Top 70 Victor Davis Hanson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Ignorance and arrogance are a lethal combination. Nowhere do we see that more clearly among writers and performers who pontificate as historians when they know nothing about history.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

2. “California is now a valuable touchstone to the country, a warning of what not to do. Rarely has a single generation inherited so much natural wealth and bounty from the investment and hard work of those more noble now resting in our cemeteries-and squandered that gift within a generation.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

3. “History has shown that a government’s redistribution of shrinking wealth, in preference to a private sector’s creation of new sources of it, can prove more destructive than even the most deadly enemy.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

4. “Stalin and Mao killed over 80 million and did not make omelets despite the broken eggs.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

5. “We may casually talk of all sorts of new programs and ‘stimulus,’ but the vast trillion-dollar collective national debt and rising annual deficits will insidiously hamstring almost everything we plan to do.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

6. “Evil is ancient, unchanging, and with us always. The more postmodern the West becomes – affluent, leisured, nursed on moral equivalence, utopian pacifism, and multicultural relativism – the more premodern the evil among us seems to arise in nihilistic response.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

7. “The wisdom and spirit of Churchill not only saved Britain from the Third Reich but saved Western civilization from a Nazi Dark Ages when no other nation was willing to take up that defense. Churchill was the greatest military, political and spiritual leader of the 20th century.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

8. “Behind every American soldier, dozens of their countrymen tonight sleep soundly – and hundreds more in their shadow abroad will wake up alive and safe.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

9. “The easily ridiculed, so-so status quo often hides Herculean efforts by those whom we take for granted, and who, working in the shadows, guarantee civilization instead of chaos.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

10. “The president who is most slandered as Hitler will probably prove to be the most zealous advocate of democratic government abroad, the staunchest friend of beleaguered Israel, and the greatest promoter of global individual freedom in our recent memory.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

11. “Democratic citizenship requires knowledge of war – and now, in the age of weapons of mass annihilation, more than ever.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

12. “Most authoritarians do not surrender power voluntarily.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

13. “Popular culture is simply a reflection of what the majority seems to want.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

14. “Often, the pretexts for starting a war are not real shortages of land, food or fuel, but rather perceptions – like fear, honor and perceived self-interest.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

15. “I saw more stupid people in graduate school and three decades in academia than I ever did who ran 100 acres without going broke.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

16. “Often the white elite signaled their disgust of the “white privilege” of the disintegrating middle class as a means of exempting their own quite genuine white privilege of insider contacts, professional degrees, wealth, inheritance, and influence.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

17. “Any time the Western way of war can be unleashed on an enemy stupid enough to enter its arena, victory is assured.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

18. “Apologizing for our past sins may reveal character and for a time lessen anti-Americanism abroad, but if it is done without acknowledging that the sins of America are the sins of mankind, and that our remedies are so often exceptional, then it only earns transitory applause – and a more lasting contempt that we ourselves do not believe in the values we profess.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

19. “States are like people. They do not question the awful status quo until some dramatic event overturns the conventional and lax way of thinking.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

20. “Military history reminds us that those who died on behalf of democratic freedom to stop totalitarian killing were a different sort than totalitarians who died fighting against it to perpetuate killing. The sacrifice of the former meant that generations yet born might have a greater likelihood of opportunity, security, and freedom; the latter fought for a cause that would have increased the suffering of future generations.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

21. “The larger themes of the new signature progressivism were identity politics, radical environmentalism, and redistributionism.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

22. “In some sense, winning against impossible odds – when most others cannot or would not try – is the only mark of a great general.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

23. “Americans spend more money on Botox, face lifts and tummy tucks than on the age-old scourges of polio, small pox and malaria.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

24. “The United States, being a strong and wealthy society, and with unrivaled global influence, invites envy. The success of its restless culture of freedom, constitutional democracy, self-critique, secular rationalism, and open markets provokes the resentment of both weaker and less-secure theocracy and autocracy alike.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

25. “In emblematic fashion, America stands as a protector of the global system of market capitalism and constitutional government, and of the often reckless modernist culture that threatens so much of tribal and indigenous custom and protocols. That we are therefore often to be hated by the authoritarian, the statist, and the tribalist – and periodically to be challenged by those who want to diminish our power, riches, or influence – is regrettable but nevertheless conceded.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

26. “Multiculturalism is a good reminder that when standards are relative, there are no standards at all.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

