The Undocumented Mark Steyn Quotes

“It is a basic rule of life that if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it.”
― Mark Steyn, The Undocumented Mark Steyn

“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, The Undocumented Mark Steyn

“The most consequential act of state ownership in the twentieth-century western world was not the nationalization of airlines or the nationalization of railways or the nationalization of health care, but the nationalization of the family.”
― Mark Steyn, The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don't Say You Weren't Warned

“In Europe, where dependency, decadence, and demographic decline are extinguishing some of the oldest nations on earth, a successor population is already in place in the restive Muslim housing projects.”
― Mark Steyn, The Undocumented Mark Steyn

“Universities are no longer institutions of inquiry but 'safe spaces' where delicate flowers of diversity of race, sex, orientation, 'gender fluidity,' and everything else except diversity of thought have to be protected from exposure to any unsafe ideas.”
― Mark Steyn, The Undocumented Mark Steyn

“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, The Undocumented Mark Steyn

“Applied globally, political correctness obliges us to forswear sovereignty.”
― Mark Steyn, The Undocumented Mark Steyn

“Demographically and psychologically, Europeans have chosen to commit societal suicide, and their principal heir and beneficiary will be Islam.”
― Mark Steyn, The Undocumented Mark Steyn

“When the desirable jobs are spending other people's money, reporting on spending other people's money and lobbying to spend other people's money then you know that the society is f***ed.”
― Mark Steyn, The Undocumented Mark Steyn

“Multiculturalism is really a suicide cult conceived by the western elites not to celebrate all cultures, but to deny their own. And that's particularly unworthy of the British, whose language, culture, and law have been the single greatest force for good in this world.”
― Mark Steyn, The Undocumented Mark Steyn

“I saw a fellow in a Don't Tread on Me T-shirt the other day. He was at LaGuardia and he was being trod all over, by the obergropinfuhrers of the TSA, who had decided to subject him to one of their enhanced pat-downs. There are few sights more dismal than that of a law-abiding citizen having his genitalia pawed by state commissars, but having them pawed while wearing a Don't Tread on Me T-shirt is certainly one of them.”
― Mark Steyn, The Undocumented Mark Steyn

“the nationalization of the family proceeds apace, and America is as well advanced on that path as anywhere else. “The west has nationalized families over the last 60 years,” writes Vaidyanathan. “Old age, ill health, single motherhood—everything is the responsibility of the state.”
― Mark Steyn, The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don't Say You Weren't Warned

“Reagan's was a full, varied American life, of which the presidency was the mere culmination.

'The Great Communicator' was effective because what he was communicating was self-evident to all but our decayed elites: 'We are a nation that has a government--not the other way around.' [from Reagan's inaugural speech]”
― Mark Steyn, The Undocumented Mark Steyn

“Free speech and a dynamic, innovative society are intimately connected: a culture that can't bear a dissenting word on race or religion or gender fluidity or carbon offsets is a society that will cease to innovate, and then stagnate, and then decline, very fast.

As American universities, British playwrights, and Australian judges once understood, the 'safe space' is where cultures go to die.”
― Mark Steyn, The Undocumented Mark Steyn

“I'm opposed to the notion of official ideology--not just fascism, Communism, Baathism, but the fluffier ones, too, like 'multiculturalism' and 'climate change' and 'marriage equality.' Because the more topics you rule out of discussion--immigration, Islam, 'gender fluidity'--the more you delegitimize the political system.”
― Mark Steyn, The Undocumented Mark Steyn

“For a century, Edison's light bulb was regarded as a beacon of American genius; then it became a 'climate criminal." That transformation is American decline in a nutshell.”
― Mark Steyn, The Undocumented Mark Steyn

“It's an Irish Republican rebel ballad from the 1840s. The reason I know is because I was once in a bar in Liverpool and a couple of lads started singing it and a couple others objected and a fight broke out. As a loyal subject of the Crown, I was on the side of the objectors. We eventually prevailed, but, even if we hadn't, 'A Nation Once Again' is a fine song to get your head kicked into, at least when compared to 'Believe' by Cher, which would rank pretty high on the list of numbers I'd least like to be listening to as my eye's gouged out and I fall into a coma, although it would be a merciful release.”
― Mark Steyn, The Undocumented Mark Steyn

“No one likes to think of himself as a coward. People prefer to think they end up yielding to what the terrorists demand, not because it's safer or more convenient, but because it's the right thing..Successful terrorism persuades the terrorized that if they do terror's bidding, it's not because they're terrified but because they're socially concerned.' [George Jonas]

This is true. Resisting terror is exhausting. It's easier to appease it, but, for the sake of your self-esteem, you have to tell yourself you're appeasing is in the cause of some or other variant of 'social justice'.”
― Mark Steyn, The Undocumented Mark Steyn

