Top 10 William Frank Buckley Jr. Quotes at QuotationFun

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More people die every year as a result of the war against drugs than die from what we call, generically, overdosing. These fatalities include, perhaps most prominently, drug merchants who compete for commercial territory, but include also people who are robbed and killed by those desperate for money to buy the drug to which they have become addicted. This is perhaps the moment to note that the pharmaceutical cost of cocaine and heroin is approximately 2 per cent of the street price of those drugs. Since a cocaine addict can spend as much as $1,000 per week to sustain his habit, he would need to come up with that $1,000. The approximate fencing cost of stolen goods is 80 per cent, so that to come up with $1,000 can require stealing $5,000 worth of jewels, cars, whatever. We can see that at free-market rates, $20 per week would provide the addict with the cocaine which, in this wartime drug situation, requires of him $1,000.

Address to the New York Bar Association (Summer 1995); published in "The War On Drugs Is Lost" - National Review Vol. 48, No. 2 - 12 February 1996.

Politics, Drugs

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Listen you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I'll sock you in the goddamn face and you'll stay plastered.

Responding to Gore Vidal's language during debate over the 1968 Democratic National Committee riots on ABC News.

Politics

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Government can't do anything for you except in proportion as it can do something to you.

Quoted in "Broken Government: Where the right went wrong," - CNN - 2006.

Politics

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Everything I do and say and the way I do and say it annoys me.

Quoted in "William F. Buckley Jr., Rapier Wit Of the Right" - Washington Post - 28 February 2008.

Humor, Politics

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Treatment is not now available for almost half of those who would benefit from it. Yet we are willing to build more and more jails in which to isolate drug users even though at one-seventh the cost of building and maintaining jail space and pursuing, detaining, and prosecuting the drug user, we could subsidize commensurately effective medical care and psychological treatment.

Address to the New York Bar Association (Summer 1995); published in "The War On Drugs Is Lost" - National Review Vol. 48, No. 2 - 12 February 1996.

Politics, Drugs

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The cost of the drug war is many times more painful, in all its manifestations, than would be the licensing of drugs combined with intensive education of non-users and intensive education designed to warn those who experiment with drugs.

Address to the New York Bar Association (Summer 1995); published in "The War On Drugs Is Lost" - National Review Vol. 48, No. 2 - 12 February 1996.

Politics, Religion, Drugs

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It is outrageous to live in a society whose laws tolerate sending young people to life in prison because they grew, or distributed, a dozen ounces of marijuana. I would hope that the good offices of your vital profession would mobilize at least to protest such excesses of wartime zeal, the legal equivalent of a My Lai massacre. And perhaps proceed to recommend the legalization of the sale of most drugs, except to minors.

Address to the New York Bar Association (Summer 1995); published in "The War On Drugs Is Lost" - National Review Vol. 48, No. 2 - 12 February 1996.

Politics, Drugs

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When in 1951 I was inducted into the CIA as a deep cover agent, the procedures for disguising my affiliation and my work were unsmilingly comprehensive. It was three months before I was formally permitted to inform my wife what the real reason was for going to Mexico City to live. If, a year later, I had been apprehended, dosed with sodium pentothal, and forced to give out the names of everyone I knew in the CIA, I could have come up with exactly one name, that of my immediate boss (E. Howard Hunt, as it happened). In the passage of time one can indulge in idle talk on spook life. In 1980 I found myself seated next to the former president of Mexico at a ski-area restaurant. What, he asked amiably, had I done when I lived in Mexico? "I tried to undermine your regime, Mr. President." He thought this amusing, and that is all that it was, under the aspect of the heavens. We have noticed that Valerie Plame Wilson has lived in Washington since 1997. Where she was before that is not disclosed by research facilities at my disposal. But even if she was safe in Washington when the identity of her employer was given out, it does not mean that her outing was without consequence. We do not know what dealings she might have been engaging in which are now interrupted or even made impossible. ... In my case, it was 15 years after reentry into the secular world before my secret career in Mexico was blown, harming no one except perhaps some who might have been put off by my deception.

"Who Did What?" in National Review - 1 November 2005.

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Those who suffer from the abuse of drugs have themselves to blame for it. This does not mean that society is absolved from active concern for their plight. It does mean that their plight is subordinate to the plight of those citizens who do not experiment with drugs but whose life, liberty, and property are substantially affected by the illegalization of the drugs sought after by the minority.

Address to the New York Bar Association (Summer 1995); published in "The War On Drugs Is Lost" - National Review Vol. 48, No. 2 - 12 February 1996.

Politics, Drugs

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It was rumored, in 1946, that the hangman in Nuremberg adjusted the nooses of some of the condemned to magnify the pain of suffocation. Such sadism was not called for then and is not called for now. But if fornication is wrong, there is no denying that it can bring pleasure. The death of Saddam Hussein at rope's end brings a pleasure that is undeniable, and absolutely chaste in its provenance.

"Spare Thoughts on Saddam" - National Review Online - 2006.

Politics, Patriotism

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