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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
Technological
Assume
Assuming
Progress
Combustion
Liberty
Engine
Social
Engines
Cannot
Internals
Like
Internal

More quotes by 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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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
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Sometimes societies become too stupid to survive. A nation that takes Barack Obama's current rhetorical flourishes seriously is certainly well advanced along that dismal path.
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One lesson of Sept. 11 is that a government that tries to do everything is likely to do most of it badly.
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The state of our civilization manifests itself both in the non-problems that terrify us beyond all reason - rising sea levels - and in the real problems we pay no heed to [population decline]...In reality, much of the planet will be uninhabited long before it's uninhabitable
Mark Steyn
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CNN? Oh, that's that network with Larry King, who, like the Son of Sam, is a native of Brooklyn. Used to be owned by Ted Turner, who, like the Cincinnati Strangler, is a native of Cincinnati. Now part of Time Warner, founded by the Warner Brothers, the oldest of whom, Harry Warner, like many Auschwitz guards, was a native of Poland.
Mark Steyn
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Once a fellow's enjoying the fruits of government health care and all the rest, he couldn't give a hoot about the general societal interest he's got his, and if it's going to bankrupt the state a generation hence, well, as long as they can keep the checks coming till he's dead, it's fine by him.
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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Like most people, I have no wish to live in a community organized by community organizers.
Mark Steyn
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The law functions as formal embodiment of a moral code, not as free-standing substitute for it.
Mark Steyn
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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
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The Democratic Party is uniquely virulently racist and pro-slavery to a degree unseen anywhere in the English-speaking world!
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.
Mark Steyn
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A big chunk of Western civilization, consciously or otherwise, has given the impression that it's dying to surrender to somebody, anybody. Reasonably enough, Islam figures: Hey, why not us?
Mark Steyn
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LBJ held up Detroit as a model of what the Great Society could accomplish. He was right.
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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When the family dies, the nation follows.
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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General Motors, like the other two geezers of the Old Three, is a vast retirement home with a small money-losing auto subsidiary.
Mark Steyn
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The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government 'security,' large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time - the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and a ton of other stuff.
Mark Steyn