Top 90 Jonah Goldberg Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Yes, I know liberals are more empirical because Jonathan Chait says they are, but my empirical studies of liberal empiricism keep spitting out contradictory findings.”

— Jonah Goldberg

52. “I suppose in John Kerry’s world good diplomacy lets the boys in the bar finish raping the girl for fear of causing a fuss. Okay, that was unfair.”

— Jonah Goldberg

53. “There is no – let me repeat – no example in the last quarter-century of a large, complex economy that has been successful with high taxes.”

— Jonah Goldberg

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

— Jonah Goldberg

55. “In Europe and America alike, voters increasingly recognize that the benefits of the green revolution aren’t worth the costs, particularly when the revolutionaries don’t have a clue what they’re doing.”

— Jonah Goldberg

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

— Jonah Goldberg

57. “We are a species that must try to impose and find systems – systems of thought, ways of organizing and categorizing reality.”

— Jonah Goldberg

58. “The problem with the United Nations is that while democracy within nations is the best available form of government, democracy among nations can be a moral disaster – especially if some nations are not democracies.”

— Jonah Goldberg

59. “Public unions are the country’s foremost advocates for increased taxes at all levels of government.”

— Jonah Goldberg

60. “One of the things that really drove me crazy was the way in which college kids, in particular, are educated to think that ideology is dangerous and bad.”

— Jonah Goldberg

61. “There was no intellectual movement in American history called social Darwinism. The people who were supposedly the leaders of the social Darwinist movement never embraced something called social Darwinism. It didn’t exist.”

— Jonah Goldberg

62. “Obama did inherit a deficit when he came into office. Why this fact justifies racking up vastly more debt and bigger deficits is a logical mystery.”

— Jonah Goldberg

63. “John Kerry is a sphincter. Okay, that’s a bit juvenile.”

— Jonah Goldberg

64. “But if the choice is a cool president and 8 or 10 percent unemployment in a declining economy and a country that seems to be going in the wrong direction and structural unemployment for young people at 50 percent, I’d rather have a dorky president who fixed those problems.”

— Jonah Goldberg

65. “The elevation of unity as the highest social value is a core tenet of fascism and all leftist ideologies.”

— Jonah Goldberg

66. “I would also say Barack Obama has spent much, much, much, much more money than the Republicans.”

— Jonah Goldberg

67. “Getting the support of Syria is the moral equivalent of winning the Klan’s endorsement – it might be useful but it doesn’t necessarily speak well of you.”

— Jonah Goldberg

68. “And, of course, liberals see no problem with using the government to impose their cultural beliefs on others; they just won’t admit that’s what they’re doing.”

— Jonah Goldberg

69. “If you spend any time in Washington you’ll find nerds. What happens is most of them sublimate their fixations with comics, or baseball cards, or 1960s British comedies to policy minutiae and political arcana. But, like Christians in ancient Rome, you can still spot them if you know the signals.”

— Jonah Goldberg

70. “Despite what you may have been taught about Indians or Africans or ancient Celts, poor people are terrible stewards of their environment. For instance, if my kid were starving to death, I would happily feed her fresh panda.”

— Jonah Goldberg

71. “Of course, it’s a mystery to me why any American who can’t be bothered to pay attention to politics unless Pamela Anderson is discussing it should be welcome in that conversation.”

— Jonah Goldberg

72. “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.”

— Jonah Goldberg

73. “If you write for the critics, only the critics will read you.”

— Jonah Goldberg

74. “Fascism isn’t a libertarian doctrine! It just isn’t, never will be and it can’t be cast as one.”

— Jonah Goldberg

75. “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.”

— Jonah Goldberg

76. “Tom Friedman says China is so awesome they make kosher pigs.”

— Jonah Goldberg

77. “The GOP needs to figure out a way to become more appealing to new constituencies.”

— Jonah Goldberg

78. “Even if you believe there is no such thing as free will, it is impossible to live any kind of decent life based on that belief. Even if our personal choices are some deep fiction, we still have to convince ourselves to get out of bed in the morning. We are still obligated as a society to judge people as if they make their own choices.”