“...the roots of ISIS do not lie in the actions America took in 2003. Bush made mistakes in Iraq, and left a ramshackle state that functioned less badly than any of its neighbors. Obama walked away, pulled out a cigarette, tossed the match over his shoulder, and ignited a fuse that, from Damascus to Baghdad to Amman and beyond, will blow up the entire Middle East.”
― Mark Steyn, The Undocumented Mark Steyn

“The British accomplished much with little; at the height of empire, an insignificant number of Anglo-Celts controlled the entire Indian subcontinent. A confident culture can dominate far larger numbers of people, as England did for much of modern history. By contrast, in an era of Massively Applied Desultoriness, we spend a fortune going to war with one hand tied behind our back....So on we stagger, with Cold War institutions, transnational sensibilities, politically correct solicitousness, fraudulent preening pseudo-nation building, expensive gizmos, little will, and no war aims...but real American lives.”
― Mark Steyn, The Undocumented Mark Steyn

“When you're responsible for half the planet's military spending, and 80 percent of its military R&D, certain things can be said with confidence: No one is going to get into a nuclear war with the United States, or a large-scale tank battle, or even a dogfight. You're the Microsoft, the Standard Oil of conventional warfare: Were they interested in competing in this field, second-tier military powers would probably have filed an antitrust suit with the Department of Justice by now. When you're the only guy in town with a tennis racket, don't be surprised if no one wants to join you on center court--or that provocateurs look for other fields on which to play. If you've got uniformed infantryman and tanks and battleships and jet fighters, you're too weak to take on the hyperpower. But, if you've got illiterate goatherds with string and hacksaws and fertilizer, you can tie him down for a decade. An IED is an "improvised" explosive device. Can we still improvise? Or does the planet's most lavishly funded military assume it has the luxury of declining to adapt to the world it's living in?”
― Mark Steyn, The Undocumented Mark Steyn

“At a certain level, credible deterrence depends on a credible enemy. The Soviet Union disintegrated, but the surviving superpower's instinct to de-escalate intensified: In Kirkuk as in Kandahar, every Lilliputian warlord quickly grasped that you could provoke the infidel Gulliver with relative impunity. Mutually assured destruction had curdled into Massively Applied Desultoriness.

Clearly, if one nation is responsible for near half the world's military budget, a lot of others aren't pulling their weight. The Pentagon outspends the Chinese, British, French, Russian, Japanese, German, Saudi, Indian, Italian, South Korean, Brazilian, Canadian, Australian, Spanish, Turkish, and Israeli militaries combined. So why doesn't it feel like that?

Well, for exactly that reason: If you outspend every serious rival combined, you're obviously something other than the soldiery of a conventional nation state. But what exactly? The geopolitical sugar daddy is so busy picking up the tab for the global order he's lost all sense of national interest.”
― Mark Steyn, The Undocumented Mark Steyn

“In 1950, America had a unique dominance of the "free world" and it could afford to be generous, so it was: We had more money than we knew what to do with, so we absolved our allies of paying for their own security. Thanks to American defense welfare, NATO is a military alliance made up of allies that no longer have militaries.

In the Cold War, that had a kind of logic: Europe was the designated battlefield, so, whether or not they had any tanks, they had, very literally, skin in the game. But the Cold War ended and NATO lingered on, evolving into a global Super Friends made up of folks who aren't Super and don't like each other terribly much.”
― Mark Steyn, The Undocumented Mark Steyn

“Every four years, the Republican Party pines for another Reagan. But Ronald Reagan, Governor of California for eight years, couldn't get elected in today's not-so-Golden State. Jerry Brown, Governor Moonbeam back in the Seventies, now presides as Governor Twilight, lead vampire of a malign alliance of unionized bureaucrats and a swollen dependency class that maintains them in office at the expense of a remorselessly shrinking productive class. As the nation's demographic profile trends ever more Californian perhaps Norquist's predictions of naturally conservative Hispanics pining for a new Coolidge will come to fruition. Or perhaps Bob Beckel's more crudely determinative analysis will prove correct--that, in a multicultural society, jostling identity groups will stick with the party of ethnocultural spoils.”
― Mark Steyn, The Undocumented Mark Steyn

“The right to evaluate risk for oneself is part of what it means to be a functioning human being.”
― Mark Steyn, The Undocumented Mark Steyn

“If I've sounded a wee bit overwrought in recent columns, it's because America is seizing up before our eyes. And I'm a little bewildered by how many Americans can't see it. I see that chap at LaGuardia with Don't Tread on Me on his chest and government bureaucrats in his pants. And I wonder if America's exceptional attitudinal swagger isn't providing a discreet cover for the withering of liberty. Sometimes an in-your-face attitude blinds you to what's going on under your nose.”
― Mark Steyn, The Undocumented Mark Steyn

“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, The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don't Say You Weren't Warned