William Buckley Jr Quotes

I won't insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said.

I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard.

Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.

Liberals, it has been said, are generous with other peoples' money, except when it comes to questions of national survival when they prefer to be generous with other peoples' freedom and security.

I would like to take you seriously but to do so would affront your intelligence.

Back in the thirties we were told we must collectivize the nation because the people were so poor. Now we are told we must collectivize the nation because the people are so rich.

The academic community has in it the biggest concentration of alarmists, cranks and extremists this side of the giggle house.

The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.

Truth is a demure lady, much too ladylike to knock you on your head and drag you to her cave. She is there, but people must want her, and seek her out.

There is an inverse relationship between reliance on the state and self-reliance.

Industry is the enemy of melancholy

A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling 'Stop!

Conservatives should be adamant about the need for the reappearance of Judeo-Christianity in the public square.

I had much more fun criticizing than praising.

[D]emocracy can itself be as tyrannical as a dictatorship, since it is the extent, not the source, of government power that impinges on freedom." -William F Buckley

The more complicated and powerful the job, the more rudimentary the preparation for it.

I profoundly believe it takes a lot of practice to become a moral slob.

I would sooner be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand members of the faculty of Harvard.

Liberals don’t care what you do so long as it’s compulsory.

I catch fire and find the reserves of courage and assertiveness to speak up. When that happens I get quite carried away. My blood gets hot my brow wet I become unbearably and unconscionably sarcastic and bellicose I am girded for a total showdown.

Pentagon ought to win the Nobel Peace Prize every year, because the U.S. military is the world’s foremost guarantor of peace

For people who like that sort of thing, that's the sort of thing they like.

The loneliness of flight is not entirely overwhelmed by cabin movies, the drinks, the Gemütlichkeit of shoulder-to-shoulder life.

Curiously, the failures of Communism are more often treated as a joke than as a tragedy.

What would happen if the Communists occupied the Sahara? Answer: Nothing—for 50 years. Then there would be a shortage of sand.

I Would Rather Be Governed By the First 2,000 People in the Telephone Directory than by the Harvard University Faculty.

The obvious differences apart, Karl Marx was no more a reliable prophet than was the Reverend Jim Jones. Karl Marx was a genius, an uncannily resourceful manipulator of world history who shoved everything he knew, thought, and devised into a Ouija board from whose movements he decocted universal laws. He had his following, during the late phases of the Industrial Revolution. But he was discredited by historical experience longer ago than the Wizard of Oz: and still, great grown people sit around, declare themselves to be Marxists, and make excuses for Gulag and Afghanistan.

Conservatism aims to maintain in working order the loyalties of the community to perceived truths and also to those truths which in their judgment have earned universal recognition.

Modern formulations are necessary even in defense of very ancient truths. Not because of any alleged anachronism in the old ideas – the Beatitudes remain the essential statements of the Western code – but because the idiom of life is always changing

People die, God endures.

National Review will support the rightwardmost viable candidate.

We find that in the absence of demonstrable truth, the best we can do is to exercise the greatest diligence, humility, insight, intelligence, and industry in trying to arrive at the nearest values to truth. I hope, of course, to argue convincingly that having done this, we have an inescapable duty to seek to inculcate others with these values.

The problem with the illiberal left is that it believes a “progressive” take on issues is an objective take, and cannot conceive that there are other legitimate points of view. As William F. Buckley Jr. once quipped, a liberal is someone who claims to be open to all points of view—and then is surprised and offended to find there are other points of view.

Parsifal is the opera that begins at five-thirty and when you look at your watch three hours later, it is only five forty-five.

How can one deduce the cause of "Hamlet" or "Saint Matthew's Passion"? What is the cause of inspiration?

There are some writers who sweep us along so strongly in their current of energy--Normal mailer, Tom Wolfe, Toni Morrison, William F. Buckley, Jr., Hunter Thompson, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers--that we assume that when they go to work the words just flow. Nobody thinks of the effort they made every morning to turn on the switch. You also have to turn on the switch. Nobody is going to do it for you.

But how reassuring it was for us, you remember, every now and then (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”), to vibrate to the music of the very heartstrings of the Leader of the Free World who, to qualify convincingly as such, had after all to feel a total commitment to the Free World.

