Best 85 quotes of Ilana Mercer on MyQuotes

A brave nation fights only because it must; a cowardly nation fights because it can.

A crucial difference between lite libertarians and the right kind is that to the former, the idea of liberty is propositional - a deracinated principle, unmoored from the realities of history, hierarchy, biology, tradition, culture, values. Conversely, the paleolibertarian grasps that ordered liberty has a civilizational dimension, stripped of which the libertarian non-aggression axiom, by which we all must live, cannot endure.

Adding an overarching tier of tyrants - the EU - to European governments has benefited Europeans as a second hangman enhances the health of a condemned man.

A depraved culture supports a depraved politics and vice versa.

American media seem to color events by refracting them through a sickeningly sentimental prism. Their efforts to create reality on the ground — instead of reporting on it — notwithstanding, here's what we know about the inchoate Egyptian uprising: the movement's members hated their ruler and did what was necessary to be rid of him.

Antitrust laws ought to be deployed, not against business, but to bust this two-party monopoly, which subverts competition in government and rewards the colluding quislings with sinecures in perpetuity.

Any opinion writer worth his salt would have rejected the quaint notion that certain eternally aggrieved identity groups have exclusive linguistic rights to words in the English language.

A propagandized population has a hard time choosing worthy heroes. It is high time Americans celebrate the Anti-Federalists, for they were correct in predicting the fate of freedom after Philadelphia.

A silly society is a youth-obsessed society: To the Chinese, who appreciate the value of experience, the greater the ratio in a team of grey 'hairs and no-hairs' to 'black hairs' the faster and better a task will be completed. The opposite assumption obtains in the youth-obsessed U.S.

Barack the boy was raised by his white maternal grandparents; his Kenyan father abandoned him. The qualities Americans appeared to find universally appealing in the ambitious, affable Obama - his confidence and calm, and his commitment to community and kin, education and excellence - these came from Kansas, not Kenya.

Because of the oil-and-water relationship governments have cultivated between ethics and political economy, speaking in plain terms - spelling it out as it is - as become foreign to the public. So here goes: When government sports a surplus, this implies that the political pickpockets have stolen more funds than they can possibly dream of spending. The property is not theirs to keep! Conversely, when deficits are reported, this means that the kleptomaniacs have not been able to steal sufficient funds to cover their profligacy.

Big media are all about the angle, the spin. Look to the overarching theme that runs through each and every news story. Be hip to the meta-narrative peddled.

Breaking into a country signals quite reliably a willingness to break yet more of the invaded country's laws.

But public works, economic protectionism, cheap money, "deficit-financed government spending," and "the animal spirits of the spendthrift in the service of boosting "consumption demand"... Doesn't Keynesianism simply appeal to the worst in human nature?

By going on the defensive. [...] libertarians are, inadvertently, conceding that speech should be policed for propriety, and that those who violate standards set by the PC set are somehow defective on those grounds alone and deserve to be purged from "polite" company.

By the standards of honest, if unorthodox, accounting, government workers don't pay taxes, but are paid out of taxes. In other words, they pay taxes out of money confiscated from taxpayers, who, in turn, pay taxes twice: on their own income and on the income of members of the bureaucracy. At the very least, this should disqualify state workers from voting.

Certain bedrock principles - arguably a true conservative mindset - dictate a respect for life. A life-conserving sensibility means that guns are meant for self-defense, not for needless killing. [...] This gun owner is no gun nut; but a right-to-self-defense fanatic.

Chinese mercantilism is not free trade, but it is far better than American militarism.

Christianity in our country is a lot like what the Ducksters profess. No longer doctrinaire or demanding, the mishmash of pop-religion practiced in churches across America is an extension of the therapeutic culture: festooned with feelings, mostly misdirected. Untempered by intelligent interpretation of scripture... American pop-theology: light on doctrine, heavy on hellfire and damnation.

Cognitive consonance is what writing in the Age of the idiot is all about. The key to success in the scribbling profession is to strike the right balance of mediocrity in writing and thinking, which invariably entails echoing one of two party lines, poorly.

Demographics need not be destiny. The waning West became what it is not by out-breeding the undeveloped world. We were once great not because of huge numbers, but due to human capital - people of superior ideas and abilities, capable of innovation, exploration, science, philosophy.

