Kimberley Strassel Quotes

Nothing for the Left, nothing the government does is ever about its superficial reason; it's only and always about expanding government power and control over you.

The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good - anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name 'leaders' for those who were once 'rulers'. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business.

Simply because the nanny-state wants to hug you doesn't mean it's not tyrannical if you don't want to be hugged.

I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens. Yes, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn't be here today. And I say without the slightest remorse, that we wouldn't be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very personal matters - who your neighbour is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit, or what language you use. We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think.

What the political left, even in democratic countries, share is the notion that knowledgeable and virtuous people like themselves have both a right and a duty to use the power of government to impose their superior knowledge and virtue on others.

What they're doing is, they're making the decisions for us. That's what this country is coming down to. They're going to make the decisions for us.

The great and the good will decide what is good for us and make sure that we get what is good for us, good and hard.

We don't want a busybody government - a boss - that butts into our lives every chance it gets to tell us how to work, how to play, where to live and on and on.

Many Americans simply don't want the pinheads in Washington or the various state capitals to be telling us how to live. But we are absolutely going in that direction. President Obama is hell-bent on imposing a bureaucracy that levels all playing fields at great expense in coin and in freedom.

I only have disdain for New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He raised taxes and has increased regulations. What else is new? He's a bully who wants to micro-manage people's lives by mandate, not persuasion.

In Europe, it appears that in the name of democracy, elites are pursuing an autocratic, centralized power, seeking economic control and social regimentation.

Personalist regimes mute factional differences the most .... Dictators usually retain the loyalty of elites through some combination of coercion, personal favors, and material rewards. Elites are frequently rotated or jailed to avoid factionalism. The military is usually a depersonalized instrument for the dictator's power, holding no sense of independent institutional identity. Divisions between so-called hard-liners and soft-liners are virtually non-existent...

The knowing minority had to impose its will on the majority, even by brute force. The great mass, the workers, are in economic slavery. They cannot accomplish their own liberation. Their minds are formed by their masters; they are incapable of understanding their true interests. It is left to the knowing minority to free the mass from the tutelage of its present masters. Only after this is done will the mass understand.

The greatest threat to our freedom is an all powerful federal government.

For in the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves.

The nanny state

The spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people.

Modernization vastly increased the power of the state. It gave the rulers new tools—the powers of indoctrination, surveillance, and repression.

There is no "slippery slope" toward loss of liberty, only a long staircase where each step down must first be tolerated by the American people and their leaders.

Witness the tragic condition of Russia. The methods of State centralization have paralyzed individual initiative and effort; the tyranny of the dictatorship has cowed the people into slavish submission and all but extinguished the fires of liberty; organized terrorism has depraved and brutalized the masses and stifled every idealistic aspiration; institutionalized murder has cheapened human life, and all sense of the dignity of man and the value of life has been eliminated; coercion at every step has made effort bitter, labor a punishment, has turned the whole of existence into a scheme of mutual deceit, and has revived the lowest and most brutal instincts of man.

Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been found that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery..

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.

Banning paper and plastic and making shoppers carry their groceries home in their mouths like dogs is just the thing to make a little tin humanist in the Obama West Wing think he's admiral of the Uzbek Navy.

The paternalism of the Conservative party is breathtaking.

The promises that globalism is the solution, the promise that government's going to make your life better if you just give up your freedoms, the promises that we know better than you on how to make your lives better, have been rejected.