Top 100 Mark Steyn Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Taliban: Americans have all the watches, but we have all the time.”

— Mark Steyn

2. “The most basic of conservative principles is that if you reward bad behavior you get more of it.”

— Mark Steyn

3. “It is a basic rule of life that if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it.”

— Mark Steyn

4. “When the family dies, the nation follows...”

— Mark Steyn

5. “Every power grab is the new base camp for the next power grab.”

— Mark Steyn

6. “LBJ held up Detroit as a model of what the Great Society could accomplish. He was right.”

— Mark Steyn

7. “When is the Democratic Party going to apologize for being the biggest slave-holding-supporting institution on the planet and sticking with racism for the century after the abolition of slavery?”

— Mark Steyn

8. “In Britain, everything is policed except crime.”

— Mark Steyn

9. “Big Government is erecting a panopticon state – one that sees everything, and regulates everything. It’s great “customer service,” except that you can never get out of the store.”

— Mark Steyn

10. “I believe Western culture – rule of law, universal suffrage, etc. – is preferable to Arab culture: that’s why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I support immigration, but with assimilation.”

— Mark Steyn

11. “A big chunk of Western civilization, consciously or otherwise, has given the impression that it’s dying to surrender to somebody, anybody. Reasonably enough, Islam figures: Hey, why not us?”

— Mark Steyn

12. “No Islamic nation could have flown to the moon or invented the Internet, simply because for a millennium the culture has suppressed the curiosity necessary for such a venture.”

— Mark Steyn

13. “The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government ‘security,’ large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time – the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and a ton of other stuff.”

— Mark Steyn

14. “The Western front is the important one in this war – the intersection between Islam and a liberal democratic tradition so mired in self-loathing it would rather destroy our civilization just to demonstrate its multicultural bona fides.”

— Mark Steyn

15. “If you’re 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you’re graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade. There has been no global warming this century. None.”

— Mark Steyn

16. “The Democratic Party is uniquely virulently racist and pro-slavery to a degree unseen anywhere in the English-speaking world!”

— Mark Steyn

17. “America is the brokest country in history. We owe more money than anyone has ever owed anyone. And Obama and Reid say relax, that’s no reason not to spend more – because the world hasn’t yet concluded we have no intention of paying it back. When they do, the dollar will collapse.”

— Mark Steyn

18. “Sometimes societies become too stupid to survive. A nation that takes Barack Obama’s current rhetorical flourishes seriously is certainly well advanced along that dismal path.”

— Mark Steyn

19. “The cradle-to-grave welfare society enfeebles the citizenry to such a degree you can never generate enough money.”

— Mark Steyn

20. “How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. How do you get away from it? Improvise.”

— Mark Steyn

21. “Appeasement is a vote to live in the present tense, to hold the comforts of the moment.”

— Mark Steyn

22. “To expect the government to save you is to be a bystander in your own fate.”

— Mark Steyn

23. “General Motors, like the other two geezers of the Old Three, is a vast retirement home with a small money-losing auto subsidiary.”

— Mark Steyn

24. “The spirit of the age is: Ask not what your country can do for you, demand it.”

— Mark Steyn

25. “There may be many things wrong with the United States but only a blind fool who hasn’t been paying attention for the last twenty years would hold up Europe as the alternative.”

— Mark Steyn

26. “The first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death.”

— Mark Steyn

27. “Welfare culture is bad not just because, as in Europe, it’s bankrupting the state, but because it enfeebles the citizenry, it erodes self-reliance and resourcefulness.”

— Mark Steyn

28. “Modern ‘liberalism’ is strikingly illiberal; the high priests of ‘tolerance’ are increasingly intolerant of even the mildest dissent; and those who profess to ‘celebrate diversity’ coerce ever more ruthlessly a narrow homogeneity.”

— Mark Steyn

29. “When is black America going to forgive white America for slavery?”

— Mark Steyn

30. “The long-term cost of a welfare society is the infantilization of the population.”

— Mark Steyn

31. “Gerald Ford used to say when trying to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” And that’s true. But there’s an intermediate stage: a government big enough to give you everything you want isn’t big enough to get you to give any of it back.”

— Mark Steyn

32. “Big Government is the small option: it’s the guarantee of smaller freedom, smaller homes, smaller cars, smaller opportunities, smaller lives.”

— Mark Steyn

33. “Unchecked, government social programs are a security threat because they weaken the ultimate line of defense: the free-born citizen whose responsibilities are not subcontracted to the government.”

— Mark Steyn

34. “There is no conceivable amount of money worth telling the world that you were beaten up by Liza Minnelli.”

— Mark Steyn

35. “The salient feature of America in the Age of Obama is a failed government class institutionally committed to living beyond its means, and a citizenry too many of whom are content to string along.”

— Mark Steyn

36. “When you’re taxing bovine flatulence emissions, there’s nothing left to tax.”

— Mark Steyn

37. “On the Continent and elsewhere in the West, native populations are aging and fading and being supplanted remorselessly by a young Muslim demographic.”

— Mark Steyn

38. “In Europe, nothing is certain except death and welfare, and why let the former get in the way of the latter?”

— Mark Steyn

39. “In Europe, where dependency, decadence, and demographic decline are extinguishing some of the oldest nations on earth, a successor population is already in place in the restive Muslim housing projects.”

— Mark Steyn

40. “Big government makes small citizens.”

— Mark Steyn

41. “Government health care changes the relationship between the citizen and the state, and, in fact, I think it’s an assault on citizenship.”

— Mark Steyn

42. “But, once you get a taste for shutting people up, it’s hard to stop. Why bother winning the debate when it’s easier to close it down?”

— Mark Steyn

43. “Once you accept you’re a child in the government nursery, why shouldn’t Nanny tell you what to do?”

— Mark Steyn

44. “Like most people, I have no wish to live in a community organized by community organizers.”

— Mark Steyn

45. “The Democrats smell blood and don’t want to be told that it’s their own.”

— Mark Steyn

46. “No family of an American hostage has ever been prosecuted for paying a ransom for the return of their loved ones. The last thing we should ever do is to add to a family’s pain.”

— Mark Steyn

47. “If gun control bore any relation to homicide rates, Washington, DC would be the safest place in the country.”

— Mark Steyn

48. “For a century, Edison’s light bulb was regarded as a beacon of American genius; then it became a ‘climate criminal.” That transformation is American decline in a nutshell.”

— Mark Steyn

49. “The most consequential act of state ownership in the twentieth-century western world was not the nationalization of airlines or the nationalization of railways or the nationalization of health care, but the nationalization of the family.”

— Mark Steyn

50. “For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ’s Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population.”

— Mark Steyn