Sign In

Sir Humphrey Appleby (Character) - Quotes

Sir Humphrey Appleby: East Yemen, isn't that a democracy? Sir Richard Wharton: Its full name is the Peoples' Democratic Republic of East Yemen. Sir Humphrey Appleby: Ah I see, so it's a communist dictatorship.

The Real Helen Thomas | National Review Online

In the movie Animal House, the Deltas are put on trial for their antics. When offered a chance to defend themselves, the best argument the fraternity’s president can come up with is, “But sir, Delta Tau Chi has a long tradition of existence both to its members and the community at large.”

The Age of Alarmists

As political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta perceptively wrote in one of his recent Indian Express pieces: “As critics, we often define our identities by picking out the worst arguments and the worst characters to go after. This is not because of the magnitude of the objective threats they pose. It is because our intellectual victories are easy”.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) - Quotes - IMDb

There's a point, far out there when the structures fail you, and the rules aren't weapons anymore, they're... shackles letting the bad guy get ahead. One day... you may face such a moment of crisis. And in that moment, I hope you have a friend like I did, to plunge their hands into the filth so that you can keep yours clean!

'Women Matter More Than Fetuses' | National Review Online

I am not a doctrinaire pro-lifer, but I find the pro-abortion view that fetuses are mere uterine contents until they are alive outside the womb to be morally tone deaf, utterly unpersuasive, and ideologically far more extreme than the pro-life view.

Bread & Circus

The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens… which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it… which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome.”

Poe's law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Any sufficiently advanced troll is indistinguishable from a genuine kook."

Twilight of the Froot Loops | National Review Online

the fanatic lives in fear that someone, somewhere, might be wrong about the Fair Tax, gay marriage, or the carried-interest treatment of private-equity managers’ incomes.

Twilight of the Froot Loops | National Review Online

The bravest of soldiers fighting in the best of causes can concede that war is hell, full of mistakes and moral compromises

The Enduring Power of Story | National Review Online

Victor Hugo even more famously declared, “There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.”

Criticism in the age of Narendra Modi | The Indian Express | Page 99

Most statesmen or even lesser politicians, on the other hand, have what Isaiah Berlin once called “antennae of the greatest possible delicacy”