RWN’s Favorite Quotes From Rush Limbaugh’s The Way Things Ought To Be

“(C)ompassion is defined not by how many people are on the government dole but by how many people no longer need government assistance.” — P.2

“(T)he USA is the greatest nation, not because Americans are inherently superior but because its government was founded on principles which seek to allow maximum individual achievement.” — P.3

“Folks, you will never be your best doing it someone else’s way, particularly if you utilize talent as opposed to learned skills. I am convinced that you have absolutely no idea how good you can be — at whatever you want to do. You don’t know because you are trapped in situations where you either can’t or are afraid to be yourself.” — P.20

“The liberals, you see, do not want to confront conservative ideas; they just attack conservatives as a group, and particularly their motives. If you believe what they say about us, you would think that if someone like Bill Bennett, or Jack Kemp, or myself were driving through South Central Los Angeles and looking at the slums and poverty, we would go: Oh, man, this is great — they’ve got nothing, so that means we get more. It’s simply preposterous. We all want to live in a great country. And for the country to fulfill its potential, you need individuals to be the best they can be — not the government taking care of people.” — P.27

“What about feeling sorry for those…who pay the taxes? Those are the people NO ONE ever feels sorry for. They are asked to give and give until they have no more to give. And when they say “Enough!” they are called selfish.” — P.47

“The world’s biggest problem is the unequal distribution of capitalism. If there were capitalism everywhere, you wouldn’t have food shortages.” — P.47

“I’m pro-life and proud of it. I’m not opposed to abortion because I want to force people to do things my way, or because I believe I posses the ultimate truth. I recognize that other people have wrestled with this issue and have sincere convictions that differ from mine. I just wish that more of the people who support abortion would see their way clear to recognizing that my views are sincere as well. Suffice it to say that to me the issue is simple. I believe that life begins at conception and that killing that human life is justifiable only when it’s necessary to save the mother’s life.” — P.50

“When the French RU-486 pill was developed in the early 1980s, it wasn’t just the pro-life people who initially opposed it. Many abortion activists also had qualms about it or even opposed it. Why? Because it took abortion out of the clinics where all the money was made and brought it into the privacy of a woman’s bathroom. It was only when they realized that blocking the French pill would be contrary to their image that they switched sides.” — P.55

“By government giveaway programs, individuals are often hurt far more than they are helped. The recipients of these programs become dependent on the government and their dignity is destroyed. Is it compassionate to enslave more and more people by making them a part of the government dependency cycle? I think compassion should be measured by how many people no longer need it. Helping people to become self-sufficient is much more compassionate than drugging them with the narcotic of welfare.” — P.72-73

“I’m not opposed to the protection of animals. But the best way to do that is to make sure some human being owns them.” — P.107

“One of my fabulous routines from the Rush to Excellence concerts concerns a San Francisco men’s club which lost its battle to exclude women from membership. The courts ruled that they had to admit women on the basis that businesswomen were being unfairly denied opportunities to do business. This is specious. If some businessman wanted to discuss a deal with a woman, all he had to do was invite her to lunch or dinner with him. How much business did women think they were going to get as a result of forcing their way in? Anyway, after one year, the female members demanded their own exercise room. They were probably tired of being ogled by a bunch of slobbering men while they pumped iron and rode LifeCycles clad in leotards and spandex. The men agreed and with grace and humanity, offered to install the first three exercise machines in the women’s new workout room. The ladies were thrilled. When they arrived on that first exciting day they found to their stunned amazement, a washing machine, an ironing board, and a vacuum cleaner. Heh, heh, heh.” — P.143

“Let me leave you with a thought that most honestly summarizes my sentiments: I love the women’s movement…especially when I am walking behind it.” — P.145

“Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines spewed forth more than a thousand times the amount of ozone-depleting chemicals in one eruption than all the fluorocarbons manufactured by wicked, diabolical, and insensitive corporations in history.” — P.154-155

“If the owl can’t adapt to the superiority of humans, screw it…Now, I know that sounded heartless. But my argument follows simple, pure logic. If a spotted owl can’t adapt, does the earth really need that particular species so much that hardship to human beings is worth enduring in the process of saving it? Thousands of species that roamed the earth are now extinct. Do you hear anyone making the case that the earth would be better off if dinosaurs were still roaming the planet? Why, we could even survive without any owls. So what if they are no longer around to kill the mice. We’ll just build more traps. Either that or we’ll breed more cats.” — P.160-161

