Top 100 Mark Steyn Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “But in reality the point of free speech is for the stuff that’s over the line, and strikingly unbalanced. If free speech is only for polite persons of mild temperament within government-policed parameters, it isn’t free at all. So screw that.”

— Mark Steyn

52. “The past is another country, but the Seventies is another planet.”

— Mark Steyn

53. “We’re the endangered species, not the spotted owl. The “population explosion” is a prop of the Western progressive’s bizarre death-cultism. We are so bad, so polluting, so exploitative, so violent, so destructive that we owe it to the world not to be born in the first place.”

— Mark Steyn

54. “The law functions as formal embodiment of a moral code, not as free-standing substitute for it.”

— Mark Steyn

55. “The president has borrowed more money to spend to less effect than anybody on the planet.”

— Mark Steyn

56. “Demographically and psychologically, Europeans have chosen to commit societal suicide, and their principal heir and beneficiary will be Islam.”

— Mark Steyn

57. “Only in America does ‘health’ ‘care’ ‘reform’ begin with the hiring of 16,500 new IRS agents tasked with determining whether your insurance policy merits a fine.”

— Mark Steyn

58. “It’s not that I place less value on Palestinian lives, but that Chairman Arafat and his chums in Hamas do.”

— Mark Steyn

59. “Secretary of State Clinton dared Iran on Monday to let her hold a town hall meeting in Tehran. That’s telling ’em. If the ayatollahs had a sense of humor, they’d call her bluff.”

— Mark Steyn

60. “A dependence on immigration from very limited and particular sources is not a strength but a weakness.”

— Mark Steyn

61. “The right to evaluate risk for oneself is part of what it means to be a functioning human being.”

— Mark Steyn

62. “The essence of a government health care system – for people who have never lived under it and don’t know – is waiting, waiting, waiting. You wait for everything. You wait for years for operations that are routine in America.”

— Mark Steyn

63. “Abraham Lincoln, a predecessor of Barack Obama in both the White House and the Illinois state legislature, had eighteen months of formal education and became a soldier, surveyor, postmaster, rail-splitter, tavern keeper, and self-taught prairie lawyer. Obama went to Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School, and became a “community organizer.” I’m not sure that’s progress – and it’s certainly not “sustainable.”

— Mark Steyn

64. “I don’t think Donald Trump is a conservative. I think his line on China for example, that he’s going to talk tough to China. China didn’t create Social Security, Medicare. China isn’t spending a fifth of a billion dollars every hour that it doesn’t have.”

— Mark Steyn

65. “Public interest criteria does not mean criteria that the public decides are in its interest. It means that the elite – via various appointed bodies – decide what the public’s interest is for them.”

— Mark Steyn

66. “Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize is an exquisite act of condescension from Norwegians, a dog biscuit and a pat on the head to the American hyperpower for agreeing to spay itself into a hyperpoodle.”

— Mark Steyn

67. “America is now a land that rewards failure – at the personal, corporate, and state level.”

— Mark Steyn

68. “The famous United Nations statistic from a 2002 report – more books are translated into Spanish in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the last thousand – suggests at the very minimum an extraordinarily closed world.”

— Mark Steyn

69. “Her Majesty’s government is engaging not merely in Orwellian Newspeak but in self-defeating Orwellian Newspeak. The broader message it sends is that ours is a weak culture so unconfident and insecure that if you bomb us and kill us our first urge is to find a way to flatter and apologize to you.”

— Mark Steyn

70. “We immigrants can sometimes sound a little hysterical about this because we come from places that have tried this and we know where it leads. Anybody who’s lived in countries with socialized health care knows that it becomes the dominant political issue.”

— Mark Steyn

71. “Bisexuality is the proportional representation of sexuality in a world where most of us – straight or gay – operate a first-past-the-post system.”

— Mark Steyn

72. “Jesse Jackson’s living depends on the maintenance of an African-American victim culture.”

— Mark Steyn

73. “Anything that shifts power from the individual judgment of free citizens to government is a bad thing.”

— Mark Steyn

74. “Applied globally, political correctness obliges us to forswear sovereignty.”

— Mark Steyn

75. “We’ve elevated the secondary impulses over the primary ones: national defense, self-reliance, family, and, most basic of all, reproductive activity. If you don’t “go forth and multiply” you can’t afford all those secondary-impulse programs, like lifelong welfare, whose costs are multiplying a lot faster than you are.”

