A duck farting in thunder.

Now, if I, a former mere bank clerk, know that this is a piece of window-dressing, you can bet Warren and the M and S bloke know it too. Whatever their generous contributions to their nations’ exchequers, in the context of our economy, and the huge American one, the effect will be as a duck farting in thunder.

-Terry Wogan, Paying more tax will get us nowhere very fast, The Telegraph

Judgement

You know, I rather like it that way: Let Republican candidates be judged on their ideas and character; and let Democratic candidates be judged on their skin color and genital equipment.

-Jay Nordlinger, The Corner

Uncoordinated Numskulls

I will not be denied the pragmatic, functional utility of anything based on the inept, clumsy, irresponsible failure of brain-dead, uncoordinated numskulls.

-Ted Nugent, "My Gun Control"

Reading Between The Lines

"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling," Oscar Wilde once remarked.

Irving Kristol took Wilde’s observation and ran with it. "The amateur’s feelings are sincere enough — why else should he be writing poetry? — but he takes the writing of poetry to be more important than the poem itself," Kristol noted in his influential 1972 essay, "Symbolic Politics and Liberal Reform." "For him, writing poetry is a kind of symbolic action, in which he liberates his most earnest sentiments, and it is in this impatient action and in this instant liberation that he seeks fulfillment."

The successful poet, meanwhile, understands that good poetry is ultimately not about the experience of the author but of the reader. "He understands that a plea of sincerity is of no account in the ultimate court of literary judgment, which will look at the poem itself and simply ask: Does it work?"

"It seems to me," Kristol wrote, "that the politics of liberal reform, in recent years, shows many of the same characteristics as amateur poetry. It has been more concerned with the kind of symbolic action that gratifies the passions of the reformer than with the efficacy of the reforms themselves."

-Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online

"It won't work."

We can, however, be certain of some facts about the health care reform plan. It won't work. No government proposal more complicated than "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private" ever works. And that doesn't work.

-P.J. O'Rourke, on the Clinton health care reform plan, Wall Street Journal

Freedom

Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement. Entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights--the "right" to education, the "right" to health care, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery--hay and a barn for human cattle.

There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.

-P.J. O'Rourke, Speech Given to Libertarians

Ouch

It’s kind of like being diagnosed with testicular cancer. You hope to live through the treatment, but you don’t look forward to what you’re about to lose.
-A reader of The Corner on Obama's victory

Helping

Helping an individual is hard. Developing a grandiose plan to save the world is not.
-Rufus T, comment 15 at Dirty Harry's Place

"Warm Body" Democracy

The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a "warm body" democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction.... [O]nce a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader — the barbarians enter Rome.
-Robert A. Heinlein, To Sail Beyond the Sunset

Fundamental law

To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.
-Charles Krauthammer