Mark Riebling Quotes

32 Sourced Quotes

What then is the moral of Churchill's life? He was the twentieth century's great man, but we must sharply circumscribe his greatness. Because he drew the sword from the stone in 1940, what he did before and after seems admirable. Through his steadfast stance, Churchill rallied the English to die with honor—therefore they deserved to win. Whoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whoever shall lose his life shall preserve it (Luke 17:33). Yet were it not for this one courageous triumph, we might now say of him: Never had one man done so little with so much.

Mark Riebling
If movement conservatism is less about hating the state than about fighting Godless modernism, this might explain why conservatives have always found actual or cultural wars to fight, but have never got around to shrinking or controlling the growth of government (though centrists like Eisenhower and Clinton did).

Mark Riebling
If [an FBI agent] abuses his power, we should punish him, and there are laws on the books for that. But just because a power can be abused doesn't mean you take away the power. Congress can declare war unjustly. What do we do if they do so? Do we take away their power to declare war? No. We somehow reprimand Congress. We vote them out of office. If a senior official or a field agent leaks some personal information on someone, they should go to jail, and they will.

Mark Riebling
There was, sometimes, a de facto alliance between this president and pope. But relations were not so close that they could be taken for granted by the president's men. In fact, the documents reveal a continuous scurrying to shore up Vatican support for U.S. policies.

Mark Riebling
Though the words "personal" and "personality" date to the 1380s, "responsibility" emerged only in the 1640s, as England began its great democratic ferment. This linguistic lag marked an arrested moral development. Our civilization developed personality early and responsibility late. Only the duties of democratic governance required a word to express the abstract principle, "a state of being responsible."

Mark Riebling
Military intelligence officers cannot afford to be celebrators of diversity, Utopians, game-theorists, apostles of negotiation, or purveyors of the idea that the Internet will bring us all together.

Mark Riebling
The Framers did not pioneer the concept of man as a personally responsible agent. That notion, arguably the greatest of all Western ideas, dates to line 32 of Homer's Odyssey, where Zeus asks people to stop blaming their bad choices on the gods.

Mark Riebling