— Jonah Goldberg

79. “Republican politics have been off-kilter for several years now because a large segment of the conservative base does not look back fondly on the Bush presidency.”

— Jonah Goldberg

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

— Jonah Goldberg

81. “Unlike classical liberalism, which saw the government as a necessary evil, or simply a benign but voluntary social contract for free men to enter into willingly, the belief that the entire society was one organic whole left no room for those who didn’t want to behave, let alone “evolve.”

— Jonah Goldberg

82. “Social distinctions tend to matter only at your own level and above.”

— Jonah Goldberg

83. “The village may have replaced “the state,” and it in turn may have replaced the fist with the hug, but an unwanted embrace from which you cannot escape is just a nicer form of tyranny.”

— Jonah Goldberg

84. “Americans are very smart about the things they care about, and ignorant about the things they don’t.”

— Jonah Goldberg

85. “I think as – all in all, it’s better to have a cool president than a not cool president.”

— Jonah Goldberg

86. “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?”

— Jonah Goldberg

87. “Crisis is routinely identified as a core mechanism of fascism because it short-circuits debate and democratic deliberation. Hence all fascistic movements commit considerable energy to prolonging a heightened state of emergency. Across the West, this was the most glorious boon of World War I.”

— Jonah Goldberg

88. “When man’s law disappears or loses its force, nature’s law returns – quickly.”

— Jonah Goldberg

89. “At the very core of conservatism lies comfort with contradiction, acceptance of the fact that life is not fair; that ideals must forever be goals, not destinations; that the perfect is not the enemy of the good but one standard by which we understand what is good in the first place – though not the only standard.”

— Jonah Goldberg

90. “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. It also highlights the real fascist legacy of World War I and the New Deal: the notion that government action in the name of “good things” under the direction of “our people” is always and everywhere justified.”

— Jonah Goldberg

91. “There is no word in the English language that gets thrown around more freely by people who don’t know what it means than “fascism.” Indeed, the more someone uses the word “fascist” in everyday conversation, the less likely it is that he knows what he’s talking about.”

— Jonah Goldberg

92. “There is at least one official voice in Europe that expresses understanding of the methods and motives of President Roosevelt,” began a New York Times report in July 1933. “This voice is that of Germany, as represented by Chancellor Adolf Hitler.” The German leader told the Times, “I have sympathy with President Roosevelt because he marches straight toward his objective over Congress, over lobbies, over stubborn bureaucracies.”

— Jonah Goldberg

93. “The progressive notion of the state as a loving, caring parent is becoming a bipartisan affair.”

— Jonah Goldberg

94. “Every Democrat says he wants to be JFK while insisting that he will do more or less what LBJ did. No Democrat would dream of saying he wanted to emulate Lyndon Johnson, because the myth is what matters most.”

— Jonah Goldberg

95. “Debates about economics these days generally enjoy a climate of bipartisan asininity. Democrats want to “rein in” corporations, while Republicans claim to be “pro-business.” The problem is that being “pro-business” is hardly the same thing as being pro–free market, while “reining in” corporations breeds precisely the climate liberals decry as fascistic.”

— Jonah Goldberg

96. “American Progressivism – the moralistic social crusade from which modern liberals proudly claim descent – is in some respects the major source of the fascist ideas applied in Europe by Mussolini and Hitler.”

— Jonah Goldberg

97. “This is why the Third Way is also authoritarian. It assumes that the right man – or, in the case of Leninists, the right party – can resolve all of these contradictions through sheer will. The populist demagogue takes on the role of the parent telling the childlike masses that he can make everything “all better” if they just trust him.”

— Jonah Goldberg

98. “Humanity has been taking off like a rocket since the 1700s, but we have not achieved a stable orbit in the heavens. And even if we did, no orbit is stable in the long run. Eventually gravity claims what is hers.”

— Jonah Goldberg