110+ Mark Steyn Quotes On Truth, Education And Line

Mark Steyn is a Canadian-born author, journalist, and cultural commentator. He is best known for his political and cultural commentary, as well as his books America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It and After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. He is a regular contributor to a variety of publications, including The Spectator, The Atlantic, and National Review. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Mark Steyn on leadership, truth, education.

Top 10 Mark Steyn Quotes

1. 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.
2. Big Government is the small option: it's the guarantee of smaller freedom, smaller homes, smaller cars, smaller opportunities, smaller lives.
3. 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?
4. The spirit of the age is: Ask not what your country can do for you, demand it.
5. LBJ held up Detroit as a model of what the Great Society could accomplish. He was right.
6. The Democratic Party is uniquely virulently racist and pro-slavery to a degree unseen anywhere in the English-speaking world!
7. [We] assume that social progress is like technological progress: one cannot uninvent the internal combustion engine, so how could one uninvent liberty?
8. 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?
9. Appeasement is a vote to live in the present tense, to hold the comforts of the moment.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• When you're taxing bovine flatulence emissions, there's nothing left to tax.
• Hollywood gave us far more Muslim terrorists in the Eighties and Nineties than it has since 9/11.
• To expect the government to save you is to be a bystander in your own fate.
• The most basic of conservative principles is that if you reward bad behavior you get more of it.
• America is now a land that rewards failure - at the personal, corporate, and state level.
• The long-term cost of a welfare society is the infantilization of the population.
• Long before they slump into poverty, great powers succumb to a poverty of ambition.
• Once you accept you're a child in the government nursery, why shouldn't Nanny tell you what to do?
• The law functions as formal embodiment of a moral code, not as free-standing substitute for it.
• Absolute welfare corrupts absolutely.

Mark Steyn Quotes About Life

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

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

But a society that has nothing to die for has nothing to live for . . . — Mark Steyn

The senator's actions in the hours and days after emerging from that pond tell us something ugly about Kennedy the man. That he got away with it tell us something ugly about American public life. — Mark Steyn

The United States, for its part, downgraded from low-level to complete withdrawal, much to the regret of other delegates such as the Reverend Jesse Jackson, President-for-Life of the People’s Republic of Himself. — Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn Quotes About Line

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

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

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

Mark Steyn Quotes About Care

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

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

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

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

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 a generation hence, well, as long as they can keep the checks coming till he's dead, it's fine by him. — Mark Steyn

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

Mark Steyn Quotes About Lived

We live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are children if they're serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President Clinton's Oval Office. — Mark Steyn

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

Like most people, I have no wish to live in a community organized by community organizers. — Mark Steyn

Jesse Jackson's living depends on the maintenance of an African-American victim culture — Mark Steyn

It's not that I place less value on Palestinian lives, but that Chairman Arafat and his chums in Hamas do. — Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn Quotes About Countries

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

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

If gun control bore any relation to homicide rates, Washington, DC would be the safest place in the country. — Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

If you took every single penny that Warren Buffett has, it'd pay for 4-1/2 days of the US government. This tax-the-rich won't work. The problem here is the government is way bigger than even the capacity of the rich to sustain it. The Buffett Rule would raise $3.2 billion a year, and take 514 years just to pay off Obama's 2011 budget deficit. — Mark Steyn

For Al Gore and Paul Ehrlich and Co., whatever the problem, the solution is always the same. Whether it's global cooling, global warming, or overpopulation, we need bigger government, more regulation, higher taxes, and a massive transfer of power from the citizens to some unelected self-perpetuating crisis lobby. — Mark Steyn

So there was President Obama, giving his bazillionth speech on health care, droning yet again that “now is the hour when we must seize the moment,” the same moment he’s been seizing every day of the week for the past year, only this time his genius photo-op guys thought it would look good to have him surrounded by men in white coats. — Mark Steyn

Byrd, the former Klu [sic] Klux Klan Kleagle, is taking a stand over states' rights, or his rights over State, or some such. Whatever the reason, the sight of an old Klansman blocking a little colored girl from Birmingham from getting into her office contributed to the general retro vibe that hangs around the Democratic Party these days. — Mark Steyn

The industrial powerhouse of 1950 [Detroit] is now a crime-ridden wasteland with a functioning literacy rate equivalent to West African basket-cases. — Mark Steyn

If you look at the range of Hollywood movies playing in most cities in the developing world, you'd hate the America they portray, too. — Mark Steyn