...my beloved Eudosia [a member of Buckley's household staff], who is Cuban, very large, quite old, and altogether superstitious, and speaks only a word or two of English (even though she has been with us for 19 years), is quite certain that the gentleman who raped the 16-year-old girl in New Caanan three years ago and escaped has successfully eluded the police only because of his resourceful determination to ravage Eudosia before he dies. Accordingly she demanded, and I gave her, a shotgun, into which I have inserted two empty shells. Still, Eudosia with blank cartridges is more formidable than Eugene McCarthy with The Bomb.

Yes, Murray Rothbard believed in freedom, and yes, David Koresh believed in God.

She [Ayn Rand] had to declare that....altruism was despicable, that only self-interest is good and noble. (About Ayn Rand)

Khrushchev murders people without regard to race, color, or creed, and therefore whatever he is guilty of, he is not guilty of discrimination?

There is a man who has won the decathlon of human existence.”*

Halfway through the second term of Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal braintrusters began to worry about mounting popular concern over the national debt. In those days the size of the national debt was on everyone’s mind. Indeed, Franklin Roosevelt had talked himself into office, in 1932, in part by promising to hack away at a debt which, even under the frugal Mr. Hoover, the people tended to think of as grown to menacing size. Mr. Roosevelt’s wisemen worried deeply about the mounting tension ... And then, suddenly, the academic community came to the rescue. Economists across the length and breadth of the land were electrified by a theory of debt introduced in England by John Maynard Keynes. The politicians wrung their hands in gratitude. Depicting the intoxicating political consequences of Lord Keynes’s discovery, the wry cartoonist of the Washington Times Herald drew a memorable picture. In the center, sitting on a throne in front of a Maypole, was a jubilant FDR, cigarette tilted almost vertically, a grin on his face that stretched from ear to ear. Dancing about him in a circle, hands clasped together, their faces glowing with ecstasy, the braintrusters, vested in academic robes, sang the magical incantation, the great discovery of Lord Keynes: “We owe it to ourselves.” With five talismanic words, the planners had disposed of the problem of deficit spending. Anyone thenceforward who worried about an increase in the national debt was just plain ignorant of the central insight of modern economics: What do we care how much we - the government - owe so long as we owe it to ourselves? On with the spending. Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect ...

Birch fallacy is the assumption that you can infer subjective intention from objective consequence: we lost China to the Communists, therefore the President of the United States and the Secretary of State wished China to go to the Communists.

To Buckley, she embodied the worst of what in subsequent decades would be called political correctness: the mindless application to every issue of a platitudinous egalitarianism whose practical effect invariably is to expand the reach of totalitarianism.

The individualist insists that drastic depressions are the result of credit inflation; (not excessive savings, as the Keynesians would have it) which at all times in history has been caused by direct government action or by government influence. As for aggravated unemployment, the individualist insists that it is exclusively the result of government intervention through inflation, wage rigidities, burdensome taxes, and restrictions on trade and production such as price controls and tariffs. The inflation that comes inevitably with government pump-priming soon catches up with the laborer, wipes away any real increase in his wages, discourages private investment, and sets off a new deflationary spiral which can in turn only be counteracted by more coercive and paternalistic government policies. And so it is that the "long run" is very soon a-coming, and the harmful effects of government intervention are far more durable than those that are sustained by encouraging the unhampered free market to work out its own destiny.

If he was, somehow at the margin deficient, it was because the country did not rise to ask of him the performance of a thunderbolt. He gave what he was asked to give. And he leaves us (or “will leave”) if not exactly bereft, lonely; lonely for the quintessential American. END.

Do you favor mandated free tuition?” I answered: “Most positively not.” The crowd unanimously and lustily booed me. “Do you realize,” I persisted, “that you are asking men and women who are, many of them poorer than you, and poorer than your parents; many of whom earn less money than you yourselves will be earning in the course of a few years, to make sacrifices in your behalf?” Boo! “If you don’t believe me,” I said, “go to your economics teachers and ask them.” Boo! “All right,” I said, “don’t go to your economics teachers, and don’t discover the economic realities—you’ll find it much easier on the conscience not to know who is sustaining the hardship for your free education.” Applause!—as a matter of fact. On

What did Miss Rand in was her anxiety to theologize her beliefs. She was an eloquent and persuasive antistatist, and if only she had left it at that—but no, she had to declare that God did not exist, that altruism was despicable, that only self-interest is good and noble. She risked, in fact, giving to capitalism that bad name that its enemies have done so well in giving it; and that is a pity.

