Top 80 William F. Buckley Jr. Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Self-control is one of the most exhilarating of pleasures.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

Featured in: Self Control Quotes

2. “Conservatism is the politics of reality.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

3. “I won’t insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

4. “I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

5. “Nobody who’s ever been to Gulag is a pacifist.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

6. “Industry is the enemy of melancholy.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

7. “If Bach is not in Heaven, I am not going!”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

8. “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

9. “All that is good is not embodied in the law; and all that is evil is not proscribed by the law. A well-disciplined society needs few laws; but it needs strong mores.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

Featured in: Strong Quotes

10. “Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

11. “People are beginning to wish that the voters had been given breathometer tests when they voted in the present government.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

12. “I am, I fully grant, a phenomenon, but not because of any speed in composition. I asked myself the other day, “Who else, on so many issues, has been so right so much of the time?” I couldn’t think of anyone.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

13. “Why does baloney avoid the grinder?”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

14. “History is but the polemics of the victor.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

15. “I’ve always believed that conservatism is the politics of reality, and that reality ultimately asserts itself in a reasonably free society, in behalf of the conservative position.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

16. “Presley brought an excitement to singing, in part because rock and roll was greeted as his invention, but for other reasons not so widely reflected on: Elvis Presley had the most beautiful singing voice of any human being on earth.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

17. “Decent people should ignore politics, if only they could be confident that politics would ignore them.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

18. “You cannot paint the Mona Lisa by assigning one dab each to a thousand painters.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

19. “If only the left hated crime as much as they hated hate.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

20. “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

21. “A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

22. “Bobby Kennedy and Nelson Rockefeller are having a row, ostensibly over the plight of New York’s mentally retarded, a loose definition of which would include everyone in New York who voted for Bobby Kennedy or Nelson Rockefeller.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

23. “They told me if I voted for Goldwater, he would get us into a war in Vietnam. Well, I voted for Goldwater and that’s what happened.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

24. “I find it easier to believe in God than to believe Hamlet was deduced from the molecular structure of a mutton chop.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

25. “One doesn’t read Jane Austen; one re-reads Jane Austen.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

26. “The anti-marijuana campaign is a cancerous tissue of lies, undermining law enforcement, aggravating the drug problem, depriving the sick of needed help and suckering well-intentioned conservatives and countless frightened parents.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

27. “Before there was Ronald Reagan there was Barry Goldwater, and before there was Barry, there was National Review, and before there was National Review there was Bill Buckley with a spark in his mind.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

28. “Scientists are people who build the Brooklyn Bridge and then buy it.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

29. “The duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world, and the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

30. “Socialize the individual’s surplus and you socialize his spirit and creativeness...”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

31. “Knee-jerk liberals and all the certified saints of sanctified humanism are quick to condemn this great and much-maligned Transylvanian statesman.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

32. “Only government can cause inflation, preserve monopoly, and punish enterprise.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

33. “A society is not ‘free’ merely because the freedoms the people are doing away with are those they voted at the last election to do without.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

34. “Kennedy after all has lots of glamour – Gregory Peck with an atom bomb in his holster.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

35. “Marijuana is not much more difficult to obtain than beer. The reason for this is that a liquor store selling beer to a minor stands to lose its liquor license. Marijuana salesmen don’t have expensive overheads, and so are not easily punished.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

36. “A capitalist is someone who derives a substantial share of his income from his equity in producing companies. On this scale the figures are discouraging. Approximately ninety percent of the capital of this country is owned by five or less percent of the American people.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

37. “One must bear in mind that the expansion of federal activity is a form of eating for politicians.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

38. “Mr. Rockefeller is due to entertain munificently at breakfast, and make his pitch. My advice to one invited guest was: Order caviar, and then say No.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

39. “You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

40. “Boredom is the deadliest poison.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

41. “Conservatism is the tacit acknowledgement that all that is finally important in human experience is behind us; that the crucial explorations have been undertaken, and that it is given to man to know what are the great truths that emerged from them.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

42. “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

43. “The Beatles are not merely awful. I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are godawful.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

44. “We are, always, reminded of the old saw: What would happen if the Soviet Union took over the Sahara Desert? Answer: Nothing for 50 years. After that there would be a shortage of sand.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

45. “The Beatles are not merely awful. They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

46. “Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

47. “Government can’t do anything for you except in proportion as it can do something to you.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

48. “The academic community has in it the biggest concentration of alarmists, cranks and extremists this side of the giggle house.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

49. “Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common needle users, and on the buttock, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.

50. “As a businessman, Frank Lorenzo gives capitalism a bad name.”

— William F. Buckley Jr.