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

[To] the progressive mind, the very concept of "the enemy" is obsolescent: there are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven't yet accommodated. — Mark Steyn

If the IMF is correct (a big if), China will be the planet's No.1 economy by 2016. That means whoever's elected in November next year will be the last president of the United States to preside over the world's dominant economic power. — Mark Steyn

It is surely only a matter of time before some federal judge finds the Constitution unconstitutional. — Mark Steyn

Last month, 80,000 Americans signed on to new jobs, but 85,000 Americas signed on for Social Security disability checks. Most of these people are not 'disabled' as that term is generally understood. Rather, it's the U.S. economy that's disabled, and thus Obama incentivizes dependency. — Mark Steyn

When Cromwell instructed his portraitist to paint him 'warts and all', he meant both halves of that equation. To teach the warts alone is morbid and unhealthy. — Mark Steyn

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

In the Western world, countries that were once the crucible of freedom are slipping remorselessly into a thinly disguised serfdom in which an ever higher proportion of your assets are annexed by the state as superlandlord. Big government is where nations go to die - not in Keynes' 'long run,' but sooner than you think. — Mark Steyn

One lesson of Sept. 11 is that a government that tries to do everything is likely to do most of it badly. — Mark Steyn

Mr Hughes's current claim of "bisexuality" has the whiff of artful centrist positioning about it: bi- 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

We're on the brink of a world in which the wealthiest nations, from Canada to Norway to Japan, can barely project meaningful force to their own borders while the nickel 'n' dime basket-cases go nuclear. — Mark Steyn

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

The progressive Left can be in favor of Big Government or population control but not both. The mutual incompatibility is about to plunge Europe into societal collapse. There is no precedent in human history for economic growth on declining human capital - and that's before anyone invented unsustainable welfare systems. — Mark Steyn

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

We are the source of our problems not mysterious sinister foreigners overseas. — Mark Steyn

Our leadership class's real accomplishment is résumé padding. — Mark Steyn

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

“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

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. How do you get away from it? Improvise. — Mark Steyn

The United Auto Workers is AARP in an Edsel: It has three times as many retirees and widows as 'workers' (I use the term loosely). GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people. — Mark Steyn

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

We're told the old-school imperialists were racists, that they thought of the wogs as inferior. But, if so, they at least considered them capable of improvement. The multiculturalists are just as racist. The only difference is that they think the wogs can never reform: Good heavens, you can't expect a Muslim in Norway not to go about raping the womenfolk! Much better just to get used to it. — Mark Steyn

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

The greatest crime of welfare isn't that it's a waste of money, but that it's a waste of people. — Mark Steyn

"Moderate" Republicans such as Arnold Schwarzenegger like to boast that they're fiscal conservatives and social liberals. But the social liberalism always ends up burying the fiscal conservatism. — Mark Steyn

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

What happened to those men and women at Fort Hood had a horrible symbolism: Members of the best trained, best equipped fighting force on the planet gunned down by a guy who said a few goofy things no one took seriously. And that's the problem: America has the best troops and fiercest firepower, but no strategy for throttling the ideology that drives the enemy — in Afghanistan and in Texas. — Mark Steyn

...discussing cultural relativism with cultural relativists is like playing tennis with some guy who says, "Your ace is just a social construct. — Mark Steyn

The state of our civilization manifests itself both in the non-problems that terrify us beyond all reason - rising sea levels - and in the real problems we pay no heed to [population decline]...In reality, much of the planet will be uninhabited long before it's uninhabitable — Mark Steyn

Kafka would surely have been impressed by the twin ambitions of the modern empathetic state: the need to set up hyper-regulatory bodies preventing you from doing anything yourself, while simultaneously endowing lavish pseudo-agencies to hand out leaflets listing a 1-800 number you can dial to order more leaflets. — Mark Steyn

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

You can't uninvent things, you can only make them obsolete... Ronald Reagan understood that the surest method of neutralising any weapon is to make it obsolete. — Mark Steyn

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

Americans tote guns because they're assertive citizens, not docile subjects of a permanent governing class. They love their military because they think there's something contemptible about Europeans preening and posing as a great power when they can't even stop some nickel'n'dime Balkan genital-severers piling up hundreds of thousands of corpses on their borders. — Mark Steyn

