The 40 Best Quotes from Jonah Goldberg

Deep conservatism

In recent years, Jonah Goldberg has caught a lot of flack in some corners of the Republican Party because he’s been a relentless critic of Donald Trump. However, unlike some of the people who’ve gone from being anti-Trump to being anti-Republican, Jonah Goldberg has stayed true to his conservative roots, and he is undeniably one of the most brilliant minds on the Right. If you don’t agree with that, read these quotes and you will see what I mean.

40) “One of the most illuminating symptoms of left-wing revolutionary movements is their tendency to blur the difference between common crime and political rebellion. The Brownshirts beat up storekeepers, shook down businessmen, and vandalized property, rationalizing all of it in the name of the ‘movement.’ Left-wing activists still refer to the L.A. riots as an ‘uprising’ or ‘rebellion.’”

39) “…I have a simple answer to any American patriot who claims that there is no conflict between his love of country and his desire to hitch our fate to the United Nations: ‘You’re mistaken.’ And, therefore, I’m thinking of adding this corollary to my General Rule of patriotism: ‘The more intellectually consistent and pro-U.N. you are, the less patriotic you are likely to be.’ I haven’t thought that all the way through, but it seems right to me.”

38) “But if you try to see things like a state for a second, it’s simply unsustainable to have a libertarian immigration policy and a liberal welfare state. Ultimately, if you don’t want cops asking for your papers, you need to get rid of one or the other.”

37) “America’s political system used to be about the pursuit of happiness. Now, more and more of us want to stop chasing it and have it delivered.”

36) “For example, one will virtually never hear that the Palmer Raids, Prohibition, or American eugenics were thoroughly progressive phenomena. These are sins America itself must atone for. Meanwhile, real or alleged ‘conservative’ misdeeds — say McCarthyism — are always the exclusive fault of conservatives and a sign of the policies they would repeat if given power. The only culpable mistake that liberals make is failing to fight ‘hard enough’ for their principles. Liberals are never responsible for historic misdeeds because they feel no compulsion to defend the inherent goodness of America. Conservatives, meanwhile, not only take the blame for events not of their own making that they often worked the most assiduously against but find themselves defending liberal misdeeds in order to defend America herself.”

35) “Science is wonderful at explaining what science is wonderful at explaining, but beyond that, it tends to look for its car keys where the light is good.”

34) “When activists say we need to move past the partisan divide, what they mean is: ‘Shut up and get with my program.’ Have you ever heard anyone say, ‘We need to get past all of this partisan squabbling and name-calling. That’s why I’m going to abandon all my objections and agree with you?’”

33) “When we fail to properly civilize people, human nature rushes in. Absent a higher alternative, human nature drives us to make sense of the world on its own instinctual terms: That’s tribalism.”

32) “I understand that identity-politics arguments are supposed to trump everything else these days, but the idea that all Americans of Asian, black, and Hispanic heritage have homogeneous political interests and identities is both ridiculous and grotesque.”

31) “My argument begins with some assertions: Capitalism is unnatural. Democracy is unnatural. Human rights are unnatural. The world we live in today is unnatural, and we stumbled into it more or less by accident. The natural state of mankind is grinding poverty punctuated by horrific violence terminating with an early death. It was like this for a very, very long time.”

30) “The miracle of liberal democratic capitalism is not self-sustaining. Turn your back on its maintenance and it will fall apart. Take it for granted and people will start reverting to their natural impulses of tribalism. The best will lack all conviction, and the worst will be full of passionate intensity. Things will fall apart.”

29) “A rising economic tide is bad for people who live off of the poverty of others.”

28) “We talk about murder and rape as unnatural as a way to heap deserving opprobrium on the practice even though, as we’ve seen, neither is actually unnatural. Adultery is wholly natural, but we condemn it as a violation of important norms to keep the habit to a minimum. ‘Very often those things we have condemned as ‘unnatural’ are things that we know will flourish if we leave them alone,’ writes Robin Fox in The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind.”

27) “If we say that anyone who ‘moralizes’ must be perfect morally then we are in effect saying no one can moralize.”

26) “Progressivism, liberalism, or whatever you want to call it has become an ideology of power. So long as liberals hold it, principles don’t matter.”

25) “Tribalism isn’t just about us-vs.-them, it’s also about deferring to fame and status, investing in personalities rather than principles. As institutions lose their hold on us, we put our faith in celebrities.”

24) “There is no ‘right side of history.’ Nothing is foreordained.”

23) “Socialism’s durability as a concept owes almost nothing to economics and almost everything to the desire for power.”

22) “Tradition, shorn of nostalgia, metaphysical sentiment, and cant is simply another word for what worked.”

21) “Look, I know very well there are many kinds of socialism. But wherever socialism has teeth, it veers closer to gangsterism because it depends on the use of arbitrary power, either by the state or, in essence, the mob. If you really want economic equality, you need to take money from people who earned it and give it to, or spend it on, people who didn’t. ‘Fighting income inequality’ doesn’t change the fact that the state is using force based upon an aesthetic conceit about how society should look.”

