William F Buckley Quotes

The point to remember is that what the Government gives it must first take away.

I won’t insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said.

I am obliged to confess that I wholeheartedly believe in God.

Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the cost becomes prohibitive.

Politics is the art of controlling your environment.

The majority of the senior class of Vassar does not desire my company and I must confess, having read specimens of their thought and sentiments, that I do not desire the company of the majority of the senior class of Vassar.

Truth is a demure lady, much too ladylike to knock you on your head and drag you to her cave. She is there, but people must want her, and seek her out.

In the great egalitarian stew-pot, Americano citizens are obediently ready to give up their lives and property.

Life can’t be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.

I would like to electrocute everyone who uses the word ‘fair’ in connection with income tax policies.

Idealism is a fine thing, possessing the ballast of experience and not the single-mindedness of youthful zeal.

I believe that we are all sinners. I am pretty sure that no person ever sleeps without a pang of conscience.

The polite thing to do has always been to address women as the superior sex.

So the poet, who wants to be something that he cannot be, and is a failure in plain life, makes up fictitious versions of his predicament that are interesting even to other persons because nobody is a perfect automobile salesman.

The most imaginative people are the most credulous, for them everything is possible.

I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.

I think that if you present a gloomy vision of the world people respond quite generously.

Should we find a second form of intelligent life in the universe, would we be saddened? Would we be happy? Would we believe in God? Wouldn’t the miracle of Creation we find inside the Earth be enough?

The fact that logic cannot satisfy us awakens an almost insatiable hunger for the irrational.

Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force.

You lose nothing when fighting for a cause… In my mind the losers are those who don’t have a cause they care about.

The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.

One must bear in mind that the expansion of federal activity is a form of eating for politicians.

You owe it to your opponents to tell them their beliefs are false and their policies are misguided.

I do not believe that any mathematical object actually exists; I think it is simply a logical construct.

Life can be seen through the prism of humor or tragedy, depending on how one looks at it.

I’d rather be an optimist and a fool than a pessimist and right.

The malaise of modernity is in its deliberation and calculation.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

History teaches us that liberty only resides in the habits of heart and mind of the people.

When a magazine prints your article, it tells the world that you believe yourself competent.

I have spent much of my life arguing with animal-rights activists.

I think that the forces on the right are a lot more tolerant and a lot more interested in hearing opposing viewpoints than the forces on the left.

Even conservatives seemed to have accepted the premise that the early choices of a child’s life are made by the parents.

Language can be deadly if it conceals assassination.

I think the notion that alternative means of solving a problem is somehow a compromise, that’s what we should be teaching.

What the Founding Fathers created in the Constitution is the most magnificent government on the face of the Earth, and the reason is this: because it was intended to preserve the American society and the American spirit, not to transform it or destroy it.

I don’t pretend to understand the Universe—it’s a great deal bigger than I am.

Even if I have the best of intentions, I don’t think I’m the one to decide when life begins.

Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.

It seems to me we are losing our sense of self-government and that’s the worst part of it.

We can remind ourselves that for every Ph.D. there is an equal and opposite Ph.D.

If you are young and black in America, your chances of success are greater than if you are a white high school dropout.

I’m not a teacher and I don’t think I’m a teacher, particularly in the academic sense.

One famous academic recently advised the audience as his lecture’s conclusion that they should always be prepared to remove their jackets in case it becomes a little warmer.

I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.

You can bring emotional logic to almost anything and it makes wonderful sense.

To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York.

We should not allow English-language colleagues to get away with equating apples with oranges.

There is an inverse relationship between reliance on the state and self-reliance.