George Mikes Quotes

The right combination is between a free economy and social policy that addresses the needs of society and creates equal opportunity.

But what sets Europe apart is we insist on a social model that consists of solidarity, equal opportunity and a certain amount of redistribution.

Charities should not become the junior partner in the welfare state; whether or not they provide services funded by Government or, indeed, receive grants from Government, they must remain independent and focused on their mission.

If there is to be justice in the world, American must create it.

We cannot be the welfare state of the planet.

A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.

As the welfare state is hollowed out, a culture of compassion is replaced by a culture of violence, cruelty and disposability.

Whether we want to own up to it or not, the welfare state has done what Jim Crow, gross discrimination and poverty could not have done. It has contributed to the breakdown of the black family structure and has helped establish a set of values alien to traditional values of high moral standards, hard work and achievement.

[The Democrats] will say that the Reagan administrtion has given benefits to the rich at the expense of the poor - a term that they define broadly to include middle-income people, women, minorities, the aged, the young, farmers, steelworkers, and others.

Throughout history, politicians have used other people's property to buy themselves power. That is the primary achievement of the welfare state.

Whatever you want to call it, socialism, liberalism, this is who they are. They corrupt everything. Folks, their targets are the institutions and traditions that have given the world its morality, its virtue. The institutions and traditions which have defined freedom and liberty. That's what the left attacks.

A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.

Liberals measure compassion by counting the number of people receiving government help.

Liberals want to manage the damage with government programs to take care of those who have fallen between the cracks. Populists want to fix the cracks so that people don't fall in the first place.

In the political language of today, people who want to keep what they have earned are said to be greedy, while those who wish to take their earnings from them and give it to others (who will vote for them in return) show compassion.

Europe is often held up as a cautionary tale, a demonstration that if you try to make the economy less brutal, to take better care of your fellow citizens when they're down on their luck, you end up killing economic progress. But what European experience actually demonstrates is the opposite: social justice and progress can go hand in hand.

The effect of every sort of New Deal is to increase and prosper the criminal class. It teaches precisely what all professional criminals believe, to wit, that, it is neither virtuous nor necessary to suffer and to do without.

The welfare state is institutionalized crime - 'organized plunder,' as the French economist Frederic Bastiat called it. It systematizes what is intrinsically wrong: forcing some people to support others. The Democrats favor the indefinite expansion of the welfare state, perpetually increasing the ratio of force to freedom in society.

You might argue on utilitarian grounds that the best way for the world to work is for everybody to take care of themselves first. And people have made that argument. But I just think we would be so much better off if we could care for distant others even a little bit more.

The government should cultivate the view also among the propertyless classes of the population, those who are the most numerous and the least educated, that the state is not only an institution of necessity but also of welfare. By recognizable and direct advantages they must be led to look upon the state not as an agency devised solely for the protection of the better-situated classes of society but also as one serving their needs and interests.

We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and for justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

The problem with leftism as a vice is that everyone else is stuck with the hangover.

The free lunch is the essence of modern liberalism.

What we apparently have failed to grasp is that, in this new world in which we live, the collective hunger of great masses of people, wherever they may be, will affect our long-range welfare, just as though they were our own people.

Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began. ... What if the checks had never arrived? No doubt the blacks would have fully privatized the welfare state through continued looting. But they were paid off and the violence subsided.