[Professor Greene's] reaction to GAMAY, as published in the Yale Daily News, fairly took one's breath away. He fondled the word "fascist" as though he had come up with a Dead Sea Scroll vouchsafing the key word to the understanding of God and Man at Yale. In a few sentences he used the term thrice. "Mr. Buckley has done Yale a great service" (how I would tire of this pedestrian rhetorical device), "and he may well do the cause of liberal education in America an even greater service, by stating the fascist alternative to liberalism. This fascist thesis . . . This . . . pure fascism . . . What more could Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin ask for . . . ?" (They asked for, and got, a great deal more.) What survives, from such stuff as this, is ne-plus-ultra relativism, idiot nihlism. "What is required," Professor Greene spoke, "is more, not less tolerance--not the tolerance of indifference, but the tolerance of honest respect for divergent convictions and the determination of all that such divergent opinions be heard without administrative censorship. I try my best in the classroom to expound and defend my faith, when it is relevant, as honestly and persuasively as I can. But I can do so only because many of my colleagues are expounding and defending their contrasting faiths, or skepticisms, as openly and honestly as I am mine." A professor of philosophy! Question: What is the 1) ethical, 2) philosophical, or 3) epistemological argument for requiring continued tolerance of ideas whose discrediting it is the purpose of education to effect? What ethical code (in the Bible? in Plato? Kant? Hume?) requires "honest respect" for any divergent conviction?

Mr. Churchill had struggled to diminish totalitarian rule in Europe, which, however, increased. He fought to save the empire, which dissolved. He fought socialism, which prevailed. He struggled to defeat Hitler—and he won. It is not, I think, the significance of that victory, mighty and glorious though it was, that causes the name of Churchill to make the blood run a little faster. He later spoke diffidently about his role in the war, saying that the lion was the people of England, that he had served merely to provide the roar. But it is the roar that we hear, when we pronounce his name. WFB

Ladies and Gentlemen, we deem it the central revelation of Western experience that man cannot ineradicably stain himself, for the wells of regeneration are infinitely deep. No temple has ever been so profaned that it cannot be purified; no man is ever truly lost; no nation is irrevocably dishonored. Khrushchev cannot take permanent advantage of our temporary disadvantage, for it is the West he is fighting. And in the West there lie, however encysted, the ultimate resources, which are moral in nature. Khrushchev is not aware that the gates of hell shall not prevail against us. Even out of the depths of despair, we take heart in the knowledge that it cannot matter how deep we fall, for there is always hope. In the end, we will bury him.

In 1951, William F. Buckley Jr., a devout Catholic fresh out of Yale, the son of an oilman, suggested a new approach to destroying the liberal consensus. In God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom,” Buckley suggested that the whole idea that people would make good decisions through argument based on evidence—the Enlightenment idea that had shaped America since its founding—was wrong. Had that been true, Americans would not have kept supporting the government activism launched by the New Deal. Americans’ faith in reasoned debate was a worse “superstition,” he said, than the superstitions the Enlightenment had set out to replace.15 Rather than continuing to try to change people’s beliefs through evidence-based arguments, he said, those opposed to the New Deal should stand firm on an “orthodoxy” of religion and individualism and refuse to accept any questioning of those two fundamental p

In 1964 the fear & loathing of Barry Goldwater was startling. Martin Luther King, Jr., detected “dangerous signs of Hitlerism in the Goldwater campaign.” Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress, warned that “a Jewish vote for Goldwater is a vote for Jewish suicide.” And George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO, saw power falling into “the hands of union-hating extremists, racial bigots, woolly-minded seekers after visions of times long past.” On Election Day Goldwater suffered a devastating defeat, winning only 41 electoral votes. It was the judgment of the establishment that Goldwater’s critique of American liberalism had been given its final exposure on the national political scene. Conservatives could now go back to their little lairs and sing to themselves their songs of nostalgia and fancy, and maybe gather together every few years to hold testimonial dinners in honor of Barry Goldwater, repatriated by Lyndon Johnson to the parched earth of Phoenix, where dwell only millionaires seeking dry air to breathe and the Indians Barry Goldwater could now resume photographing. But then of course 16 years later the world was made to stand on its head when Ronald Reagan was swept into office on a platform indistinguishable from what Barry had been preaching. During

But is God a Yale man?

