Ilana Mercer Quotes

143 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Ilana Mercer
The Democratic and Republican parties each operates as a necessary counterweight in a partnership designed to keep the pendulum of power swinging in perpetuity from the one set of colluding quislings to the other, and back.

Ilana Mercer
Incarcerating people for their [drug] consumption choices has the consistency of arresting a survivor of suicide for attempted murder.

Ilana Mercer
Socialism is humanity's second nature. All politicians do is turn human vice into votes.

Ilana Mercer
If for harming himself a man forfeits his freedom, then he was never free in the first place.

Ilana Mercer
In America, black is beautiful. To be black is to be more righteous, nobler; carry the heaviest historic baggage — heavier than the Holocaust — and be encouraged to perpetually and publicly pick at those suppurating sores. To be black is to have an unwritten, implicit social contract with wider, whiter society. To be black it to be born with an IOY (I Own You); it is to be owed apologies, obsequiousness, education, and auto-exculpation for any wrongdoing.

Ilana Mercer
Liberals retain a totemic attachment to the Freudian idea that traumatic toilet training is destiny.

Ilana Mercer
Prosperity and penury do not turn on gyno-centric and gay matters. But leftist statists and libertarians of the left place these wedge issues at the forefront of the fight for freedom. [...] Every bit as bad as liberals, "libertarian" political operators are prepared to shed political blood over any imagined sign of bigotry.

Ilana Mercer
The titan is tired. We Americans have our own tyrants to tackle. We no longer want to defend to the death borders not our own—be they in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, wherever. And we don't need our friends looking to us to do so.

Ilana Mercer
A right that can't be defended is a right in name only. If you cannot by law defend your life, you have no right to life. If you cannot defend your property, you have no right of private property. And if you cannot defend your liberty, you are not a free man. It follows that inherent in the idea of an inalienable right is the right to mount a vigorous defense of the same rights.

Ilana Mercer
The proposition that economist Ludwig von Mises was a feminist is an apodictic impossibility.

Ilana Mercer
The French have no sense of humor or irony. The last truly funny comedian to have made merry in France lived in the 17th century. He was Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, aka Molière.

Ilana Mercer
The military is government. The military works like government; is financed like government, and sports many of the same inherent malignancies of government, chief of which is its liberalism. Like the government, the military is freighted with pathological political correctness.

Ilana Mercer
You'll get your free IUDs and morning-after-pills, if not from your employer or the insurers — then from the increasingly desperate taxpayer (who, by now, might even consider paying for a spaying, too).

Ilana Mercer
Another dynamic is at play in the region besides the Sunni-Shia divide. It is that between the forces of centralization and the forces of decentralization. As a rule, the U.S. sides with the former; the Arab people with whom we meddle generally side with the latter. Given the tribal, familial focus of their societies; Arabs are unlikely to abandon their particularism in favor of American statism.

Ilana Mercer
This White House fetishizes Iraqi national unity. It believes that to succeed, Iraqis should be like Americans, forever imprisoned in an arranged, unhappy political marriage.

Ilana Mercer
The great Roman statesman Cicero observed that, 'Not to know what happened before one was born is to be always a child.' In our ignorance of the values that form part of our history and heritage, we Americans have become perpetual children.

Ilana Mercer
Round and round will Americans be compelled to ride on a mindless, manufactured, racial carousel … for without it, the edifice of an industry built upon grievance and excuse-making is destined to collapse.

Ilana Mercer
The United States has already passed on as the world's economic leader. Having flouted Thomas Jefferson for too long, America has succumbed to public debt, the 'fore horse for oppression and despotism,' after which 'taxation will follow, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.

Ilana Mercer
Mrs. Clinton's riches are not capitalism's reward for hard work. Hillary has accrued wealth by using the predatory political process to wield power over others.

Ilana Mercer
The media lie so much, that when stuff happens that scares them, they no longer know where to turn for the truth.

Ilana Mercer
A balanced-budget requirement implies is that government has the constitutional right to spend as much as it takes in; that government is permitted to waste however much revenue it can extract from wealth producers, and that the bums must merely bring into balance what was stolen (taxes) with what is squandered (spending).

Ilana Mercer
Disaffected, disadvantaged, disenfranchised is how progressives prefer to depict the Muslim murderers in their midst. After all, progressives hail from the school of therapeutic thought that considers crime to have been caused, not committed. Misbehavior is either medicalized and outsourced to state-approved experts, or reduced to the fault of the amorphous thing called society.

Ilana Mercer
The strength of ideas rests on their relationship to reality.

Ilana Mercer
By going on the defensive... libertarians are, inadvertently, conceding that speech should be policed for propriety, and that those who violate standards set by the PC set are somehow defective on those grounds alone and deserve to be purged from polite company.

Ilana Mercer