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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.

Jonah Goldberg

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Jonah Goldberg
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: March 21
Author
Journalist
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Jonah Jacob Goldberg
Respect
Pigs
Reprehensible
Serious
Reasonable
Ludicrous
Bits
Dirty
Wrestle
Point
Treat
Elevated
Makes
Treats
Mud
Made
Likes
Nazi
Horror
Holocaust
Argument
Arguments
Debatable

More quotes by Jonah Goldberg

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The decision [to create a theme park called EuroWorld] was made by the EU countries in response to their collective realization that no one in Europe has had an innovative idea in well over a century.
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The government cannot love you, and any politics that works on a different assumption is destined for no good.
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But this is the kind of ass-clownery that stems from the fact that all philosophy looks weird when you don't have one.
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Tom Friedman says China is so awesome they make kosher pigs.
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Nothing drives your opponents more crazy than being utterly reasonable. And nothing makes demonizing or delegitimizing your opponents easier than letting them shriek unreasonable things for you. The Republicans need to get back to being the party that elicits unreasonable shrieking from their opponents. Not the other way around.
Jonah Goldberg
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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.
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In many respects fascism not only is here but has been here for nearly a century. For what we call liberalism--the refurbished edifice of American Progressivism--is in fact a descendant and manifestation of fascism.
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Social distinctions tend to matter only at your own level and above.
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Everyone understands that [democrat Senator Harry Reid] is deliberately lying. The man reads his lies from prepared texts. You can't read from a script and then claim you misspoke.
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We are a species that must try to impose and find systems - systems of thought, ways of organizing and categorizing reality.
Jonah Goldberg
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Of course, it's a mystery to me why any American who can't be bothered to pay attention to politics unless Pamela Anderson is discussing it should be welcome in that conversation.
Jonah Goldberg
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The premise of my book is that everyone is a bit ideological to some extent. Everyone comes from a ideological perspective.
Jonah Goldberg
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Getting the support of Syria is the moral equivalent of winning the Klan's endorsement - it might be useful but it doesn't necessarily speak well of you.
Jonah Goldberg
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And in the minds of progressives you are free to live anyway you want so long as it's progressive.
Jonah Goldberg
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If power made one evil, then God would be the Devil.
Jonah Goldberg
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But if the choice is a cool president and 8 or 10 percent unemployment in a declining economy and a country that seems to be going in the wrong direction and structural unemployment for young people at 50 percent, I'd rather have a dorky president who fixed those problems.
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If you think shrinking government and getting it less involved in your life is a hallmark of tyranny it is only because you are either grotesquely ignorant or because you subscribe to a statist ideology that believes the expansion of the state is the expansion of liberty.
Jonah Goldberg
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[A] country without a word to describe its love for what is best within it is a country ill-equipped to defend what is best within it.
Jonah Goldberg
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Despite what you may have been taught about Indians or Africans or ancient Celts, poor people are terrible stewards of their environment. For instance, if my kid were starving to death, I would happily feed her fresh panda.
Jonah Goldberg
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Keep in mind that Eric Alterman is media critic for The Nation-a hysterically left-wing magazine dedicated to the proposition that corporate America, U.S. foreign policy and the Republican Party are criminal, racist or both. The simple reality is that, for him, the Democratic Party is far too conservative.
Jonah Goldberg