Mark Steyn Quotes

The entitlement mentality so carefully cultivated by liberal academics, politicians, clergymen, and journalists continues to corrode the self-sufficiency that once defined the American character.

In several short years, Obama has fundamentally shifted the balance away from the individual and toward government, and has altered the national psyche from self-reliance to ever-growing reliance on government.

People still seem to think that they should vote themselves money. They seem to think there is stuff which they think is the government's job, when it's really the individual's job.

A lot of people have a sense-of-entitlement mentality that somebody else ought to do these things for them. People are mad at the government for not getting jobs for them. I don't understand why it's the government's responsibility.

It's not good for government to tell people that the world owes them a living and that things are free.

The more is given, the less the people will work for themselves

The great vice of democracy --- a vice which is exacting a bitter retribution from it at this moment - is that for a generation we have been busy getting ourselves on to the list of beneficiaries and removing ourselves from the list of contributors, as if somewhere there was somebody else's wealth and somebody else's effort on which we could thrive.

Not only does big government get in the way when it provides disincentives to work, it also has a profoundly negative effect on community. […] The more the government does for individuals, the more community is diminished.

We can not continue to allow this over reliance on government to replace the cornerstone institution that has made the American experience possible.

I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won't help themselves, won't lift a finger, and expect the federal government to do everything.

Personal accountability and responsibility is dying. Long live the Democrat welfare state.

We don't have entitlements as part of our family heritage. If you want nice things in life, if you want to get ahead, you have to earn it.

In their zeal to show compassion, liberal community activists are quick to offer government handouts and, in the process, convey the message that people are incapable of making it on their own.

[T]he notion that a belief in self-reliance cannot coexist with a spirit of generosity is crap. In fact, one is far less likely to find a spirit of generosity among the advocates of governmentally-required "compassion".

Anything that encourages pauperism, anything that relaxes the manly fiber and lowers self-respect, is an unmixed evil.

Nothing more guarantees the erosion of character than getting something for nothing. In the liberal welfare state, one develops an entitlement mentality. And the rhetoric of liberalism - labeling each new entitlement a 'right reinforces this sense of entitlement.' -

The more government dependents, the more likely that democracy will become a conspiracy against self-reliance.

I intend to end the something for nothing culture

The long-term cost of a welfare society is the infantilization of the population.

Our nation needs to stop doing for people what they can and should do for themselves. Self reliance means, if anyone will not work, neither should he eat.

The world doesn't owe you anything. It was here first.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Don't teach a man to fish and you feed yourself. He's a grown man, fishing's not that hard.

If one hasn't a horse, one is one's own horse.

Every form of true education trains the student in self-reliance

We should stop looking to law to provide the final answer.... Law cannot save us from ourselves.... We have to go out and try to accomplish our goals and resolve disagreements by doing what we think is right. That energy and resourcefulness, not millions of legal cubicles, is what was great about America. Let judgment and personal conviction be important again.