“Often the charge of racism is used to shift our focus from the criminal to society’s inequities. The media, the liberals, and the black leadership have created a climate of censorship with respect to any issues involving race, other than their prescribed views on the subject. They have been successful in labeling many events as racist when clearly they were not. The Willie Horton issues is a classic example of this. The Willie Horton ads are now unquestioningly accepted as a sordid, racist, blemish on the Republican party. But this description is infinitely more than the facts allow. The truth is that the Willie Horton political advertisement had nothing to do with race. The issue was crime and Michael Dukakis’s softness of approach with criminals. Willie Horton was one of eleven convicted killers permitted to leave prison to visit their families as part of a furlough program under then Massachusetts Governor Dukakis. Horton was in prison for murdering a man after castrating him and stuffing his genitals in his mouth. During his furlough in 1987, Horton tied up a man and made him watch while Horton raped the man’s wife. After the incident, the state legislature tried to stop killers from getting furloughs, but Dukakis fought against it because he said the program was 99 percent effective. The Republicans thought it might be appropriate to communicate that truth to the American people. Apparently so did the Eagle Tribune, a Massachusetts newspaper that won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the flaws in Dukakis’s furlough program. Of course, when this publication ran the story long before the ad was even contemplated by the Bush campaign, no one called that liberal publication racist. The Horton ad was an excellent illustration of the tangible consequences of the liberals’ general approach to the criminal justice system. Their sympathy is almost always reserved for the criminal rather than for the victim.” — P.172

“Liberals have created, and the minority leadership has exploited, a community of dependent people, unaware of the true route to prosperity and happiness: self-reliance and self-investment. Instead, people are told that American is unjust, unfair, and full of disadvantages. They are told that their only hope is for government to fix their problems. What has happened is that generations of people have bought into this nonsense and as result have remained hopelessly mired in poverty and despair — because the promised solutions don’t work. And they will never work — they never have.” — P.221-222

“(Gorbachev) was given a freedom award at Yeshiva University in New York, which is akin to rewarding Pharoh for freeing the Israelites. This is the same man who, less than a year ago, was sending his tanks to roll over the people of Lithuania — and trying to muzzle the Russian press to stop it from reporting what was going on. This is the man who covered up the meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, and he’s lecturing us about the environment. The same man who cut off Sakharov’s microphone in the Soviet Congress when Sakarov tried to demand that the Communist party’s constitutional monopoly on power be abolished. But it seems no one is holding that against him anymore.” — P. 235

“I’m convinced that a lot of people simply don’t know what’s available out there and how it is possible to find a job and work your way up if you are willing to accept responsibility for your life. I know what it’s like to be on the bottom. I’ve been broke. I’ve been fired seven times from jobs. And I don’t even have a college degree. But I didn’t blame anyone else for my problems. I knew that if I didn’t try to solve them on my own or with the help of friends or family members, no one else was going to take care of me.” — P.252

“The administrative cost of many welfare programs in this country is 72 cents per case. For every dollar in taxes set aside for welfare recipients, only 28 cents winds up in their pockets. Yet, the Utopians still believe we have to create more government entitlements.” — P.264

“The assault on America’s religious underpinnings is based on a distorted interpretation of the establishment and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment. Those causes are “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Only a lawyer could claim not to understand the plain meaning of those words. The government is prohibited from setting up a state religion, such as Britain has, but no barriers will be erected against the practice of any religion.” — P.277

“Liberalism claims to have leaders: black leaders, minority leaders, etc., but these people are not leaders at all. They advocate the status quo of dependence and subordination of individualism to the group at large. There is no leadership, no inspiration or motivation to individual greatness, but rather a continuum, of wallowing in the rut on blame and the rationalization of failure.” — P.282

“The economist Walter Williams points out that with the money we’ve spent on poverty programs since the 1960s we could have bought the entire assets of every Fortune 500 company and virtually every acre of US farmland. Still, the left wants more. Yet, not only didn’t we eliminate poverty, but today many social problems are far worse than they’ve ever been.” — P.302

Share this!

Enjoy reading? Share it with your friends!