By temperament I am content with the doctrine that good fences make good neighbors; but good fences shouldn’t evolve into barbed-wire barricades, though much of this is happening: the atomistic pull of high-tech living, in a high-tech age.

I quite understand a future without Marx, but it has always seemed to me that if our future is indeed to be without Jesus, the decision will be His, not ours; and that in any event, Jesus is not bound even by the deliberations of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Hayek also thought that any collectivist system would inevitably give rise to cries for greater equality. It was simply not possible in a collectivist system to advocate for any other principle of distributive justice. Efforts for greater equality, however, would incite the lower middle class to seek more at the expense of the established middle class and unsuccessful professionals to seek more at the expense of successful professionals. It was the resentments of these groups, Hayek argued, that provided much of the fuel and many of the recruits for fascism and National Socialism.

Burkeans and traditional conservatives are, in a sense, societal Darwinists (as opposed to social Darwinists) who believe our institutions—governmental and private—have evolved over time to serve us well. Things that have not served society well have been discarded; things that worked well have been retained and refined. Because our lives are too short to allow the individual to acquire great knowledge, we must stand on the shoulders of our ancestors and work with contemporaries to assemble a collective wisdom. All of this is summed up by the aphorism The individual is foolish but the species is wise.

Libertarians are individualists while Burkeans are communitarians. Libertarians believe individuals should be unshackled to achieve what they can and that society’s wealth is the sum total of individual achievement. Communitarians believe that no individual truly achieves alone. Everyone stands on the shoulders of those who have come before—those who created the nation in which he lives, the institutions that nurtured him, the schools that educated him. Moreover, our success depends on the social structure in which we live and work. The entrepreneur could not succeed without all that society provides: a transportation system, a monetary system, police and fire protection, and on and on. As communitarians see it, the entrepreneur benefits not only from his own education but also from the education of his customers because without successful customers he would have no market for his goods.

The Americans? These are people who invaded Texas and California with ethnic savagery. What do they have against us?” *

Mostly these conversations were had over the telephone, burdened by the conceptual difficulties of conflicting priorities, generals talking to engineers, political deputies to architects.

The executioner proper, the official who would place the nooses around the necks of the condemned, was a practiced hangman, his occupation begun in his youth in Texas, where he apprenticed under the regular hangman.

Like Kirk, Viereck was a communitarian who was offended by libertarian romanticizing of the individual pursuit of wealth in an environment of pure laissez-faire.

When a conservative once decides, as many articulate conservatives seem to have decided in explosive America, that the best of all possible worlds was here yesterday and is gone today, he begins the fateful move toward reaction and ratiocination that turns him from a prudent traditionalist into an angry ideologue.

It is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of Western civilization. It is already a wreck from within. That is why we can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying knowledge that there were those who, at the great nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth.

Memoirs of a Superfluous Man was a libertarian manifesto. In it, Nock railed against statism and collectivism in all forms. He drew no distinctions among different forms of government. “Communism, the New Deal, Fascism, Nazism, are merely so-many trade-names for collectivist Statism, like the trade-names for tooth-pastes which are all exactly alike except for the flavoring,” Nock wrote.41 The problem, as he saw it, was that governmental power will inevitably be turned against the individual. “In proportion as you give the State power to do things for you, you give it power to do things to you; and the State invariably makes as little as it can of the one power, and as much as it can of the other,” he explained.

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.

Conservatives must do this, Buckley instructed, by resisting when liberals try to respond to every problem with a government program.

I saw nothing very clearly but I did see this: that my life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart.”61

Rossiter said that conservatism had a “high duty to maintain its historic links with American liberalism,” and vice versa. “The American, like his tradition, is deeply liberal, deeply conservative,” Rossiter wrote. “If this is a paradox, so, too, is America

There is no greater paradox in the cosmos,” the deceased had written, “than the apparent contradiction of our helplessness (‘without me, you can do nothing’) alongside God’s ‘helplessness.’ Oh, I know, God is all-powerful, and so on; but he cannot undo what he has done, and what he once did was to make men free. This means that he ‘needs’ us in order to get us to Heaven as his lovers, and in order to do his will in the world. All we have to do in order to frustrate those wishes—to render God ‘helpless’—is to say No. But God is not helpless, really, because he has mercy—himself. And what mercy does is convert, change our hearts. Which God never stops trying to do until we are dead. This means continued suffering for him, which is what Christ is all about.” Young

the genius of Churchill was his union of affinities of the heart and of the mind, the total fusion of animal and spiritual energy”—but

Dr. King’s flouting of the law does not justify the flouting by others of the law, but it is a terrifying thought that, most likely, the cretin who leveled his rifle on the head of Martin Luther King, may have absorbed the talk, so freely available, about the supremacy of the individual conscience, such talk as Martin Luther King, God rest his soul, had so widely, and so indiscriminately, made.

