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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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Mark Steyn
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: December 8
Film Critic
Journalist
Music Critic
Pundit
Writer
City of Toronto
Responsibility
Threat
Free
Program
Born
Ultimate
Unchecked
Social
Whose
Weaken
Government
Citizens
Responsibilities
Line
Programs
Security
Citizen
Lines
Defense

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Big Government is the small option: it's the guarantee of smaller freedom, smaller homes, smaller cars, smaller opportunities, smaller lives.
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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.
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The president has borrowed more money to spend to less effect than anybody on the planet.
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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?
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Mr Hughes's current claim of bisexuality has the whiff of artful centrist positioning about it: bi- is the proportional representation of sexuality in a world where most of us - straight or gay - operate a first-past-the-post system.
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No family of an American hostage has ever been prosecuted for paying a ransom for the return of their loved ones. The last thing we should ever do is to add to a family's pain.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. How do you get away from it? Improvise.
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Long before they slump into poverty, great powers succumb to a poverty of ambition.
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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.
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LBJ held up Detroit as a model of what the Great Society could accomplish. He was right.
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Every power grab is the new base camp for the next power grab.
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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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In Europe, nothing is certain except death and welfare, and why let the former get in the way of the latter?
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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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Like most people, I have no wish to live in a community organized by community organizers.
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For Al Gore and Paul Ehrlich and Co., whatever the problem, the solution is always the same. Whether it's global cooling, global warming, or overpopulation, we need bigger government, more regulation, higher taxes, and a massive transfer of power from the citizens to some unelected self-perpetuating crisis lobby.
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