Quote

Welfare culture is bad not just because, as in Europe, it's bankrupting the state, but because it enfeebles the citizenry, it erodes self-reliance and resourcefulness.

Mark Steyn

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Mark Steyn
Age: 64
Born: 1959
Born: December 8
Film Critic
Journalist
Music Critic
Pundit
Writer
City of Toronto
State
Bankrupting
Culture
Erodes
States
Resourcefulness
Self
Erode
Citizenry
Reliance
Welfare
Europe

More quotes by Mark Steyn

Image
The progressive Left can be in favor of Big Government or population control but not both. The mutual incompatibility is about to plunge Europe into societal collapse. There is no precedent in human history for economic growth on declining human capital - and that's before anyone invented unsustainable welfare systems.
Mark Steyn
Image
It is surely only a matter of time before some federal judge finds the Constitution unconstitutional.
Mark Steyn
Image
The essence of a government health care system - for people who have never lived under it and don't know - is waiting, waiting, waiting. You wait for everything. You wait for years for operations that are routine in America.
Mark Steyn
Image
LBJ held up Detroit as a model of what the Great Society could accomplish. He was right.
Mark Steyn
Image
But, once you get a taste for shutting people up, it's hard to stop. Why bother winning the debate when it's easier to close it down?
Mark Steyn
Image
Apparently the pro-choice types who jump up and down in the street demanding that you keep your rosaries off their ovaries are entirely relaxed about the government getting its bureaucratics all over your lymphatics.
Mark Steyn
Image
Question: How much do you have to invest in the future before you've spent it and no longer have one?
Mark Steyn
Image
Government health care changes the relationship between the citizen and the state, and, in fact, I think it's an assault on citizenship.
Mark Steyn
Image
Our leadership class's real accomplishment is résumé padding.
Mark Steyn
Image
The president has borrowed more money to spend to less effect than anybody on the planet.
Mark Steyn
Image
One lesson of Sept. 11 is that a government that tries to do everything is likely to do most of it badly.
Mark Steyn
Image
Once you accept you're a child in the government nursery, why shouldn't Nanny tell you what to do?
Mark Steyn
Image
For states in demographic decline with ever more lavish social programs, the question is a simple one: Can they get real? Can they grow up before they grow old? If not, then they'll end their days in societies dominated by people with a very different worldview.
Mark Steyn
Image
The first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death.
Mark Steyn
Image
In Britain, everything is policed except crime.
Mark Steyn
Image
When the family dies, the nation follows.
Mark Steyn
Image
The minute health care becomes a huge, unwieldy, expensive government bureaucracy it's a permanent feature of life and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
Mark Steyn
Image
Can't spell, can't spot fake Shakespeare, can't tell one wacky foreigner from another: it's increasingly obvious that Barbra is some deep sleeper planted by the Republicans to discredit the very concept of activist celebrities. Poor old Democrats, in thrall to her fundraising: people who need Barbra are the unluckiest people in the world.
Mark Steyn
Image
Big Government is the small option: it's the guarantee of smaller freedom, smaller homes, smaller cars, smaller opportunities, smaller lives.
Mark Steyn
Image
The Democratic Party is uniquely virulently racist and pro-slavery to a degree unseen anywhere in the English-speaking world!
Mark Steyn