He told us that most of our civic problems were problems brought on or exacerbated by government, not problems that could be solved by government. That, of course, is enduringly true. Only government can cause inflation, preserve monopoly, and punish enterprise.

A second marked characteristic of the Liberal in debate with the conservative is the tacit premise that debateis ridiculous....Many people shrink from arguments over facts because facts are tedious, because they require a formal familiarity with the subject under discussion, and because they can be ideologically dislocative. Many Liberals accept their opinions, ideas, and evaluations as others accept revealed truths.

I do not, in short, myself believe it is in the least bit undignified to confess to having been critically influenced in one's thinking by a teacher, or a faculty, or a book; but the accent these days is so strong on atomistic intellectual independence that to suggest such a thing is, as I have noted, highly inflammatory.

Instead of pushing the engines of concern argument any further, Buckley revived his attack on Baldwin's radicalism. Before describing the next phase in his assault, it is worth noting what is revealed by this rhetorical choice. As he had demonstrated time and time again throughout his career, he was far more comfortable on the attack than he was when he attempted to build an affirmative case for his views. If he had chosen to defend his claim that the United States was providing a world historical model of how to treat minority groups, he would have had to confront many uncomfortable questions. Was it true that the United States was showing "dramatic concern" for "the Negro problem"? If so, what did the policy of concern entail, and what problem, precisely, was being addressed? Was the American example really unprecedented in the history of the world? And perhaps most interestingly—assuming for a moment that Buckley was right about these matters—it would be worth asking why and how this policy of concern was activated and sustained. Was it primarily because of the enlightened humanitarianism of those in power or because of the radicalism of freedom fighters?    As a conservative who had been dragging his feet on civil rights for more than a decade, serious attention to these questions would have put Buckley in an awkward position. To the extent that the United States was giving "the problems of a minority" exceptional concern, it was in spite of the intransigence of Buckley, writers he commissioned to write for The National Review, and political candidates he supported. He likely surmised that he had better not dwell too long on what was animating "dramatic concern" for the Negro problem or whether he was personally devoted to this "primary policy of concern." If the engines of concern had been working in the United States, it was no thanks to Buckley and his allies.

As Buckley imagined it, the radical confrontation that might happen would be between "the United States" or "the Americans" and "the Negro people." In this framing, "the Negro people" are not counted as real Americans. This way of thinking was nothing new for Buckley. It was suggested in the very title of his infamous "Why the South Must Prevail" piece nearly a decade earlier. [Emphasis added.] In his formulation, black people were not actually part of "the South"; they were merely a problem that existed in the South. By framing matters in this way, Buckley was demonstrating the truth of what Baldwin considered to be his most damning indictment: "the country which is your birthplace, and to which you owe your life and identity," he had told the students earlier that night, "has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you.

Some people turn to crime, others to ideology.

Then one day, in October 1948, while Truman was campaigning feverishly for re-election, Hoover picked up the morning paper and read that the evening before, in Boston, Truman had denounced the Republican Party as desiring to reintroduce the age of Hoover, defined as the exploitation of the poor for the benefit of the greedy rich. “I vowed,” Hoover told me, “never to speak to Truman again.” But when, a few months after his election, Truman asked Hoover to drop in at the White House on an urgent matter, “I couldn’t, of course, refuse a summons from the President of the United States. But I was determined to tell him off before we got down to business, and I did: ‘Mr. President,’ I said, ‘the remarks you made about me in Boston were as dirty and unforgivable as any I ever heard in a lifetime of politics.’ ‘I couldn’t agree with you more,’ Truman replied affably. ‘When I came to that paragraph in my speech, I almost didn’t read it.

The world is a giant ashtray we put things into.