20) “The traditional family is the enemy of all political totalitarianism because it is a bastion of loyalties separate from and prior to the state, which is why progressives are constantly trying to crack its outer shell.”

19) “We live in the most non-patriarchal moment in all of American history, if not all of Western history, if not all of human history. And yet so profound is the need to fight this terrible foe that, across the landscape, Donna Quixotes are constantly tilting their lances at mirages of their own imaginations.”

18) “We judge the strides we make in the present by the extent of our improvement over the past. But we have an annoying tendency to judge the past by the standards of the present.”

17) “Again, one need not be categorically opposed to ethnic groups or other minorities flexing their muscles in a diverse society. That’s a story as old as the country and is unavoidable in any society. The key distinction, once more, is that some within these groups are not merely fighting for their piece of the pie or for recognition of their legitimate interests. They are seeking to overthrow the ideals that made this country so successful in the first place. They are not merely arguing that the system needs to live up to its own ideals, which was the argument of the suffragettes and the civil rights movement. They are arguing that the ideals themselves are illegitimate.”

16) “Complexity is a subsidy. The more complex government makes society, the more it rewards those with the resources to deal with that complexity and the more it punishes those who do not.”

15) “Everyone moralizes. The suggestion that liberals aren’t moralizers is so preposterous it makes it hard for me to take any of them seriously when they wax indignant about ‘moralizers.’ Almost every day, they tell us what is moral or immoral to think and to say about race, taxes, abortion, you name it. They explain it would be immoral for me to spend more of my own money on my own children when that money could be spent by the government on other peoples’ children. In short, they think moralizing is fine. They just want to have a monopoly on the franchise.”

14) “Finally, since we must have a working definition of fascism, here is mine: ‘Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the ‘problem’ and therefore defined as the enemy.’ I will argue that contemporary American liberalism embodies all of these aspects of fascism.”

13) “It is true that might doesn’t make right. But might doesn’t make wrong, either.”

12) “Once the government starts writing checks to people, the people getting the checks want to keep getting checks (particularly given that the majority of them get more from the government than they ever pay in). This has been the aim of liberalism since at least the New Deal, to turn Americans into clients of the state.”

11) “One of the overriding points of Liberal Fascism is that all of the totalitarian “isms” of the Left commit the fallacy of the category error. They all want the state to be something it cannot be. They passionately believe the government can love you, that the state can be your God or your church or your tribe or your parent or your village, or all of these things at once. Conservatives occasionally make this mistake, libertarians never do, liberals almost always do.”

10) “Liberals are uncomfortable with the topic of patriotism because their core philosophical impulses are to make America a different country than it is.”

9) “The government cannot love you, and any politics that works on a different assumption is destined for no good.”

8) “What was once considered the only noble motivation for a hero, a conception of good outside himself, has been replaced by what Irish philosopher David Thunder calls ‘purely formal accounts of integrity.’ According to Thunder, ‘purely formal accounts essentially demand internal consistency within the form or structure of an agent’s desires, actions, beliefs, and evaluations.’ He adds that, under purely formal integrity, a person ‘may be committed to evil causes or principles, and they may adopt principles of expediency or even exempt themselves from moral rules when the rules stand in the way of their desires.’ In other words, if you stick to your code, no matter what you do, you can be seen as a hero. It’s this sort of thinking that has led Hannibal Lecter, a character who barbarously murders and eats(!) innocent people, to be seen as something of a folk hero.”

7) “To fret about political, social, or economic inequality in a free society is to fret about the problem of freedom itself, for in the presence of freedom there will always be inequality of some kind.”

6) “People ask, ‘Why is there poverty in the world?’ It’s a silly question. Poverty is the default human condition. It is the factory preset of this mortal coil.”

5) “Capitalism is the most cooperative system ever created for the peaceful improvement of people’s lives. It has only a single fatal flaw: It doesn’t feel like it. The market system is so good at getting people—from all over the world—to work together that we barely notice how much we’re cooperating.”

4) “The desire to be entertained has rewired much of our civilization because it has rewired our minds. When everything needs to be entertaining, we judge everything by its entertainment value.”

3) “Just to clarify: If you go into every situation saying there’s absolutely nothing worth fighting over, you will inevitably end up on a cot sleeping next to a guy named Tiny, bringing him breakfast in his cell every morning, and spending your afternoons ironing his boxers. Or, in the case of the French, you might spend your afternoons rounding up Jews to send to Germany, but you get the point.”

2) “But tolerance is a two-way street. In a decent society, the majority owes respect to the minority. And the minority owes the majority respect as well. That bargain has fallen apart, most acutely in Europe, but America is not far behind, as the champions of identity have grown in power. The story has been embellished to the point where the majority are not cast as tolerant and decent citizens trying to figure out how we should live with one another; the majority are now simply villains.”

1) “Indeed, as libertarians are fond of pointing out, pretty much all laws come with the implicit threat of violence. Don’t believe me? Refuse to obey even the most picayune law and eventually a man in uniform with a gun on his hip is going to come talk to you about it.”

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