Pat Buchanan

On Terri Schiavo

• "Ours is a nation where a judge may not sentence Beltway sniper Lee Malvo to death, because he is too young to die, but can sentence Terri Schiavo to death, because she is too severely handicapped to live." - From his syndicated column [03/23/05]

On the decision by the United States to invade and occupy Iraq:

• "Well, I think it's something the British might say when they were driven out of Palestine, the French might say when they were driven out of Algeria. Quite simply, in this modern world, if you try to rule other peoples, even to alter them, make them democratic or force them to change their ways to conform to your own, you're going to have a serious problem with those people. They're going to fight, just like the American revolutionaries fought against the British Empire. We ought to know that. We were the first - we were the first people to rise up against an empire." - From HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher -- 2004 September 03

On abortion:

• "I don't care about the circumstances of a child's conception. You want to execute somebody in the case of rape, execute the rapist and let the unborn child live." - From the [2/24/96]

On race relations in the 1940s and 1950s:

• "There were no politics to polarize us then, to magnify every slight. The 'negroes' of Washington had their public schools, restaurants, bars, movie houses, playgrounds and churches; and we had ours." - From Right from the Beginning, Buchanan's 1988 autobiography [p. 131]

From an April 1969 memo where Buchanan urges President Richard Nixon not to visit Martin Luther King's widow on the first anniversary of King's death:

• "[this visit would] outrage many, many people who believe Dr. King was a fraud and a demagogue and perhaps worse... Others consider him the Devil incarnate. Dr. King is one of the most divisive men in contemporary history." - From [10/1/90]

On civil rights groups:

• "George Bush should have told the [NAACP convention] that black America has grown up; that the NAACP should close up shop, that its members should go home and reflect on JFK's admonition: 'Ask not what your country can do for you, but rather ask what you can do for your country.'" - From his syndicated column [7/26/88]

On the US's move to sanction :

• "Why are Americans collaborating in a U.N. conspiracy to ruin [South Africa] with sanctions?" - From his syndicated column [9/17/89]

On :

• "How, then, can the feds justify favoring sons of Hispanics over sons of white Americans who fought in World War II or Vietnam?" - From his syndicated column [1/23/95]

On :

• "...an across-the-board assault on our Anglo-American heritage." - From a speech given to the in September 1993

• "There is nothing wrong with us sitting down and arguing that issue that we are a European country." - From [11/15/92]

On Capitol Hill:

• "Israeli occupied territory" - From the St. Louis Post Dispatch [10/20/90]

On Adolf Hitler:

• "Though Hitler was indeed racist and anti-Semitic to the core, a man who without compunction could commit murder and genocide, he was also an individual of great courage, a soldier's soldier in the Great War, a political organizer of the first rank, a leader steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed oratorical powers that could awe even those who despised him...Hitler's success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path." - From a 1977 syndicated column as reported by [1/14/92]

On other religions:

• "Our culture is superior. Our culture is superior because our religion is Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free." - From a speech given to the in September 1993, as reported by an 1994 report

On homosexuals:

• "Homosexuality involves sexual acts most men consider not only immoral, but filthy. The reason public men rarely say aloud what most say privately is they are fearful of being branded 'bigots' by an intolerant liberal orthodoxy that holds, against all evidence and experience, that homosexuality is a normal, healthy lifestyle." - From a syndicated column [9/3/89]

• "Homosexuality is not a civil right. Its rise almost always is accompanied, as in the , with a decay of society and a collapse of its basic cinder block, the family." - From [3/30/92]

On women:

• "Rail as they will about 'discrimination,' women are simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism." - From a syndicated column [11/22/83]

• "The real liberators of American women were not the noise-makers, they were the automobile, the supermarket, the shopping center, the dishwasher, the washer-dryer, the freezer." - From Right from the Beginning [p. 149]

On Spanish dictator :

• "Catholic savior" - From Right from the Beginning

On running for president in 1996:

• "You just wait until 1996, then you'll see a real right-wing tyrant." - From [6/26/95]

On immigration:

• "If we had to take a million immigrants in, say , next year, or , and put them up in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?" - "This Week With David Brinkley," 1/8/91

On an article about intelligence:

• "If correct, then all our efforts and expenditures not only for 'compensatory education' but to provide an 'equal chance at the starting line' are guaranteeing that we wind up with the intelligent ones coming in first. And every study shows blacks 15 I.Q. points below whites on average. . . . If there is no refutation, then it seems to me that a lot of what we are doing in terms of integration of blacks and whites -- but even more so, poor and well-to-do -- is less likely to result in accomodation than it is in perpetual friction -- as the incapable are played consciously by government side by side with the capable." - In a memo to Richard Nixon on August 26, 1971

On the United Nations and other international organizations:

• "We believe "independence forever." We will reclaim every lost ounce of American sovereignty. We will lead this country out of the WTO, out of the IMF, and I will personally tell Kofi Annan: Your UN lease has run out; you will be moving out of the United States, and if you are not gone by year's end, I will send you ten thousand Marines to help you pack your bags." - From his Reform Party acceptance speech [8/14/00]

On the trial of Iwan Demjanjuk:

• "God help us. We are the Salem judges of our own time." - "Dividing Line." New York Post, Saturday, March 17, 1990.

On :

• "Take a hard look at Duke's portfolio of winning issues and expropriate those not in conflict with GOP principles, [such as] reverse discrimination against white folks." - From a syndicated column [2/25/89]

On :

• "Terrorism is the price you pay for empire." - [November 2004] Buchanan has criticized the "war on terror" and the reasons given by the Bush Administration that Al-Qaeda attacked the United States
• "In his inaugural address, Mr. Bush calls 9/11 the day “when freedom came under attack.” This is sophomoric. Osama did not send fanatics to ram planes into the World Trade Center because he hates the Bill of Rights. He sent the terrorists here because he hates our presence and policies in the Middle East. He did it for the same reason FLN rebels blew up cafes in Paris and Hamas suicide bombers blow up pizza parlors in Jerusalem." -- February 2005

By late 1863, Lincoln’s war to crush Southern secession was about whether “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall ... perish from the earth.” By 1917, the European war whose causes Wilson professed not to understand in 1916 had become “the war to end all wars” and to “make the world safe for democracy.”

Leaders alchemize wars begun over lesser interests into epochal struggles for universal principles because only thus can they justify demands for greater sacrifices in blood and treasure. But Bush has gone Wilson one better. He is not only going to make the world safe for democracy, he is going to make the world democratic. Where Lincoln abolished slavery in the South, Bush is going to abolish tyranny from the earth: “So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

A conservative knows not whether to laugh or weep, for Mr. Bush has just asserted a right to interfere in the internal affairs of every nation on earth. Why? Because the “survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.” But this is utterly ahistorical. The world has always been afflicted with despots. Yet America has always been free. And we have remained free by following the counsel of Washington, Jefferson, and Adams and staying out of foreign quarrels and foreign wars.

Who is feeding the president this interventionist nonsense?

~~ February 2005 - from the American Conservative magazine -