The Tyranny of Clichés Quotes

“Hence the great irony: Hayek, one of the greatest champions of individual liberty and economic freedom the world has ever known, believed that knowledge was communal. Dewey, the champion of socialism and collectivism, believed that knowledge was individual. Hayek's is a philosophy that treats individuals as the best judges of their own self-interests, which in turn yield staggering communal cooperation. Dewey's was the philosophy of a giant, Monty Pythonesque crowd shouting on cue: "We're All Individuals!”
― Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas

“social gospel minister Walter Rauschenbusch proclaimed that if God couldn’t be a liberal progressive then we needed a new god entirely.”
― Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas

“Rousseauian”
― Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas

“For it is very certain that in general the most powerful encouragement that can be given to industry of every kind, is to let it alone, and not to meddle with it.”
― Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas

“The French Enlightenment was a lot like the Star Wars franchise: It started great; it just evolved into disaster over time, as the characters became more and more unbelievable”
― Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas

“An ideology, at the most fundamental level, is simply a checklist of ideas you have about the world. Having an ideology doesn’t mean you’ve been brainwashed, it means you’ve come to conclusions about how the world works at some basic level.”
― Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas

“For generations, the Left has assumed that history marches with them: Get out of the way, or be crushed.”
― Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas

“There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. Here”
― Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas

“Doctors make no such exceptions to the Hippocratic Oath—save, of course, when it comes to abortion—and only then when another dogmatic obsession trumps their oath. Alas,”
― Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas

“Head Start, among the holiest of social programs, has never worked, and each time this unwelcome fact presents itself it is greeted as proof that the program simply requires more money.”
― Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas

“That’s why liberals are constantly discovering new crises that require more government solutions.”
― Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas

“whenever liberalism goes off the tracks and turns into something bad or despotic, it’s because real liberals have abandoned the project. The”
― Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas

“Hayek, more than anyone else, illuminated the knowledge problem. Simply put: No one person can ever know enough. Planners who think they can process all of the data from disparate sources across vast expanses of geography and culture are, quite simply, educated fools.”
― Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas

“Taken on its own terms, pragmatism’s folly is that it separates intelligence from wisdom. Its greatest sins are arrogance and deceit, including self-deceit. It is arrogant because it assumes the individual—particularly the expert—can know everything he needs to know without reference to received wisdom,”
― Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas

“Despite the fact that the New Deal was a failure, it remains the gold standard in liberal policy making.”
― Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas

“Often, what we think are the facts of the past are in reality simply reflections of what we want to believe about the present.”
― Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas