Quotes by Political Analysts

The university system, a gift of Western civilization to the world, was developed by the Catholic Church.

(Catholic) monks taught metallurgy, introduced new crops, copied ancient texts, preserved literacy, pioneered in technology, invented champagne, improved the European landscape, provided for wanderers of every stripe, and looked after the lost and shipwrecked.

Thomas E. Woods Jr.

There are two opposing conceptions concerning lies. The first is attributed to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who is reputed to have said, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” There is another one, attributed to US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who said: “Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.”It is clear that the Russian leadership has a preference for Lenin’s approach. Even faced with unequivocal evidence it continues to deny the facts. Apart from unfounded accusations against Georgia of genocide and the denial of its own use of cluster bombs, the war in Georgia was preceded and accompanied by open lies, misinformation (for instance, about “uncontrollable” South Ossetian militias), and active disinformation, all reminiscent of the old Soviet style.In this way Russia almost succeeded in hiding the most important fact: that this was not a “Russian-Georgian war,” but a Russian war against Georgia in Georgia. There was not a single Georgian soldier that crossed the Russian frontier at any point. The Georgian troops that went into South Ossetia did not cross international frontiers, but intervened in their own country, no different from Russian troops intervening in Chechnya. It was Russian and not Georgian troops that crossed the border of another, sovereign country, in breach of the principles of international law [230―31].

Marcel H. Van Herpen

Would you buy potato chips that listed potato by-product or potato digest as an ingredient

Michelle T. Bernard

For over 10 years I worked in the dating, sex and relationship fields, so combining everything I learned into my first fictional adventure romance was a blast and a true labor of love. After all the years I spent advising people on how to date, marry and have great sex, it was exciting to tell a very modern story of a woman in her late 30s working to get the wrong guy out of her life, just as Mr. Right comes along.

Taylor Marsh

A time of ongoing cultural revolution when the adversaries of Christianity have made plain their intent to use the state machinery to promote radical social ideologies hardly seems an opportune moment to discuss how the rights of property might be compromised. Private property is an important bulwark against the ongoing anti-Christian campaign. Although opponents of the free market will doubtless claim that they wish to interfere with the rights of property only to this or that extent, or only to bring about this or that allegedly desirable social outcome, there can be little excuse for such naiveté in our day. No Christian should want to build up an institution that he would be terrified to see in the hands of his ideological opponents.

Thomas E. Woods Jr.

Democracy is always an unfinished experiment, testing the capacity of each generation to live freedom nobly.

George Weigel

Churchmen sought to introduce rational trial procedures and sophisticated legal principles in place of the superstition-based trial by ordeal that had characterized the Germanic legal order.

Thomas E. Woods Jr.

It was Francisco de Vitoria, a Catholic priest and professor, who earned the title of father of international law.

Thomas E. Woods Jr.

The idea of formulated 'rights ... comes not from John Locke and Thomas Jefferson ... but from the canon law of the Catholic Church.

Thomas E. Woods Jr.

Their message is conveyed in that hortatory tone and declamatory voice used by politicians when starting a condition contrary to fact. People who aren't cowed don't spend a lot of time proclaiming they won't be cowed. Leaders who really have strengthened the voice of freedom don't don't need to reassure there electorates that they're committed to doing so.

William Kristol

Leo Strauss's discoveries in the history of political philosophy had the effect of liberating his students from the yoke of contemporary thought.

William Kristol

Gratitude magnifies the sweet parts of life and diminishes the painful ones.

Yuval Levin

In that instant, Gogolov feared death. He could feel himself falling through the dark void of space. He was flailing and terrified and utterly alone. He braced for impact, but it never came. He cried for mercy he would never see. He felt the searing heat and the demons ripping at his eyes and face with claws like razors. And then, in a terrifying flash of clarity, he realized it would never end.

Joel C. Rosenberg

Women are caught between feminism and the pornification of America, and men are, too. I spent my youth squatting on a pedestal, the beauty queen who couldn’t get laid. I’ve been a Relationship Consultant, phone sex diva, mistress, been fought over, lived with hunks who treated me as the trophy, then couldn’t deliver. Now I’m married, because he wouldn’t take no for an answer, and I’m grateful he didn’t. I always knew what I wanted, which is where it all begins. I can help others get theirs, too.” - Taylor Marsh

Taylor Marsh

We should, however, not forget that ethnic cleansing, especially of nonwhite Muslim peoples, has old historical roots in Russia. John Dunlop, for instance, reminds us that “in May 1856, Count Kiselev, minister of state domains, informed officials in the Crimea that Alexander [tsar Alexander II] was interested in ‘cleansing’ (Kiselev used the verb oshishchat’) Crimea of as many Tatars as possible.” That the tsarist empire was interested in annexing foreign lands, but not in annexing foreign peoples, was expressed by the famous remark of a tsarist minister that “Russia needs Armenia, but she has no need of Armenians.” [192]

Marcel H. Van Herpen

I have come to call this shadow government the Deep State...a hybrid association of key elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States with only limited reference to the consent of the governed as normally expressed through elections

Mike Lofgren

Trust remains the coin of the realm in politics. A President who is trusted, by the people, by the congress, by the press, by foreign countries, is a President who can get a lot of good things done.