Demonstrators for a government takeover of medicine have a right to discuss their demands, but no right to enact these demands.

For too long, the U.S. has been operating upon the premise that American men and matériel should be capable of reaching and controlling all corners of the world. This was a bully’s universe.

free market is a market in which groups and individuals are differently represented. Parity in prosperity and performance between differently able individuals and groups can be achieved only by playing socialist leveler.

From dwarf tossing to drug taking: The legislator has no place in voluntary exchanges between consenting adults, as dodgy and as dangerous as these might be.

Gays have become colossal bores. Once interesting and iconoclastic, all they seem to crave nowadays is the State's pension and seal of approval. They ought to go back to the days of the Stonewall Riots, when the police's violations of privacy and private property were the object of their anger and activism.

Government commissions are where accountability goes to die.

Government jobs are not an addition to the country's payroll; they are an increase in the nation's payload.

Hamas hides among unwitting civilians, who have no way of controlling its activities. This fact does not give Israel the right to kill innocent non-combatants, not even unintentionally. Besides, murder is not "unintentional" when you know it is inevitable.

Hollywood no longer offers entertainment. Instead, activism has replaced acting, and sermons have supplanted stories. Instead of a good yarn, you get a yawn.

If the Bill of Rights was intended to place strict limits on federal power and protect individual and locality from the national government the 14th Amendment effectively defeated that purpose by placing the power to enforce the Bill of Rights in federal hands, where it was never intended to be.

In a free society, the “vision thing” is left to private individuals; civil servants are kept on a tight leash, because free people understand that a “visionary” bureaucrat is a voracious one and that the grander the government [...] the poorer and less free the people.

Incarcerating people for their [drug] consumption choices has the consistency of arresting a survivor of suicide for attempted murder.

In the bureaucracy, incentives will forever be inverted. Failure results in success: in more funds, more training, more time off.

In the rare event that the Supreme Court refuses to play along [...] there is always a perfectly legal, extra-constitutional, quasi-legislative, quasi-executive, quasi-judicial, "independent" regulatory commission or executive agency to kill off or override constitutional protections.

Islamic terrorism is the handiwork of people who've heeded, not hijacked, Islam. Or so says [Wafa] Sultan.

Liberals can always be trusted to see God in Mumia Abu-Jamal and the devil in the Pope.

Liberals retain a totemic attachment to the Freudian idea that traumatic toilet training is destiny.

Libya is a war of the womb. A product of the romantic minds of women who fantasize about an Arab awakening. It is estrogen-driven paternalism on steroids.

Like environmentalists, politicians generally privilege flora and fauna over folks.

Like environmentalists, politicians generally privilege flora and fauna over folks. (NIMBYs excepted. Senator Edward Kennedy is a not-in-my-backyard environmentalist: he opposes wind farms in Nantucket Sound, offshore from his Hyannis Port compound.)

Like or dislike her, the British Queen is harmless. Her role is purely ceremonial. Conversely, life and death are in the hands of the monarch who sits in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Members of the media-monetary-military-congressional complex are immoral and have an allergy to the truth.

Mistaking Palestinian military weakness for moral innocence seems to further amplify the inattention of journalists to the culture of lies.

Obamacare is a marketplace in the same way the Knockout Game is a game.

One’s life, liberty and the products of one’s labor were not intended to be up for grabs by grubby, greedy majorities. Contra classical natural law theory, legal positivism equates justice with the law of the state. However, from the fact that most Americans want others to fund or subsidize their health care, it does not follow that they have such a right. A need is not a right.

Progressive policies lead to a regressive society.

Prosperity and penury do not turn on gyno-centric and gay matters. But leftist statists and libertarians of the left place these wedge issues at the forefront of the fight for freedom. [...] Every bit as bad as liberals, "libertarian" political operators are prepared to shed political blood over any imagined sign of bigotry.

Quotas are a perfectly logical, if diabolical, extension of the regulation of private property courtesy of the Civil Rights Act, whereby in an attempt to shape American society in politically pleasing ways, people have been coerced into liking, hiring or renting against their will or better judgment.

Revive the value of seasoned, stoical masculinity in education. Men in authority are now a threatened minority. Again, and in defense of the pack that piled on Klein, America’s progressive schools are overrun by ineffectual females.