William F. Buckley Jr. eloquently stated: “ An anti-semite’ in actual usage, is less often a man who hates Jews than a man certain Jews hate.

fortiori,

..."fascist" is quite simply a word of disapprobiation. The Communists, you surely have noticed, refer to anyone who disagrees with any...any hemidemimisemiquaver in the Communist line as a fascist. Or a proto-fascist. Or a neo-fascist. It has nothing whatever to do with the political disciplines practiced by Mussolini.

hit the ball 120 miles per hour!

. Do you know the story of Nicholas Murray Butler?” “All I know about him is that he was forever the president of Columbia University and the soul of propriety.” “Exactly,” said Caroline, “and I read somewhere, in one of your uninhibited journals, that it was the ambition of Heywood Broun the journalist to become rich for the sake of indulging himself in only a single pleasure. He proposed to hire the whole of the Metropolitan Opera House and give a benefit concert sending out all the tickets gratis. But he would arrange to send tickets to prominent bald-headed New Yorkers seating them in the orchestra floor so as to describe, for the benefit of the balconies, one huge S H I T—with Nicholas Murray Butler dotting the i!” She roared with pleasure.

I have written many essays detailing the facts about this so-called “collapse of communism.” In all that time nobody wrote a detailed argument showing I was wrong. They just repeated slogans the communists had given them. In fact, those who warned about the coming fake collapse of communism – James Angleton and Anatoliy Golitsyn – were not dealt with by rational argument. They were libeled in books whose authors did the talk show circuit. They were dragged through the mud and called madmen by leading conservatives like William F. Buckley, Jr. But there was no rational argument against their true predictions of the future. Angleton and Golitsyn had been right. And now the end of the long range strategy is upon us. J.R.Nyquist

It is all very well to take the revolutionists by the scruff of the neck and show them that revolutions, as Professor Toynbee preaches, historically have not brought about the ends explicitly desired, but something very like their opposite; but the success of such demonstrations presupposes a clinical curiosity on the part of the observer, and such is not the temper of those in America who are talking about revolution.

for December 19 and for a day or two bracketing the

It is widely known that whenever Senator Johnson feels the urge to act the statesman at the cost of a little political capital,” WFB wrote in June 1958, “he lies down until he gets over it.

This faction hoped to use their wealth to advance a strain of conservative libertarian politics that was so far out on the political fringe as recently as 1980, when David Koch ran for vice president of the United States on the Libertarian Party ticket, it received only 1 percent of the American vote. At the time, the conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. dismissed their views as “Anarcho-Totalitarianism.

He was everything. The soldier who loved poetry. The historian who loved to paint. The diplomat who thrived on indiscretion. The patriot with international vision. The orderly man given to electric spontaneities. (on Winston Churchill)

The united nations is the most concentrated assault on moral reality in the history of free institutions, and it does not do to ignore that fact or, worse, to get used to it.

Libertarians believe in the transcendent importance of the individual while traditional conservatives stress the importance of the community. Libertarians want the free market to be as unregulated as possible while traditional conservatives believe that big business, if unconstrained, can impoverish national life and threaten freedom. Libertarians believe a strong state threatens freedom while traditional conservatives believe that a strong state—properly constructed to ensure that too much power does not accumulate in any one branch—is necessary to ensure freedom.

We are experiencing hyperpartisanship. Paradoxically, it is confusion within each camp—not certainty—that fuels the vehemence. It is because each side can’t see its own compass clearly that makes it so distrustful and defiant whenever the other side suggests a direction.

Students who come to college with strong religious convictions will take an active part in one or more . . . undergraduate activities. The majority, however, will unconsciously look to see what the authorities judge to be important. If religion is relegated to the role of a not-too-important sideshow, if its part in our intellectual and emotional tradition is ignored, and if the members of the faculty act with indifference, whether deliberate or unconscious, toward those questions of ultimate import which no discipline can escape and on which religion has had much to say, then it is small wonder that a majority of students will go their way, troubled perhaps and a little uneasy in the absence of answers, upon the assumption that religion does not matter.

Though Marx’s proletariat may be somewhat better fed than it was a century ago, its individual members have made little if any progress toward that personal liberty and independence on which the dignity of man is founded.

The danger comes when a distrust of doctrinaire social systems eases over into a dissolute disregard for principle. A disregard for enduring principle delivers a society, eviscerated, over to the ideologists.

Henry Kissinger said in 1968: Word should be gotten to Nixon that, if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world, that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal.