This Week In Quotes: Oct 14 – Oct 20

21 Oct, 2011 by John Hawkins

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In New York, marchers chanted, “This is what democracy looks like,” but, actually, this isn’t what democracy looks like. This is what freedom of speech looks like. Democracy looks a lot more boring. Democracy requires institutions, elections, political parties, rules, laws, a judiciary, and many unglamorous, time-consuming activities, none of which are nearly as much fun as camping out in front of St. Paul’s cathedral or chanting slogans on the Rue St. Martin in Paris. — Anne Applebaum

Can the test-score gap be closed? With the Hispanic illegitimacy rate at 51 percent and the black rate having risen to 71 percent, how can their children conceivably arrive at school ready to compete? Should this continue for three decades, what will it mean for America if Asians and whites occupy the knowledge-industry jobs, while scores of millions of black and Hispanic workers are relegated to low-paying service-sector jobs? Will that make for social tranquility? — Pat Buchanan

The worst thing about Occupy Wall Street is that it’s ruining a good cause: hating Wall Street. Just when opposing Wall Street was gaining momentum, these brain-dead zombies are forcing us to choose between thieving bankers and them. — Ann Coulter

Obviously everybody is saying, they need to kind of clarify, they need policy issues — ‘this is what we want’ as opposed to…. The other thing it needs, and I don’t want this to come out the wrong way. If we think — not needs but will happen — if you think back to the late ’60s, what is the most stirring image of all of the rebellion that happened. What do we remember? Kent State. Now, I’m not saying somebody has to get killed. What will happen, there will be a climax moment of class warfare somehow played out on screen that I think will — the same way ‘9-9-9’, if you will, kind of simplifies a message — that articulates this clash. So, both the real clarification in terms of policy and unfortunately some imagery says to America, and I think those are the two things… — Donnie Deutsch

I think Mormons are good, moral people but they’re not part of Christianity. But what’s been interesting… is since I made those comments, the left has been pretty kind to me. It’s been the conservatives who have been after me with a meat cleaver. — Robert Jeffress

It’s the usual Socialist fiscal math of “1 + 1 = You’re paying, so who cares. — Rachel Marsden

My last word here out in the hallway just outside of [Lawrence O’Donnell’s] studio is that the police need to join us. In the same way the Egyptian army joined the people in Freedom Square there in Cairo. This is my appeal to the New York Police Department, the police departments all over the country. You are working class people. You’re not paid enough. You have the most dangerous job in the country, and these rich bastards on Wall Street they have ruined your 401(k)s, your pension funds, your future, your children’s future. Money that should be going to having better law enforcement has gone to needless wars in other lands. So, my appeal to the police is you are us and we are you, and join us. It’s fun. We’ll even let you beat on a bongo drum. That’s my last word. Thank you. — Michael Moore

Our future would certainly be brighter if the economy resumed strong growth, but that wouldn’t automatically ensure higher living standards. A society generates those through productivity — increases in efficiency, technology or business organization that lower costs or enable firms to pay higher wages. Without higher productivity, broad living standards won’t rise. But even with it, the young may not enjoy gains. — Robert Samuelson

The conservatives always say to me, would I, why don’t I just write a check for more taxes. … Well, no, I won’t give my money to war machine and to other things, but if it will help the education and the health care for people who are locked out, of course I want to pay more taxes. — Russell Simmons

No society ever thrived because it had a large and growing class of parasites living off those who produce. — Thomas Sowell

The problem in Iraq and Afghanistan is not that we are spending insufficient money, but that so much of that money has been utterly wasted. Dominant powers often wind up with thankless tasks, but the trick is to keep it within budget: London administered the vast sprawling fractious tribal dump of Sudan with about 200 British civil servants for what, with hindsight, was the least-worst two-thirds of a century in that country’s existence. These days I doubt 200 civil servants would be enough for the average branch office of the Federal Department of Community Organizer Grant Applications. Abroad as at home, the United States urgently needs to start learning how to do more with less. — Mark Steyn

At the “Occupy” demonstrations, not-so-young college students are demanding that their tuition debt be forgiven. In Egypt, half the population lives in poverty; the country imports more wheat than any other nation on the planet, and the funds to do that will dry up in a couple months’ time. They’re worrying about starvation, not how to fund half a decade of Whatever Studies at Complacency U. One sympathizes. When college tuition is $50,000 a year, you can’t “work your way through college” — because, after all, an 18-year-old who can earn 50-grand a year wouldn’t need to go to college, would he? Nevertheless, his situation is not the same as some guy halfway up the Nile living on $2 a day: One is a crisis of the economy, the other is a crisis of decadence. And, generally, the former are far easier to solve. — Mark Steyn

Beneath the allegedly young idealism are very cobwebbed assumptions about societal permanence. The agitators for “American Autumn” think that such demands are reasonable for no other reason than that they happen to have been born in America, and expectations that no other society in human history has ever expected are just part of their birthright. But a society can live on the accumulated capital of a glorious inheritance only for so long. And, in that sense, this bloodless, insipid revolution is just a somewhat smellier front for the sclerotic status quo. — Mark Steyn

I’m going for the hick vote here. I just want you to know. Maybe we could start wearing stickers that say ‘Hicks for Elizabeth’ — could we do that? — Elizabeth Warren