Explore Quotes by Jonah Goldberg

Someone once noted that a 'gaffe' in Washington is when a politician accidentally tells the truth.

If you're uncertain when life begins, why not give the unborn the benefit of the doubt and oppose abortion?

The premise of my book is that everyone is a bit ideological to some extent. Everyone comes from a ideological perspective.

Our country, if you read the 'Federalist Papers,' is about disagreement. It's about pitting faction against faction, divided government, checks and balances. The hero in American political tradition is the man who stands up to the mob - not the mob itself.

The mainstream perception that conservatives are close-minded and dogmatic while liberals are open-minded and free-thinking has it almost exactly backward. Liberal dogma is settled: The government should do good, where it can, whenever it can. That is President Obama's idea of pragmatism and bipartisanship: He's open to all ideas, from either side of the aisle, about how best to expand government and get the state more involved in our lives.

Seriously, in 2008 we elected a community organizer, state senator, college instructor first term senator over a guy who spent five years in a Vietnamese prison. And now he's lecturing us about how America's gone "soft"? Really?

Cultures grow on the vine of tradition.

When you treat reprehensible and ludicrous arguments with respect you have elevated the reprehensible and made the ludicrous a bit more reasonable. Having a serious argument with a Nazi makes the horror of the Holocaust a debatable point. Don't wrestle in the mud with pigs. You get dirty and the pig likes it.

I am just mystified by these people telling me I would think Obama was doing a great job if his skin contained less melanin.

Not reassuring when weathermen say 'Today will be terrible but don't worry it won't be as terrible as tomorrow or Friday.

Government money only pays for the "liberties" the government thinks you should have, and therefore it can determine how you exercise them. That turns liberties into privileges dispensed at the whim of the state.

If you think shrinking government and getting it less involved in your life is a hallmark of tyranny it is only because you are either grotesquely ignorant or because you subscribe to a statist ideology that believes the expansion of the state is the expansion of liberty.

[American] liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say.

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