Jonah Goldberg Quotes

When you treat reprehensible and ludicrous arguments with respect you have elevated the reprehensible and made the ludicrous a bit more reasonable. Having a serious argument with a Nazi makes the horror of the Holocaust a debatable point. Don’t wrestle in the mud with pigs. You get dirty and the pig likes it.

The Founders understood that democracy was important, but if you didn’t filter it through a republican system you’d be just as likely to end up with a tyranny of the majority as you would with a healthy society. Don’t worry, I won’t quote the Federalist Papers, but trust me, it’s in there.

You can make a very good argument that society would be much worse off if you let 10 rapists and murderers free rather than put one poor, wrongly accused accountant in prison. And so my only point on that is that it should open up an argument. It should not sort of settle one, because nobody disagrees with it.

The premise of my book is that everyone is a bit ideological to some extent. Everyone comes from a ideological perspective.

Capitalism is the greatest system ever created for alleviating general human misery, and yet it breeds ingratitude.

I think as – all in all, it’s better to have a cool president than a not cool president.

Simply because the nanny-state wants to hug you doesn’t mean it’s not tyrannical if you don’t want to be hugged.

You know those Navy SEALs, they weren’t Democrats and Republicans. They were just doing what was best for America. Wouldn’t that be a great country if all of you Americans were just like that? You followed orders, you marched in step and you followed my agenda.

One of the things that really drove me crazy was the way in which college kids, in particular, are educated to think that ideology is dangerous and bad.

Social distinctions tend to matter only at your own level and above.

Our country, if you read the ‘Federalist Papers,’ is about disagreement. It’s about pitting faction against faction, divided government, checks and balances. The hero in American political tradition is the man who stands up to the mob – not the mob itself.

Progressivism was a sister movement of fascism, and today’s liberalism is the daughter of Progressivism.

Joe Biden says the Wall Street crisis is the result of George W. Bush’s tax cuts, which makes as much sense as blaming the rising price of fairy dust. But as a wise man once asked, Who gives a rat’s patoot what Joe Biden thinks?

Liberals are Nazis, and Nazis are liberals. And if you don’t agree with me, you’re a Nazi too.

Our fear of hypocrisy is forcing us to live in a world where gluttons are fine, so long as they champion gluttony.

America’s political system used to be about the pursuit of happiness. Now More and more of us want to stop chasing it and have it delivered.

If we say that anyone who ‘moralizes’ must be perfect morally then we are in effect saying no one can moralize.

Cultures grow on the vine of tradition.

And it’s the President of the United States who said he wasn’t going to spike the football and all this, we shouldn’t gloat about it, running campaign ads, gloating about it and saying the other guy isn’t good enough to do the tough things that I did, which I think is, one reprehensible.

I would also say Barack Obama has spent much, much, much, much more money than the Republicans.

Someone once noted that a ‘gaffe’ in Washington is when a politician accidentally tells the truth.

If power made one evil, then God would be the Devil.

Look, I think liberals have reasonable gripes with Fox News. It does lean to the right, primarily in its opinion programming but also in its story selection (which is fine by me) and elsewhere. But it’s worth remembering that Fox is less a bastion of ideological conservatism and more a populist, tabloidy network.

There was no intellectual movement in American history called social Darwinism. The people who were supposedly the leaders of the social Darwinist movement never embraced something called social Darwinism. It didn’t exist.

We are a species that must try to impose and find systems – systems of thought, ways of organizing and categorizing reality.

The government cannot love you, and any politics that works on a different assumption is destined for no good.

Champions of Liberty get called Fascists by Champions of Statism

Facts are mere speed bumps on the road to lefty moral outrage.

The white male is the Jew of liberal fascism.

But it is one of these sort of mythologies about America and its intellectual history, that the right embraced this thing called social Darwinism, when it never did so.

[Libertarianism] is about curbing state power to let people be and do what they want. Liberalism is about using state power to make people do and be what liberals want. And that makes all the difference in the world.

Republican politics have been off-kilter for several years now because a large segment of the conservative base does not look back fondly on the Bush presidency.

But you’re never taught in schools – we don’t teach anyone in public schools that government is the problem. We don’t teach anyone in college that government is the problem – except maybe a handful of sort of unique, conservative schools. But mainstream media never talks as if government is the problem.

If there is ever a fascist takeover in America, it will come not in the form of storm troopers kicking down doors but with lawyers and social workers saying. “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.

The main difference between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives are honest about it. We’re kind of dorks about it. We are kind of like Dungeons and Dragons geeks.