A Torch Kept Lit Quotes

“People die, God endures.”
― William F. Buckley, Jr., A Torch Kept Lit: Great Lives of the Twentieth Century

“What did Miss Rand in was her anxiety to theologize her beliefs. She was an eloquent and persuasive antistatist, and if only she had left it at that—but no, she had to declare that God did not exist, that altruism was despicable, that only self-interest is good and noble. She risked, in fact, giving to capitalism that bad name that its enemies have done so well in giving it; and that is a pity.”
― William F. Buckley Jr., A Torch Kept Lit: Great Lives of the Twentieth Century

“But how reassuring it was for us, you remember, every now and then (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”), to vibrate to the music of the very heartstrings of the Leader of the Free World who, to qualify convincingly as such, had after all to feel a total commitment to the Free World.”
― William F. Buckley Jr., A Torch Kept Lit: Great Lives of the Twentieth Century

“He was everything. The soldier who loved poetry. The historian who loved to paint. The diplomat who thrived on indiscretion. The patriot with international vision. The orderly man given to electric spontaneities.
(on Winston Churchill)”
― William F. Buckley Jr., A Torch Kept Lit: Great Lives of the Twentieth Century

“There is a man who has won the decathlon of human existence.”*”
― William F. Buckley Jr., A Torch Kept Lit: Great Lives of the Twentieth Century

“To Buckley, she embodied the worst of what in subsequent decades would be called political correctness: the mindless application to every issue of a platitudinous egalitarianism whose practical effect invariably is to expand the reach of totalitarianism.”
― William F. Buckley Jr., A Torch Kept Lit: Great Lives of the Twentieth Century

“In 1964 the fear & loathing of Barry Goldwater was startling. Martin Luther King, Jr., detected “dangerous signs of Hitlerism in the Goldwater campaign.” Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress, warned that “a Jewish vote for Goldwater is a vote for Jewish suicide.” And George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO, saw power falling into “the hands of union-hating extremists, racial bigots, woolly-minded seekers after visions of times long past.” On Election Day Goldwater suffered a devastating defeat, winning only 41 electoral votes. It was the judgment of the establishment that Goldwater’s critique of American liberalism had been given its final exposure on the national political scene. Conservatives could now go back to their little lairs and sing to themselves their songs of nostalgia and fancy, and maybe gather together every few years to hold testimonial dinners in honor of Barry Goldwater, repatriated by Lyndon Johnson to the parched earth of Phoenix, where dwell only millionaires seeking dry air to breathe and the Indians Barry Goldwater could now resume photographing. But then of course 16 years later the world was made to stand on its head when Ronald Reagan was swept into office on a platform indistinguishable from what Barry had been preaching. During”
― William F. Buckley Jr., A Torch Kept Lit: Great Lives of the Twentieth Century

“Mr. Churchill had struggled to diminish totalitarian rule in Europe, which, however, increased. He fought to save the empire, which dissolved. He fought socialism, which prevailed. He struggled to defeat Hitler—and he won. It is not, I think, the significance of that victory, mighty and glorious though it was, that causes the name of Churchill to make the blood run a little faster. He later spoke diffidently about his role in the war, saying that the lion was the people of England, that he had served merely to provide the roar. But it is the roar that we hear, when we pronounce his name. WFB”
― William F. Buckley Jr., A Torch Kept Lit: Great Lives of the Twentieth Century

“If he was, somehow at the margin deficient, it was because the country did not rise to ask of him the performance of a thunderbolt. He gave what he was asked to give. And he leaves us (or “will leave”) if not exactly bereft, lonely; lonely for the quintessential American. END.”
― William F. Buckley Jr., A Torch Kept Lit: Great Lives of the Twentieth Century

“Dr. King’s flouting of the law does not justify the flouting by others of the law, but it is a terrifying thought that, most likely, the cretin who leveled his rifle on the head of Martin Luther King, may have absorbed the talk, so freely available, about the supremacy of the individual conscience, such talk as Martin Luther King, God rest his soul, had so widely, and so indiscriminately, made.”
― William F. Buckley Jr., A Torch Kept Lit: Great Lives of the Twentieth Century

“the genius of Churchill was his union of affinities of the heart and of the mind, the total fusion of animal and spiritual energy”—but”
― William F. Buckley Jr., A Torch Kept Lit: Great Lives of the Twentieth Century

“There is no greater paradox in the cosmos,” the deceased had written, “than the apparent contradiction of our helplessness (‘without me, you can do nothing’) alongside God’s ‘helplessness.’ Oh, I know, God is all-powerful, and so on; but he cannot undo what he has done, and what he once did was to make men free. This means that he ‘needs’ us in order to get us to Heaven as his lovers, and in order to do his will in the world. All we have to do in order to frustrate those wishes—to render God ‘helpless’—is to say No. But God is not helpless, really, because he has mercy—himself. And what mercy does is convert, change our hearts. Which God never stops trying to do until we are dead. This means continued suffering for him, which is what Christ is all about.” Young”
― William F. Buckley Jr., A Torch Kept Lit: Great Lives of the Twentieth Century

“He told us that most of our civic problems were problems brought on or exacerbated by government, not problems that could be solved by government. That, of course, is enduringly true. Only government can cause inflation, preserve monopoly, and punish enterprise.”
― William F. Buckley Jr., A Torch Kept Lit: Great Lives of the Twentieth Century

“It is widely known that whenever Senator Johnson feels the urge to act the statesman at the cost of a little political capital,” WFB wrote in June 1958, “he lies down until he gets over it.”
― William F. Buckley Jr., A Torch Kept Lit: Great Lives of the Twentieth Century