Bill Buckley Quotes

Even President Reagan couldn’t understand him. During an early briefing Casey delivered to the national security cabinet, Reagan slipped Vice President Bush a note: “Did you understand a word he said?” Reagan later told William F. Buckley, “My problem with Bill was that I didn’t understand him at meetings. Now, you can ask a person to repeat himself once. You can ask him twice. But you can’t ask him a third time. You start to sound rude. So I’d just nod my head, but I didn’t know what he was actually saying.” Such was the dialogue for six years between the president and his intelligence chief in a nuclear-armed nation running secret wars on four continents.

Buckley goes on to declare: "What keeps Christians afloat is the buoyant knowledge that no devastating damage has in fact been done to Christian doctrine" (N 55). Ah, blessed Bill! - how strong a shield your ignorance must be! I suppose one should not be surprised at Buckley's staggering ignorance of science, ancient and modern, but one might expect him to have a slightly better notion of the scientific and philosophical implications of many of the Christian doctrines in which he professes to believe. And although he claims to have read much in the area of Catholic apologetics, he seems wondrously unaware of the multitude of skeptical tracts that have, for many intellectuals, shattered the foundations of religious belief, whether it be Robert G. Ingersoll's Some Mistakes of Moses (1879) or Joseph Wheless's Is It God's Word? (1926) or Bertrand Russell's Religion and Science (1935), all the way down to Antony Flew's Atheistic Humanism (1993), Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World (1995), and beyond.

Or as Bill Buckley said in 1970, “I see it as the continuing challenge of National Review to argue the advantages to every one of the rediscovery of America, the amiability of its people, the flexibility of its institutions, of the great latitude that is still left to the individual, the delights of spontaneity, and, above all, the need for superordinating the private vision over the public vision.

The Buckley boys, like the Bushes, had been in Skull and Bones, and Bill Buckley, whose conservative intellectual magazine National Review was often politically helpful to Poppy Bush, would in later years admit to a stint working for the CIA himself.

My friend’s dad was a teacher in the local public schools, a loyal member of the teachers’ union, and a more dedicated liberal than most: not only had he been a staunch supporter of George McGovern, but in the 1980 Democratic primary he had voted for Barbara Jordan, the black U.S. Representative from Texas. My friend, meanwhile, was in those days a high school Republican, a Reagan youth who fancied Adam Smith ties and savored the writing of William F. Buckley. The dad would listen to the son spout off about Milton Friedman and the godliness of free-market capitalism, and he would just shake his head. Someday, kid, you’ll know what a jerk you are. It was the dad, though, who was eventually converted. These days he votes for the farthest-right Republicans he can find on the ballot. The particular issue that brought him over was abortion. A devout Catholic, my friend’s dad was persuaded in the early nineties that the sanctity of the fetus outweighed all of his other concerns, and from there he gradually accepted the whole pantheon of conservative devil-figures: the elite media and the American Civil Liberties Union, contemptuous of our values; the la-di-da feminists; the idea that Christians are vilely persecuted—right here in the U.S. of A. It doesn’t even bother him, really, when his new hero Bill O’Reilly blasts the teachers’ union as a group that “does not love America.

Post election in 1988, he famously swept a copy of Bill Buckley’s National Review off a coffee table in his Kennebunkport, Maine home and said “well we don’t need this shit anymore.

16. Love will tear us apart (Joy Division) 15. Ain't no sunshine (Bill Withers) 14. Sound of silence (Simon and Garfunkel) 13. My way (Frank Sinatra) 12. All by myself (Eric Carmen)  11. Yesterday (The Beatles) 10. Without you (Harry Nilsson)  9. Seasons in the sun (Terry Jacks)  8. Fix You (Coldplay)  7. My heart will go on (Celine Dion)  6. Hallelujah (Leonard Cohen/Alexandra Burke/Jeff Buckley)  5. Nothing compares 2 U (Prince/Sinead O'Connor)  4. I will always love you (Whitney Houston)

Although cable news has, I believe, done much damage in undercutting civility in political discourse—a civility to which more journalists and newscasters aspired in the pre-cable era—it is insufficient to simply single out blowhards like Bill O’Reilly, or Fox News overlord Roger Ailes, or on the left, Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann, formerly of MSNBC. The problem is partly that there’s money in staging the televisual equivalent of cockfighting.

One might think that someone as smart as Buckley would have the good sense to shut up, but good sense is not something Bill Buckley had in great supply when he entered the army.