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

Popular culture as a whole is popular, but in today's fragmented market it's a jostle of competing unpopular popular cultures. As the critic Stanley Crouch likes to say, if you make a movie and 10 million people go see it, you'll gross $100 million - and 96 per cent of the population won't have to be involved. That alone should caution anyone about reading too much into individual examples of popular culture. — Mark Steyn

At first glance, an alliance of anarchists and government might appear to be somewhat paradoxical. But the formal convergence in Oakland makes explicit the movement's aims: They're anarchists for statism, wild free-spirited youth demanding more and more total government control of every aspect of life - just so long as it respects the fundamental human right to sloth. — Mark Steyn

When the family dies, the nation follows. — Mark Steyn

The Democrats smell blood and don't want to be told that it's their own. — Mark Steyn

So-called "progressives" actively wage war on progress. . . . Ultimately, progressives are at war with mass prosperity. — Mark Steyn

[Charles] Manson wanted to start a race war. Nobody said he was leading some sort of charge about white supremacy. — Mark Steyn

The trouble with the social-democratic state is that, when government does too much, nobody else does much of anything. — Mark Steyn

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

I like Mitch Daniels on the fiscal conservative issues. You disagree with him on this idea that social issues, you takeoff the table. I do that for two reasons. I think the fiscal issues in a sense are a symptom of a lot of the deeper cultural issues in America. I don't think they are as disconnected as he thinks. — Mark Steyn

How do you 'invest in the future'? By borrowing $188 million every hour. That's what the Government of the United States is doing. It's spending one-fifth of a billion dollars it doesn't have every hour of every day of every week - all for your future! — Mark Steyn

Big government makes small citizens. — Mark Steyn

How ridiculous! You're going to have the first black president apologize for slavery? — Mark Steyn

Anything that shifts power from the individual judgment of free citizens to government is a bad thing. — Mark Steyn

When is black America going to forgive white America for slavery? — Mark Steyn

Question: How much do you have to invest in the future before you've spent it and no longer have one? — Mark Steyn

Apparently the pro-choice types who jump up and down in the street demanding that you keep your rosaries off their ovaries are entirely relaxed about the government getting its bureaucratics all over your lymphatics. — Mark Steyn

Americans and other Westerners who want their families to enjoy the blessings of life in a free society should understand that the life we've led since 1945 in the Western world is very rare in human history. Our children are unlikely to enjoy anything so placid, and may well spend their adult years in an ugly and savage world unless we decide that who and what we are is worth defending. — Mark Steyn

What can Americans learn from the Olympics spectacle? According to the IMF, China will succeed America as the dominant economic power in the course of the next presidential term, so Howard Fineman, editorial director of the Huffington Post and MSNBC mainstay, was anxious to pick up tips. 'Brits long ago lost their empire,' he tweeted, 'but overall show us how to lose global power gracefully.' So there's that. — Mark Steyn

In Europe, nothing is certain except death and welfare, and why let the former get in the way of the latter? — Mark Steyn

Jokes are one of the things that bind the culture. If you can't have jokes about everybody in society and if one group is hedged off and protected then that group can never truly be integrated. — Mark Steyn

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

After all, [female genital mutilation is] a key pillar of institutional misogyny in Islam: its entire purpose is to deny women sexual pleasure. True, a lot of us hapless western men find we deny women sexual pleasure without even trying, but we don't demand genital mutilation to guarantee it. On such slender distinctions does civilization rest. — Mark Steyn

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

When nuclear weapons were an elite club of five relatively sane world powers, the Left was convinced the planet was about to go ka-boom any minute, and the handful of us who survived would be walking in a nuclear winter wonderland. Now anyone with a few thousand bucks and an unlisted number in Islamabad in his Rolodex can get a nuke, and the Left couldn't care less. — Mark Steyn

Indeed, if I understand this global-warming business correctly, the danger is that the waters will rise and drown the whole of Massachusetts, New York City, Long Island, the California coast and a few big cities on the Great Lakes - in other words, every Democratic enclave will be wiped out leaving only the solid Republican heartland. Politically speaking, for conservatives there's no downside to global warming. — Mark Steyn

Every power grab is the new base camp for the next power grab. — Mark Steyn

Those who can do. Those who can't form a supercommittee. — Mark Steyn

Life Lessons by Mark Steyn

1. Mark Steyn's work emphasizes the importance of standing up for your beliefs and not being afraid to challenge the status quo.
2. He also encourages readers to think critically and to be open to different perspectives and ideas.
3. Lastly, Steyn's work highlights the power of using words to make a difference and to create meaningful change.