Mark Steyn Quotes

48 Sourced Quotes

"Moderate" Republicans such as Arnold Schwarzenegger like to boast that they're fiscal conservatives and social liberals. But the social liberalism always ends up burying the fiscal conservatism.

Mark Steyn
Bisexuality is the proportional representation of sexuality in a world where most of us — straight or gay — operate a first-past-the-post system.

Mark Steyn
The Eco-Messiah sternly talks up the old Nazi comparisons: what we're facing is an ecological Holocaust, and the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of glass shattering in Berlin. That 221,000 kilowatt-hours might suggest that, if this is the ecological Holocaust, Gore's pad is Auschwitz. But, as his spokesperson would no doubt argue, when you're faced with ecological Holocausts and ecological Kristallnachts, sometimes the only way to bring it to an end is with an ecological Hiroshima. The Gore electric bill is the eco-atom bomb: you have to light up the world in order to save it.
On Al Gore

Mark Steyn
In 1970, the developed nations had twice as big a share of the global population as the Muslim world: 30 percent to 15 percent. By 2000, they were at parity: each had about 20 percent.
And by 2020?

Mark Steyn
There may be many things wrong with the United States but only a blind fool who hasn't been paying attention for the last twenty years would hold up Europe as the alternative.

Mark Steyn
It is surely only a matter of time before some federal judge finds the Constitution unconstitutional.

Mark Steyn
General Motors, like the other two geezers of the Old Three, is a vast retirement home with a small money-losing auto subsidiary.

Mark Steyn
For Al Gore and Paul Ehrlich and Co., whatever the problem, the solution is always the same. Whether it's global cooling, global warming, or overpopulation, we need bigger government, more regulation, higher taxes, and a massive transfer of power from the citizens to some unelected self-perpetuating crisis lobby.

Mark Steyn
Unchecked, government social programs are a security threat because they weaken the ultimate line of defense: the free-born citizen whose responsibilities are not subcontracted to the government.

Mark Steyn
So-called "progressives" actively wage war on progress.... Ultimately, progressives are at war with mass prosperity.

Mark Steyn
The trouble with the social-democratic state is that, when government does too much, nobody else does much of anything.

Mark Steyn
[We] assume that social progress is like technological progress: one cannot uninvent the internal combustion engine, so how could one uninvent liberty?

Mark Steyn
On the movie Monster: "I confess I went into the movie ready to dislike Miss Theron. I'm sick of newspaper articles detailing the amount of time, talent and technical wizardry required to turn some silver-screen beauty into an average-looking woman. There are plenty of average-looking women out there — gritty Britty TV drama seems to be full of them — and it seems excessively unfair that they can't even get a shot at the frumpy roles because Nicole Kidman's hogging the false nose again."

Mark Steyn
The law functions as formal embodiment of a moral code, not as free-standing substitute for it.

Mark Steyn
The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government 'security,' large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time - the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and a ton of other stuff.

Mark Steyn
Appeasement is a vote to live in the present tense, to hold the comforts of the moment.

Mark Steyn
Once a fellow's enjoying the fruits of government health care and all the rest, he couldn't give a hoot about the general societal interest; he's got his, and if it's going to bankrupt the state of a generation hence, well, as long as they can keep the checks coming till he's dead, it's fine by him.

Mark Steyn
When you're taxing bovine flatulence emissions, there's nothing left to tax.

Mark Steyn
Anything that shifts power from the individual judgment of free citizens to government is a bad thing.

Mark Steyn
But a society that has nothing to die for has nothing to live for...

Mark Steyn
The greatest crime of welfare isn't that it's a waste of money, but that it's a waste of people.

Mark Steyn
But, once you get a taste for shutting people up, it's hard to stop. Why bother winning the debate when it's easier to close it down?

Mark Steyn
For states in demographic decline with ever more lavish social programs, the question is a simple one: Can they get real? Can they grow up before they grow old? If not, then they'll end their days in societies dominated by people with a very different worldview.

Mark Steyn
Long before they slump into poverty, great powers succumb to a poverty of ambition.

Mark Steyn
As a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it, "Civilizations die from suicide, not murder", as can be seen throughout much of the Western world right now. The progressive agenda — lavish social welfare, abortion, agnosticism, multiculturalism — is collectively the real suicide bomb.

Mark Steyn
On the French view of international politics: According to my dictionary, the word 'ally' comes from the Old French. Very Old French, I'd say. For the New French, the word has a largely postmodern definition of 'duplicitous charmer who undermines you at every opportunity.'

Mark Steyn
The progressive Left can be in favor of Big Government or population control but not both. The mutual incompatibility is about to plunge Europe into societal collapse. There is no precedent in human history for economic growth on declining human capital - and that's before anyone invented unsustainable welfare systems.

Mark Steyn
Reverend Jesse Jackson, President-for-Life of the People's Republic of Himself.

Mark Steyn
Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not all European countries.

Mark Steyn
On the Continent and elsewhere in the West, native populations are aging and fading and being supplanted remorselessly by a young Muslim demographic.

Mark Steyn