Ilana Mercer Quotes

143 Sourced Quotes

Islamic terrorism is the handiwork of people who've heeded, not hijacked, Islam.

Ilana Mercer
Immoral acts that are forbidden severally cannot be sanctioned collectively. The citizen must not steal. Neither should The State.

Ilana Mercer
From the fact that most Americans want others to fund or subsidize their healthcare, it does not follow that they have such a right. A need is not a right. A man's life, liberty and the products of his labor were not intended to be up for grabs by grubby, greedy majorities.

Ilana Mercer
Good immigrants come to America to be part of the 'little platoons' that make up its glorious private economy: the people of Nike, Apple, Microsoft, Starbucks, McDonald's, Amazon, Google, Marriot, Mattel, FedEx, Costco, Coca-Cola, Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, Fred Meyer, Overstock. com, Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, and millions of local franchises run by innovative, everyday Americans. Bad immigrants come to America to partake of the state.

Ilana Mercer
A crucial difference between lite libertarians and the Right kind is that to the former, the idea of liberty is propositional – a deracinated principle, unmoored from the realities of history, hierarchy, biology, tradition, culture, values. Conversely, the paleolibertarian grasps that ordered liberty has a civilizational dimension, stripped of which the libertarian non-aggression axiom, by which we all must live, cannot endure.

Ilana Mercer
In the bureaucracy, incentives will forever be inverted. Failure results in success: in more funds, more training, more time off.

Ilana Mercer
Yankees are fond of citing Confederacy officials in support of slavery and a war for slavery. Most Southerners, however, were not slaveholders. All Southerners were sovereigntists, fighting a 'War for Southern Independence.' They rejected central coercion. Southerners believed a union that was entered voluntarily could be exited in the same way.

Ilana Mercer
Like or dislike her, the British Queen is harmless. Her role is purely ceremonial. Conversely, life and death are in the hands of the monarch who sits in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Ilana Mercer
A propagandized population has a hard time choosing worthy heroes. It is high time Americans celebrate the Anti-Federalists, for they were correct in predicting the fate of freedom after Philadelphia.

Ilana Mercer
Profits and prices are the street signs of the economy. Only fools flout them. The much–maligned price system works not only to secure supply but to conserve.

Ilana Mercer
Inviting an invasion by foreigners and instigating one against them are two sides of the same neoconservative coin.

Ilana Mercer
If not by design at least by default; reflexively if not intentionally, government operatives work to retain their positions and increase their sphere of influence.

Ilana Mercer
Ludwig von Mises referred to Ayn Rand as 'the most courageous man in America.' If that doesn't say it all about the economist's man-centric frame of reference, I don't know what does.

Ilana Mercer
Quotas are a perfectly logical, if diabolical, extension of the regulation of private property courtesy of the Civil Rights Act, whereby in an attempt to shape American society in politically pleasing ways, people have been coerced into liking, hiring or renting against their will or better judgment.

Ilana Mercer
Adding an overarching tier of tyrants—the EU—to European governments has benefited Europeans as a second hangman enhances the health of a condemned man.

Ilana Mercer
In a free society, the 'vision thing' is left to private individuals; civil servants are kept on a tight leash, because free people understand that a 'visionary' bureaucrat is a voracious one and that the grander the government... the poorer and less free the people.

Ilana Mercer
From dwarf tossing to drug taking: The legislator has no place in voluntary exchanges between consenting adults, as dodgy and as dangerous as these might be.

Ilana Mercer
In the rare event that the Supreme Court refuses to play along—there is always a perfectly legal, extra-constitutional, quasi-legislative, quasi-executive, quasi-judicial, 'independent' regulatory commission or executive agency to kill off or override constitutional protections.

Ilana Mercer
A silly society is a youth-obsessed society: To the Chinese, who appreciate the value of experience, the greater the ratio in a team of grey 'hairs and no-hairs' to 'black hairs'—the faster and better a task will be completed. The opposite assumption obtains in the youth-obsessed U.S.

Ilana Mercer
At the annual White House Sycophants' Dinner, the most pretentious people in the country, in politics, journalism and entertainment - not the country's natural aristocracy, but its authentic Idiocracy - convene and revel in their ability to petition and curry favor with one another, usually to the detriment of the rest of us.

Ilana Mercer
What is more obscene: the idea that one can apologize for the hubris and deceit that is Obama and his health care, or the actual need some have for an apology from an entity so evil that he would toy with the lives of millions as though they were insects and he God? This is hard to tell.

Ilana Mercer
Leave ISIS to Syria, Tehran and Tel Aviv. Let the locals take out their trash.

Ilana Mercer
… we're not all the same. A common liberal refrain … is that differences between individuals are statistically more significant than those between cultural, ethnic, and racial groups. I don't see why the fact of inter-individual differences would nullify inter-group variance. That's liberal logic for you.

Ilana Mercer
Those of us who want the U.S. to stay solvent—and out of the affairs of others—recognize that sovereign nation-states that resist, not enable, our imperial impulses, are the best hindrance to hegemonic overreach.

Ilana Mercer
Chinese mercantilism is not free trade, but it is far better than American militarism.

Ilana Mercer
It would appear that the Keynesian faithful have foisted on free-market capitalists an unfalsifiable theory. Evidence that contradicts it, Keynesian kooks enlist as evidence for the correctness of their theory.

Ilana Mercer
Demographics need not be destiny. The West became the best not by out-breeding the undeveloped world... but because of human capital; people of superior ideas and abilities, capable of innovation, exploration, science, philosophy.

Ilana Mercer
Opposing the policies of the American state is not synonymous with opposing 'America.' It is possible to disavow every single action taken by the U.S. government and still love the 'little platoons' of America, as Edmund Burke described a man's social mainstay—his family, friends, coreligionists, coworkers. By logical extension, it is dishonest to malign those who assign the 'bad' category to the state, on the ground that they hate 'America.'

Ilana Mercer
Whatever open-border libertarians think about immigration law, once the immigration scofflaw steals, trespasses, or vandalizes private property, said alien is guilty of crimes. To say, moreover, that the state's laws made masses of men and women commit such crimes is to voice the philosophy of determinism, not individualism.

Ilana Mercer
Still – and for all Obama's heavy hinting to the contrary – Islam has no "human rights." The ideas of individual rights and the dignity of man are distinctly Western, an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. And while dialogue is dignified; dhimmitude is not, even if it achieves a desired, if temporary, effect.

Ilana Mercer