27. “Westernization, coupled with globalization, has created an affluent and leisured elite that now gravitates to universities, the media, bureaucracies, and world organizations, all places where wealth is not created, but analyzed, critiqued, and lavishly spent.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

28. “A Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, John Edwards, Howard Dean, George Soros, or Al Gore looks – no, acts – like he either came out of a hairstylist’s salon or got off a Gulfstream.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

29. “General George S. Patton may have been uncouth, but he wasn’t wrong when he bellowed, “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

30. “Who we are, how we think, and the manner in which we act, ipsis factis, are considered obnoxious, dangerous, and unpalatable to many fundamentalist Muslims around the globe, who endure manifestations of our power and influence daily, from DVDs in Kabul to text-messaging ads in Yemen.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

31. “War seems to come out of nowhere, like rust that suddenly pops up on iron after a storm.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

32. “Military history is just as often the tangential story of an appeasement that fails to head off warmongering as it is of an aggressive chest-thumping that prompts conflict. The destructive military careers of Alexander the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler all would have ended earlier had any of their numerous enemies united when the odds favored them, had any listened to a Demosthenes, a Cato the Younger, or a Churchill.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

33. “In Trump’s mind, the problem with federal agencies was not just that they overreached and were weaponized, but that their folds of bureaucracy led to incompetency.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

34. “Politicians in their hubris who believe they can ignore debt or wish it away are sorely disappointed – as we see now with the plummeting approval ratings of both the administration and Congress.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

35. “For years postmodernists have lectured us that there is no truth, no absolutes, no timeless protocols worthy of reverence; Trump is their Nemesis, who reifies their theories that truth is simply a narrative whose veracity is established by the degree of power and persuasion behind it.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

36. “Given the Western ability to produce deadly weapons, its propensity to create cheap, plentiful goods, and its tradition of seeing war in pragmatic rather than ritual terms as a mechanism to advance political ends, it is no surprise that Mesoamericans, African tribes, and native North Americans all joined European forces to help kill off Aztecs, Zulus, and Lakotas.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

37. “Barack Obama, for at least the first two years after his departure, had all but destroyed the traditional role of Democrats as a federal, state, and local majority party – and in its place had paved the way for a new neosocialist ascendency.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

38. “It may be now blasphemous to concede that much of the current division in the country was deliberately whipped up by Obama. Often in mellifluous tones and with near academic authority, he accentuated racial and cultural differences.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

39. “Even in its third century, America is still the most meritocratic nation in the world.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

40. “To conclude wars decisively and achieve prewar aims, the victor must defeat, and often even humiliate militarily, an enemy and force the loser to abandon prewar behavior before offering a magnanimous peace. “Humiliate,” here, does not mean to gratuitously insult or ridicule a prostrate enemy but rather to show him that the wages of his unprovoked aggression are the end of his ability to make war on others.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

41. “The fact is, beneath the hype, Iraqis will soon appreciate American help and idealism far more than French perfidy. It is never wrong to be on the side of freedom – never.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

42. “Prewar education, reputation, influence, and rank matter little when the enemy is gaining ground and very few know how to turn him back.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

43. “Victory may now require a level of force deemed objectionable by civilized peoples, meaning that some, for justifiable reasons, may be reluctant to pursue it. But victory has not become an ossified concept altogether.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

44. “Cheap anti-Americanism will eventually have consequences.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

45. “Hillary apparently never appreciated that when she went after Trump’s sins of the flesh, it would quickly prove a losing proposition.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

46. “Almost every key indicator of the current economy – unemployment, deficits, housing, energy – argues that Obama’s reactionary all-powerful statist approach has only made things far worse.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

47. “Out of spite, McCain had flipped on his earlier support of Obamacare just to cast the deciding vote that defeated Trump’s effort to repeal and replace it.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

48. “Harry Truman, after all, in conjunction with Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, radically cut back American arms following the end of the Second World War. Johnson himself wished to dismantle the Marine Corps and felt nuclear weapons had made all such conventional arms unnecessary.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

49. “After three elections, voters finally caught on that Obama’s faults were not in the stars, but in himself. They apparently tired of the usual distractions from a dismal presidential record.”

— Victor Davis Hanson

50. “Entertainers wrongly assume that their fame, money, and influence arise from broad knowledge rather than natural talent, looks, or mastery of a narrow skill.”

— Victor Davis Hanson