"[...] the whole purpose of a written constitution is to fix limits on government power. When judges ignore the textual limitations on government power, this is not judicial "restraint" so much as judicial abdication. [...] If changing conditions suggest that constitutional constraints should be altered, it is not for judges to make these alterations but for the people to act through the amendment process. Until that point, judges are obligated to enforce the Constitution by its terms, even if it means rejecting the work of democratic majorities and elected representatives. [...] Judges must force government officers to supply reasons for restrictions on individual liberty and, where such are lacking, be willing to strike laws down."
--- Jonathan H. Adler, writing for National Review magazine, 2016.
"For more than 100 years, progressives have sought to "transform" America, to make the political, economic, cultural, and legal foundation of our constitutional republic (our "regime" in the Aristotelian-Tocquevillian sense) more statist, more centralized, more regulatory, more "European", more secular, and less capitalist, less entrepreneurial, less "provincial", less religious, less exceptional."
---- John Fonte for National Review magazine, in a review of the book Taming Globalization by Yoo and Ku about the concerns of international law conflicting with United States sovereignty.
"You cannot go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal."--- Actor Robert Downey Jr. explaining his transformation to a more conservative thinker after dealing with a difficult time during his life.
"I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war, a direct killing - direct murder by the mother herself."
---Mother Teresa, after winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.
"Psychology has served up one excuse after another for bad behavior - our terrible childhoods, our genes, our neurotransmitters, our addictions. In each case, and often with extremely unscientific reasoning, we are offered absolution. The whole psychological enterprise [...] has had the effect of excusing poor choices and bad character. 'Virtue is [no longer] manifested in one's behavior, always so difficult and tedious to control, but in one's attitude to victims'."
---Mona Charen, for National Review, in a book review of T. Dalrymple's "Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality"
"You just have to get that word 'average' out of your vocabulary. And you have to tell yourself that you are great. And you have to believe it. [...] So just go out there and work hard."--Donald Trump, successful business and real-estate tycoon and US presidential nominee in 2016.
"My parents' priority was building character, not maintaining my happiness. They wanted to raise a child who would love God and live by the Golden Rule. So I had to learn that i was not the center of the universe. I had to learn that i was often wrong. And i had to learn the daily courage necessary to confront and overcome problems on my own, without constantly appealing to a higher earthly authority [government] for aid and comfort."
--David French, in writing for National Review Magazine
"Che Guevara was a murderer. He wasn't a hero. Also, Raul and Fidel are murderers, not legitimate authorities, not legitimate heads of state. They are there by force, not by the will of the people."
--Danilo "El Sexto" Maldaonado, Cuban citizen, artist, and young rebellious leader in Cuba, fighting for freedom from leftist oppression.
"The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left [democrats] is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive." (i.e. universities; government departments)
--Thomas Sowell
"The fate of the world depends on the United States, the fate of the United States depends on the conservative movement, and the fate of the conservative movement depends on the health and success of the Republican party."
-- Harry Jaffa (author)
"Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman were ultimately provincial, repetitive, narcissistic nihilists who could tell us nothing about how to live together and who had "emancipated" themselves from the religious, rational, and ethical traditions of the past that animated the best human behavior: their solipsistic "secular incarnation involves a denial of history and an extreme anti-nomianism."
--Laura Dassow Walls (author) and M.D. Aeschliman (Nationial Review)