— Mark Steyn

76. “The best reason to diminish social programs is not to put more money in people’s pockets but to put more responsibility in people’s pockets.”

— Mark Steyn

77. “For states in demographic decline with ever more lavish social programs, the question is a simple one: Can they get real? Can they grow up before they grow old? If not, then they’ll end their days in societies dominated by people with a very different worldview.”

— Mark Steyn

78. “Barack Obama is a symptom rather than the problem. He didn’t declare himself president; America chose him.”

— Mark Steyn

79. “Once a fellow’s enjoying the fruits of government health care and all the rest, he couldn’t give a hoot about the general societal interest; he’s got his, and if it’s going to bankrupt the state of a generation hence, well, as long as they can keep the checks coming till he’s dead, it’s fine by him.”

— Mark Steyn

80. “It is easier,” said Frederick Douglass, “to build strong children than to repair broken men.”

— Mark Steyn

81. “The Clinton presidency has at last stumbled on its rendezvous with history: While Ronald Reagan and George Bush presided over the fall of Communism, Mr. Clinton presides over the rise of Viagra. It may not be true that any young boy can grow up to be president. But at least, thanks to Viagra, any young boy can grow up to be this president.”

— Mark Steyn

82. “Once it’s no longer accepted that something is wrong, all the laws in the world will avail you naught. The law functions as a formal embodiment of a moral code, not as a free-standing substitute for it.”

— Mark Steyn

83. “Absolute welfare corrupts absolutely.”

— Mark Steyn

84. “Having done an impressive job of demolishing the basic societal building block of the family, the ambitious liberal is now moving on to demolishing the basic building block of the sexes.”

— Mark Steyn

85. “The ‘Occupy’ movement has no real solutions, except more government, more spending, more regulation, more bureaucracy, more unsustainable lethargic pseudo-university with no return on investment, more more more of what got us into this hole.”

— Mark Steyn

86. “The minute health care becomes a huge, unwieldy, expensive government bureaucracy it’s a permanent feature of life and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

— Mark Steyn

87. “Big government is a national security threat: it increases your vulnerability to threats like Islamism, and makes it less likely you’ll be able to summon the will to rebuff it.”

— Mark Steyn

88. “Reverend Jesse Jackson, President-for-Life of the People’s Republic of Himself.”

— Mark Steyn

89. “Nobel Prize winner Ivar Giaever reminds us that “in pseudoscience you begin with a hypothesis which is very appealing to you, and then you only look for things which confirm the hypothesis”.”

— Mark Steyn

90. “Nixon’s avowedly ‘square’ White House was, in fact, less cheesy than Clinton’s Lite FM programming and more confident than the Kennedys’ culturally craven collect-the-set approach.”

— Mark Steyn

91. “The United States has the most powerful government, with the longest reach, of any nation in history. It is also the Brokest Nation in History. Resolving that contradiction is unlikely to be pretty.”

— Mark Steyn

92. “We have been shirking too long, and that’s unworthy of a great civilization. To see off the new Dark Ages will be tough and demanding. The alternative will be worse.”

— Mark Steyn

93. “If any “white supremacist” were really a “supremacist”, he wouldn’t be living in his mom’s basement.”

— Mark Steyn

94. “Contemporary politics is all about phony energy, about running around slamming doors for the sake of it-or, more to the point, opening them and tossing through a huge sack of taxpayer dollars.”

— Mark Steyn

95. “There was less private-sector business experience in Obama’s cabinet than in any administration going back a century.30.”

— Mark Steyn

96. “One reason why the developed world has a difficult job grappling with the Islamist threat is that it doesn’t take religion seriously. It condescends to it. In Europe’s wholly secularized environment, the enduring religiosity of America is not just odd, but primitive.”

— Mark Steyn

97. “The free world is shuffling into a psychological bondage whose chains are mostly of our own making.”

— Mark Steyn

98. “America has potholed roads and decrepit airports, but it builds state-of-the-art offices for regulatory bureaucrats – and their enforcers. The federal Department of Education doesn’t employ a single teacher, but it does have a SWAT team.”

— Mark Steyn

99. “Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb. The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone.”

— Mark Steyn

100. “Incidentally, over half the illegal population supposedly came to America after September 11, 2001.95 That’s to say, they broke into a country on Code Orange alert. Odd that.”

— Mark Steyn