Don’t Burn This Book Quotes

“Researchers at the University of Missouri had found a “gender equality paradox” when they studied 475,000 teenagers across the globe. They noted that hyperegalitarian countries such as Finland, Norway, and Sweden had a smaller percentage of female STEM graduates than countries such as Albania and Algeria, which are considered less advanced”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“If we’re going to confront reality honestly, then nothing can be off-limits. Our power structures, our political leaders, and our religious institutions all must be fair game in a free society. There’s a fine line when jokes and mockery become cruel and pointless, but this is the line comedians have toed since the beginning of time. We must relentlessly defend their ability not only to push our limits but also to occasionally trip over the line into sacrilege and controversy.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Exhibit A: I’m guessing you’re no fan of socialism, which was a founding principle of the Nazi movement. The name “Nazi” is an acronym for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, which most of today’s Democrat socialists conveniently forget. Actually, that’s an understatement. These people don’t just overlook this truth, they’ve totally rewritten history on the matter. These days, Nazism gets associated with conservatism at the drop of a hat, but historically it stems from the left. Adolf Hitler? An art-loving vegetarian who seized power by wooing voters away from Germany’s Social Democrat and communist parties. Italy’s Benito Mussolini? Raised on Karl Marx’s Das Kapital before starting his career as a left-wing journalist and, later, implementing a deadly fascist regime.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Don’t Burn This Book may not usher in world peace, balance the national debt, or improve your sex life, but while those are worthy pursuits, that wasn’t my goal. Instead, I want to champion the values that keep people safe, sane, and free.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Harvard University has chosen to make it harder for Asian applicants to be accepted into the university because they outperform their peers. So yes, systemic racism is real . . . at America’s top university.”
― Dave Rubin, Don’t Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” In other words, today’s progressives have now become the sexists and racists they’ve claimed to hate.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“This is because outward virtue signaling is separate from being a considerate, moral person. Whereas the latter is central for common decency (and is something we should all strive for), the former is just a display of faux morality. One that’s designed to offer protection from the mob ever turning on them. It’s a protection racket—a form of insurance. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Elder was right and he damn well knew it. “The biggest burden that black people have is being raised without fathers,” he declared. “A black kid raised without a dad is five times more likely to be poor and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of school, and twenty times more likely to end up in jail. When I hear people tell me about systemic racism or unconscious racism I always say ‘give me an example.’ And almost nobody can do it. I give the facts . . . and [according to left-wingers] the facts are racist.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“It’s no coincidence that social justice warriors are frequently out of shape, poorly dressed, and have messy hair, along with their overall disheveled appearance. If some dress for success, they dress for failure.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.” T”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Suddenly, out of nowhere, rationalizing Islamic terror had become a progressive position. According to progressives, it was another 2-D argument: brown people = good, white people = bad.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“I’ve reluctantly reached after years of watching my old “team” transform into a baying mob of hysterical puritans—a feral gang that sows division through identity politics and encourages societal tribes to rank themselves in a pecking order of “oppression.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Trust me, beaut fades, but dumb is forever.”
― Dave Rubin, Don’t Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Free-thinking is the new counterculture, which makes it cutting-edge and subversive, like punk rock or hip-hop in the early 1980s. It’s on the periphery where all the sexy, rebellious, and exciting stuff happens, not the mainstream center left, which has become like an R-rated movie stripped down to PG for minimum offense.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“So yes, saying “I don’t know” is a good thing. Bullshitting your way through life is not dignified and over time it can never really work. Eventually people see through it and then are very likely to second-guess everything else you say going forward.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“I’m black—not African American. That’s a term I don’t like. I was born in America and I’ve never been to Africa. It’s an absurd term. A term that Jesse Jackson crammed down the throats of the media. It’s ridiculous.”
― Dave Rubin, Don’t Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“The motto is no longer ‘I think therefore I am.’ It’s not even ‘I’m a victim therefore I am.’ It’s now, ‘I self-flagellate therefore I am,’” he says. “It’s almost a theater of the absurd. The currency is victimhood by proxy. Whoever can grovel the most is the currency of the radical left.” Don’t be like them. Be better.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“As he noted in The Daily Signal, children from fatherless homes are likelier to drop out of high school, die by suicide, have behavioral disorders, join gangs, commit crimes, and end up in prison. They are also more likely to live in poverty-stricken households. Conversely, nuclear families—whether black or white—are richer in all ways.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Thomas Sowell nailed it when he said: “No government of the left has done as much for the poor as capitalism has. Even when it comes to the redistribution of income, the left talks the talk but the free market walks the walk.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Everyone pays the same, that 18 percent, except a tiny bit more for those at the top, along with a bit of relief for those at the bottom. In a perfect world I’d do the 18 percent tax across the board, but perhaps a classical liberal is just a guilty libertarian. As it stands right now, the top 1 percent already pay 90 percent of the money generated through federal tax, while the lower 10 percent pay basically nothing—yet still we’re told the rich need to pay more. This is nothing but class warfare, which is good for votes, but bad for policy. And if the”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“I’m a free-speech absolutist. Yes, even when it comes to opinions I find abhorrent. In fact, specifically when it comes to those opinions. The only exceptions to this rule have already been specified by the Supreme Court of the United States: calling for direct violence against a person or specific group, yelling “fire” in a crowded theater (with the intent to incite iminent lawless action), and defaming somebody through libel or slander. Everything else should get a free pass, every single time. No exceptions, ever.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Segregating Americans into identity groups—the very essence of bigotry—has been fully embraced by modern progressivism, which has absolutely nothing to do with classical liberalism”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Free-thinking is the new counterculture, which makes it cutting-edge and subversive, like punk rock or hip-hop in the early 1980s.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Worse still, they implement all of these things with brute force: violence, censorship, character assassination, smear campaigns, doxing, trolling, deplatforming, and online witch hunts. Tricks that are deliberately designed to leave people down and out. Ideally, jobless and without the resources to push back.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“It’s a form of practice. Figure out who you want to be, then dress like that person. No detail is too small to overlook. If you’re at any critical point of your life, you should do everything you can to tip the scales—not in your favor, but in favor of having the right thing happen.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“That’s the incredible irony of it all: the more you admit to not knowing, the smarter you’ll actually get!”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“If one person speaks the language of conservatives and the other speaks the language of progressives, the chances that they will engage with each other on the level of facts are low.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“You might be a kid who’s scared to speak up in class, a lipstick lesbian who dares to champion the Second Amendment, or a Trump supporter who lives in the People’s Republic of California. Whatever your story, it’s all good. The left may no longer be liberal, but you’re no longer left out. 3 Think Freely or Die FREE-THINKING IS TRICKY. There isn’t a road map that delivers you to the site of a set destination. It’s actually more like being a nomad than a settler: there’s no political party for you to call a permanent home. Although this might sound scary, it’s actually incredibly liberating. See, free-thinking is fluid. Unlike our bloated political system, it’s creative and keeps your mind agile. In fact, the tribal political game and free-thinking are at complete odds with each other. One requires conformity, while the other is impossible to pigeonhole. The”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Dressing well not only can determine what energy you put into the universe, but also what you get in return.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Twice each year, take a one-week break from social media. I recommend the last week of the summer and the final week of the year—this will recharge your batteries at convenient times and restore your perspective. Then slowly reintroduce yourself to it all with fresh eyes. (If you’re feeling really adventurous, join me once a year for the month of August, when I shut off all my devices and stop reading the news entirely.”
― Dave Rubin, Don’t Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason