This Week In Quotes: September 18 – September 25

The way you persuade a voter to your cause is to keep the initial intellectual buy-in as low as possible. The same way you’d induce a casual player to play poker — you don’t tell him it’s $50 minimum bet, $150 maximum raise. You bring him into a low-stakes game with a tiny buy-in.

Schwarzenegger is a RINO, but the speech he gave at the 2004 RNC was brilliant. It kept the intellectual buy-in to becoming a Republican small. He would say: “Are you for paying less in taxes? Then guess what, you’re a Republican. Are you for keeping our country strong and safe? Then guess what, you’re a Republican.”

And so on. He offered a series of small buy-ins into the movement — buy-ins that most people would gladly accept. — Ace, Ace of Spades HQ

Trying to evaluate the quality of a nation’s health care by looking at life expectancy is like trying to estimate the birthrate by counting the number of flowers bought on Valentine’s Day. (Or estimating future pregnancies of women with low self-esteem by adding up the total number of U.S. cities on a Bobby Brown tour and then multiplying by 2.)

There are lots of ways to get pregnant that don’t require flowers or a backstage pass to a Bobby Brown concert, just as there are lots of ways to die that don’t require setting foot inside a doctor’s office. — Ann Coulter

It’s been said that a grand jury can indict a ham sandwich. Well, these people can indict a ham sandwich for being racist. There is not an issue, topic or flavor of ice cream that Al Sharpton won’t inject racism into. — Jonah Goldberg

I joined the Bush administration in the 2004 just as things were turning against the president. The White House was following the “51 percent strategy” for governing — cobbling together enough support to eke out a win. Republican ideology centered on numbers and percentages instead of the values and ideas that had brought them to power. Those who didn’t join the coveted 51 percent were shunned or ignored. Eventually this group included conservative and moderate Republicans who were not on board with the party line du jour. Bush indicated that Republicans opposed to his immigration plan, for example, lacked the courage to do what was right for their country. — Matt Latimer

It seems to me that President Carter has earned his place as if not the worst president in history, the worst president of the 20th Century. — John McCain

…The ambitious policy geeks look at somebody like Glenn Beck and say, “Hey, why is this bozo on TV? He’s never attended any Heritage briefings and I never see him at the Wednesday morning meetings at Grover’s!”

The GOP establishment in Washington has a surfeit of such parasitical careerists, who think that the Republican Party is about them, and not about all those millions of grassroots people who are, in fact, the conservative movement. — Robert Stacy McCain

“I think it’s important to realize that I was actually black before the election.” — Barack Obama

…Nobody told me that I couldn’t make it because I was poor and black, or that I ought to hate white people today because of what some other white people did to my ancestors in some other time.

Nobody sugar-coated the facts of racial discrimination. But Professor Sterling Brown of Howard University, who wrote with eloquent bitterness about racism, nevertheless said to me when I prepared to transfer to Harvard: “Don’t come back here and tell me you didn’t make it ’cause white folks were mean.”

He burned my bridges behind me, the way they used to do with armies going into battle, so that they had no place to retreat to, and so had to fight to win. — Thomas Sowell

Diplomacy used to be, as Canada’s Lester Pearson liked to say, the art of letting the other fellow have your way. — Mark Steyn

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