William F. Buckley Jr. quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr. Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from William F. Buckley Jr. on Wise Famous Quotes.

To buy very good wine nowadays requires only money. To serve it to your guests is a sign of fatigue.

Mr. Rockefeller is due to entertain munificently at breakfast, and make his pitch. My advice to one invited guest was: Order caviar, and then say No.

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

But is God a Yale man?

Louis Kelso of San Francisco, a lawyer-economist, has for years felt that he has a radical answer to the problem.

Boredom is the deadliest poison.

History is but the polemics of the victor.

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

Scientists are people who build the Brooklyn Bridge and then buy it.

Why does baloney avoid the grinder?

Socialize the individual's surplus and you socialize his spirit and creativeness ...

People are beginning to wish that the voters had been given breathometer tests when they voted in the present government.

The real threat, as seen by the ACLU, is that religious behavior might give secular behavior a bad name, and that is, surely, unconstitutional.

[The] act of gratitude is nowadays is probably more often neglected than overdone.

Decent people should ignore politics, if only they could be confident that politics would ignore them

I grew up, as reported, in a large family of Catholics without even a decent ration of tentativeness among the lot of us about our religious faith.

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

The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.

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

Some of my instincts are reprehensible.

Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.

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

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

The New York Times, whose editorial department sounds like Cotton Mather rewriting Eleanor Roosevelt ...

One must bear in mind that the expansion of federal activity is a form of eating for politicians.

They told me if I voted for Goldwater, he would get us into a war in Vietnam. Well, I voted for Goldwater and that's what happened.

Human progress is achieved by taking exact measurements.

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

for December 19 and for a day or two bracketing the

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

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

We love your adherence to democratic principles.

Industry is the enemy of melancholy

All adventure is now reactionary.

The Beatles are not merely awful. I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are godawful.

What was wrong with communism wasn't aberrant leadership, it was communism.

Everything I do and say and the way I do and say it annoys me.

Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.

One doesn't read Jane Austen; one re-reads Jane Austen.

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

Self-control is one of the most exhilarating of pleasures.

No one since the Garden of Eden - which the serpent forsook in order to run for higher office - has imputed to politicians great purity of motive.

Did you know that forty percent of the words used by Shakespeare were used by him only once?

Knee-jerk liberals and all the certified saints of sanctified humanism are quick to condemn this great and much-maligned Transylvanian statesman.

If only the left hated crime as much as they hated hate.

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

Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive.

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

As a businessman, Frank Lorenzo gives capitalism a bad name.

Enthusiasm for conservation can be fashioned into a nasty weapon for those who dislike business on general principles.

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

Kennedy after all has lots of glamour - Gregory Peck with an atom bomb in his holster.

Only government can cause inflation, preserve monopoly, and punish enterprise.

You cannot paint the Mona Lisa by assigning one dab each to a thousand painters.

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

It seems to me that the idea traditionally defended of endeavoring to maintain existing ethnic balances simply doesn't work any more.

When it is not possible to reason with holy warriors, it is necessary to immobilize them or crush them.

You know, I've spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.

It is not a sign of arrogance for the king to rule. That is what he is there for.

Why should any country continue, forever, to be "great"?

Not everything that is legal is reputable.

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

If you had a European prime minister who experienced what we've experienced it would be expected that he would retire or resign,

The police can't use clubs or gas or dogs. I suppose they will have to use poison ivy.

Government can't do anything for you except in proportion as it can do something to you.

Conservatism is the politics of reality

France believes in armed intervention by America only when the intervention is in France to rescue France from occupation by other powers.

It had all the earmarks of a CIA operation; the bomb killed everybody in the room except the intended target!

The socialized state is to justice, order, and freedom what the Marquis de Sade is to love.

He [Cassius Clay] became a Black Muslim, which is a pseudo-religion for unbright neurotics who feel the need to hate all white people.

A society is not 'free' merely because the freedoms the people are doing away with are those they voted at the last election to do without.

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

Christianity finds all its doctrines stated in the Bible, and Christianity denies no part, nor attempts to add anything to the Word of God.

Reagan is both too fatalistic and too modest to be a crudaser. He doesn't have that darkness around the eyes of a George McGovern.

Following Mrs. Roosevelt in search of irrationality was like following a burning fuse in search of an explosive.

Friendship is strengthened by ... that which ever so lightly elevates us from the trough of self-concern and self-devotion.

Norman Mailer decocts matters of the first philosophical magnitude from an examination of his own ordure, and I am not talking about his books.

If Bach is not in Heaven, I am not going!

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

Nobody who's ever been to Gulag is a pacifist.

I had much more fun criticizing than praising.

I would like to electrocute everyone who uses the word 'fair' in connection with income tax policies.

I find it easier to believe in God than to believe Hamlet was deduced from the molecular structure of a mutton chop.