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[We] assume that social progress is like technological progress: one cannot uninvent the internal combustion engine, so how could one uninvent liberty?

Mark Steyn

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Mark Steyn
Age: 64
Born: 1959
Born: December 8
Film Critic
Journalist
Music Critic
Pundit
Writer
City of Toronto
Liberty
Engine
Social
Engines
Cannot
Internals
Like
Internal
Technological
Assume
Assuming
Progress
Combustion

More quotes by Mark Steyn

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But in reality the point of free speech is for the stuff that’s over the line, and strikingly unbalanced. If free speech is only for polite persons of mild temperament within government-policed parameters, it isn’t free at all. So screw that.
Mark Steyn
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I believe Western culture - rule of law, universal suffrage, etc. - is preferable to Arab culture: that's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I support immigration, but with assimilation.
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Long before they slump into poverty, great powers succumb to a poverty of ambition.
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It's not that I place less value on Palestinian lives, but that Chairman Arafat and his chums in Hamas do.
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The industrial powerhouse of 1950 [Detroit] is now a crime-ridden wasteland with a functioning literacy rate equivalent to West African basket-cases.
Mark Steyn
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The Western front is the important one in this war - the intersection between Islam and a liberal democratic tradition so mired in self-loathing it would rather destroy our civilization just to demonstrate its multicultural bona fides.
Mark Steyn
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If the IMF is correct (a big if), China will be the planet's No.1 economy by 2016. That means whoever's elected in November next year will be the last president of the United States to preside over the world's dominant economic power.
Mark Steyn
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[To] the progressive mind, the very concept of the enemy is obsolescent: there are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven't yet accommodated.
Mark Steyn
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There may be many things wrong with the United States but only a blind fool who hasn't been paying attention for the last twenty years would hold up Europe as the alternative.
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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
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After all, [female genital mutilation is] a key pillar of institutional misogyny in Islam: its entire purpose is to deny women sexual pleasure. True, a lot of us hapless western men find we deny women sexual pleasure without even trying, but we don't demand genital mutilation to guarantee it. On such slender distinctions does civilization rest.
Mark Steyn
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I like Mitch Daniels on the fiscal conservative issues. You disagree with him on this idea that social issues, you takeoff the table. I do that for two reasons. I think the fiscal issues in a sense are a symptom of a lot of the deeper cultural issues in America. I don't think they are as disconnected as he thinks.
Mark Steyn
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There is no conceivable amount of money worth telling the world that you were beaten up by Liza Minnelli.
Mark Steyn
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When is the Democratic Party going to apologize for being the biggest slave-holding-supporting institution on the planet and sticking with racism for the century after the abolition of slavery?
Mark Steyn
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To expect the government to save you is to be a bystander in your own fate.
Mark Steyn
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It is surely only a matter of time before some federal judge finds the Constitution unconstitutional.
Mark Steyn
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Unchecked, government social programs are a security threat because they weaken the ultimate line of defense: the free-born citizen whose responsibilities are not subcontracted to the government.
Mark Steyn
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America is now a land that rewards failure - at the personal, corporate, and state level.
Mark Steyn
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How ridiculous! You're going to have the first black president apologize for slavery?
Mark Steyn
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The trouble with the social-democratic state is that, when government does too much, nobody else does much of anything.
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