David Gergen

The Possibility of somebody emerging as a nuclear power or events happening that surprise us on the nuclear stage is still a possibility. It always will be because there's an awful lot going behind the scenes. Our intelligence just has to get better on the score. -Peter Goss.

Joel C. Rosenberg

I thought I was getting away from politics for a while. But I now realise that the vuvuzela is to these World Cup blogs what Julius Malema is to my politics columns: a noisy, but sadly unavoidable irritant. With both Malema and the vuvuzela, their importance is far overstated. Malema: South Africa's Robert Mugabe? I think not. The vuvuzela: an archetypal symbol of 'African culture?' For African civilisation's sake, I seriously hope not.Both are getting far too much airtime than they deserve. Both have thrust themselves on to the world stage through a combination of hot air and raucous bluster. Both amuse and enervate in roughly equal measure. And both are equally harmless in and of themselves — though in Malema's case, it is the political tendency that he represents, and the right-wing interests that lie behind his diatribes that is dangerous. With the vuvu I doubt if there are such nefarious interests behind the scenes; it may upset the delicate ears of the middle classes, both here and at the BBC, but I suspect that South Africa's democracy will not be imperilled by a mass-produced plastic horn.

Richard Calland

The possibility of somebody emerging as a nuclear power or events happening that surprise us on the nuclear age is still a possibility. It always will be because there's an awful lot going on behind the scenes. Our intelligence just has to get better on that score. Peter Goss

Joel C. Rosenberg

Homo voluntatis cannot explain why some things that can be done should not be done.

George Weigel

Freedom is the great organizing principle of a life lived in a truly human way.

George Weigel

The Kremlin has made a habit of accusing others of crimes of which it has been accused of itself [228]

Marcel H. Van Herpen

On August 7, 2013, on the evening of the fifth anniversary of the war, Georgian President Mikheil Saakasvili, in a prerecorded interview on Georgia’s Rustavi-2 TV, told that he had met Putin in Moscow in February 2008 at an informal summit of the CIS. During the summit he told Putin that he was ready to say no to NATO in exchange for Russian help with the reintegration of the two breakaway territories. Saakashvili claimed “that ‘Putin did not even think for a minute” about his proposal. “[Putin] smiled and said, ‘We do not exchange your territories for your geopolitical orientation... And it meant ‘we will chop off your territories anyway.’”Saakashvili asked him to talk about the growing tensions along the borders with South Ossetia, saying, “It could not be worse than now.” “That’s when he [Putin] looked at me and said: ‘And here you are very wrong. You will see that very soon it will be much, much, much worse.’” [234]

Marcel H. Van Herpen

On September 11, 2008, during a meeting of the Valdai Club with Vladimir Putin in Sochi, Carrère d’Encausse asked Putin if he would respond positively to Kokoity’s demand for integration of South Ossetia into the Russian Federation. She wrote: “Vladimir Putin answered with the greatest firmness that such a hypothesis was excluded. He explained that if Russia in this specific case was unable to ignore the will of the Ossetian people to be independent, it was firm regarding the principles of respecting the inviolability of existing frontiers. This principle, according to him, applied without exception to the Russian Federation which could not, therefore, welcome into its midst a nation or territory that so desired.”Putin’s double-talk (he is speaking about the “inviolability of existing frontiers” just after having changed the frontiers of Georgia by brutal force) brings her to the — naive — conclusion that “the blunt refusal that was opposed to the Ossetian demand for integration into Russia makes the Russian position clear: the August intervention in Georgia... could lead to a settlement of a conflict between Georgia and its separatist minorities, [but] in no case to a dossier that was of interest to Russia.” [237]

Marcel H. Van Herpen

Father Roger Boscovich is often credited as the father of modern atomic theory.

Thomas E. Woods Jr.

Father Nicholas Steno, is often identified as the father of geology.

Thomas E. Woods Jr.

The first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a free falling body was Father Giambattista Riccioli.

Thomas E. Woods Jr.

The exaltation of human reason and its capabilities, a commitment to rigorous and rational debate, a promotion of intellectual inquiry and scholarly exchange--all sponsored by the Church--provided the framework for the Scientific Revolution.

Thomas E. Woods Jr.

Thirty-five craters on the moon are named for Jesuit scientists and mathematicians.

Thomas E. Woods Jr.

The father of Egyptology was Father Athanasius Kircher.

Thomas E. Woods Jr.

Jesuits so dominated the study of earthquakes that seismology became known as 'the Jesuit Science.

Thomas E. Woods Jr.

Father Roger Boscovich is often credited as the father of modern atomic theory.

Thomas E. Woods Jr.

Father Nicholas Steno, is often identified as the father of geology.

Thomas E. Woods Jr.

The first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a free falling body was Father Giambattista Riccioli.

Thomas E. Woods Jr.

Thirty-five craters on the moon are named for Jesuit scientists and mathematicians.

Thomas E. Woods Jr.

The father of Egyptology was Father Athanasius Kircher.

Thomas E. Woods Jr.

Jesuits so dominated the study of earthquakes that seismology became known as 'the Jesuit Science.

Thomas E. Woods Jr.

Normalization takes place not because there is Western-ideology that normalizes third-world texts in any special way (other than the usual play with exoticism) but because this academic seeks to domesticate everything, even Marx.

Aijaz Ahmad