Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm not usually absolutely speechless.
We have to have a revival of the concept 'truth matters.'
I'm a conservative who likes small government and lower taxes.
In the modern university, no act of good teaching goes unpunished.
The N.R.A. has effectively turned itself into the Id of the Right.
To put it bluntly, the push for 'college for all' sets up students to fail.
I feel dumber every time I listen to Sean Hannity. I don't want to be that guy.
I have a confession to make. When I was a child, I was a chronic, repeat doodler.
There was always the paranoid strain in American politics, particularly on the Right.
Academic culture is not merely indifferent to teaching, it is actively hostile to it.
The GOP was once the party of William F. Buckley Jr., Ronald Reagan, and John McCain.
I have long admired Paul Ryan and thought of him as the future of the Republican Party.
Both the Left and the Right need to connect as people rather than as political entities.
We desperately need to have a public that actually cares whether things are true of not.
It is an uphill fight to persuade workers that the minimum wage is not in their interest.
It has almost become a cliche that we are a polarized country, but the reality runs deeper.
I am less horrified by Trump himself than by what he has done to the rationalizers and enablers.
Nothing annoys academics more than pointing out how little time they actually spend teaching students.
Congress is a co-equal branch of government, with a long and rich history of standing up to the executive branch.
Criticisms of mainstream media bias have been a staple of the conservative movement and talk radio from the beginning.
At one time, the Left had a monopoly not merely of the media and academia, but also of the world of policy think tanks.
I'm still a conservative, you know, someone who believes in limited government and balanced budgets and the Constitution.
After 2008, I told people that conservatives were going to be invisible for a while. But, with time, our ideas would be back.
You know something that you'll never hear on one of these cable talking-head shows? One of the guests going, 'Hmm, I don't know.'
Conservatism should be a reality-based philosophy, and the movement will be better off if it recognizes that facts really do matter.
Unless you have experienced it, it's difficult to describe the virulence of the Twitter storms that were unleashed on Trump skeptics.
It is harder to explain why free markets create wealth than it is to pander to workers who have been displaced by global competition.
Denouncing Nazis is the easiest thing in the world: All it requires is a modicum of historical perspective and a working moral compass.
The shock of Trumpism has made me rethink what the conservative movement was about and who our allies were and what our assumptions were.
To finally reform higher education, we should start by asking fundamental questions, such as, Why does it take four years to get a degree?
I knew Buckley - he was a friend of mine - and Steve Bannon is no William F. Buckley. Buckley marginalized the kooks. Bannon empowered them.
For the anti-anti-Trump pundit, whatever the allegation against Mr. Trump, whatever his blunders or foibles, the other side is always worse.
Victimism can be seen as a generalized cultural impulse to deny personal responsibility and to obsess on the grievances of the insatiable self.
Reagan did not have to rely on or cope with talk radio, Fox News, Breitbart, or any of the other trolls that now dominate conservative politics.
In 2008, conservatives ridiculed the Left for its adulation of Barack Obama, only to succumb to their own cult of personality eight years later.
It turns out that many of the Trump voters who had said they wanted to burn it all down meant it, and they are taking to the task with great relish.
As our politics have become more polarized, the essential loyalties shift from ideas to parties to tribes to individuals. Nothing else ultimately matters.
Fox News and other Trump-friendly media long ago became fever wards of speculation and conspiracy-mongering as they obsessed over plots from the Deep State.
When it became clear that I was going to remain #NeverTrump, conservatives I had known and worked with for more than two decades organized boycotts of my show.
The conservative media ecosystem - like the rest of us - has to recognize how critical, but also how fragile, credibility is in the Orwellian age of Donald Trump.
With a vast majority of conservative voters and listeners solidly behind Mr. Trump, conservative critics of the president find themselves isolated and under siege.
I think of John McCain as a conservative, but he is clearly not the same kind of 'conservative' as, say, Rand Paul. The word is close to losing almost all meaning.
Since the election, President Trump has shown a persistent penchant for conspiracy-minded suggestions about his political opponents and elements of his own government.
For decades, conservatives have struggled with containing crackpottery, most notably William F. Buckley's famous excommunication of the John Birch Society in the 1960s.
One of the surprises to me was the willingness of many people in the conservative media to roll over, to abandon long-held conservative principles, and to embrace Donald Trump.
As the Right doubles down on anti-anti-Trumpism, it will find itself goaded into defending and rationalizing ever more outrageous conduct just as long as it annoys CNN and the Left.
Conservatives spent an awful long time ignoring things: the birthers, the bigots, the xenophobes, the alternative-reality media. We had assumed that they were postcards from the fringe.
There was a time when the Republican Party could discuss possible reforms to our gun laws: Ronald Reagan himself endorsed the Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban that passed in 1994.
In our era of zero tolerance, I would surely have spent most of elementary and middle school shuttling between suspensions and expulsions, with an occasional time out for social studies.
During dull moments at school, I admit, I not only drew soldiers shooting one another but also tanks, bombers, fighters, and even the occasional space ship with planet-destroying powers.