.