Buckley Athwart History - from WSJ

(I am very much stirred by how he thinks and realizes his ideas; this is someone i can identify. actually, admire.)

I believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.

-- "God and Man at Yale," 1951

It seems altogether possible that did National Review not exist, no one would have invented it. . . . For we offer, besides ourselves, a position that has not grown old under the weight of a gigantic, parasitic bureaucracy, a position untempered by the doctoral dissertations of a generation of Ph.D.s in social architecture, unattenuated by a thousand vulgar promises to a thousand different pressure groups, uncorroded by a cynical contempt for human freedom. And that, ladies and gentlemen, leaves us just about the hottest thing in town.

-- "Statement," National Review, 1955

The attempted assassination of Sukarno last week had all the earmarks of a CIA operation. Everyone in the room was killed except Sukarno.

-- Editorial, National Review, 1957

We deem it the central revelation of Western experience that man cannot ineradicably stain himself, for the wells of regeneration are infinitely deep. . . . Khrushchev cannot take permanent advantage of our temporary disadvantage, for it is the West he is fighting. And in the West there lie, however encysted, the ultimate resources, which are moral in nature. . . . Even out the depths of despair, we take heart in the knowledge that it cannot matter how deep we fall, for there is always hope. In the end, we will bury him.

-- Address in New York, after Khrushchev was invited to speak at the U.N., 1960

The glorious development of this year was the nomination of a man whose views have given the waiting community a choice. . . . Now is precisely the moment to labor incessantly to educate our fellow citizens. The point is to win recruits whose attention we might never have attracted but for Barry Goldwater: to win them not only for Nov. 3 but for future Novembers: to infuse the conservative spirit in enough people to entitle us to look about, on Nov. 4, not at the ashes of defeat but at the well-planted seeds of hope, which will flower on a great November day in the future.

-- Address to Young
Americans for Freedom,
September 1964

At a press conference during his campaign for mayor of New York City: Do you have any chance of winning?

Buckley: No.

Q: Do you really want to be mayor?

Buckley: I've never considered it.

Q: Well, conservatively speaking, how many votes do you expect to get?

Buckley: One.

Q: And who would cast that vote?

Buckley: My secretary.

-- 1965 (When later asked what he would do if elected, he replied, "Demand a

recount.")

A good debater is not necessarily an effective vote-getter: you can find a hole in your opponent's argument through which you could drive a coach and four ringing jingle bells all the way, and thrill at the crystallization of a truth wrung out from a bloody dialogue -- which, however, may warm only you and your muse, while the smiling paralogist has in the meantime made votes by the tens of thousands.

-- "The Unmaking of a Mayor," 1966

I first met [Whittaker] Chambers in 1954. An almost total silence had closed in on him. Two years earlier he had published "Witness." . . . The bitterness of the Hiss trial had not by any means subsided. For some of the reviewers, Hiss's innocence had once been a fixed rational conviction, then blind faith; now it was rank superstition, and they bent under the force of an overwhelming book. . . .

The tokens of hope and truth were not, he seemed to be saying, to be preserved by a journal of opinion, not by writers and thinkers, but only by activists, and I was to know that he considered a publication -- the right kind of publication -- not a word, but a deed. Though Chambers was a passionate literary man, always the intellectual, insatiably and relentlessly curious, in the last analysis it was action, not belletrism, that moved him most deeply.

-- "Odyssey of a Friend," 1969

Henry Gibson: Mr. Buckley, I have noticed that whenever you appear on television, you're always seated. Is that because you can't think on your feet?

Buckley: It's very hard to stand up carrying the weight of what I know.

-- Appearance on "Laugh-In," 1970

I am lapidary but not eristic when I use big words.

-- Column, 1986

How gifted do you need to be to publish Whittaker Chambers and Russell Kirk, James Burnham and Keith Mano? . . . If an editorial note is reserved for me in the encyclopedias, it will appear under the heading "Alchemy." . . . And, yes, we did as much as anybody with the exception of -- Himself -- to shepherd into the White House the man I am confident will emerge as the principal political figure of the second half of the 20th century . . . He said, at a critical moment in history, that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was an evil empire. . . . We were missing only the galvanizing summation; and we got it from President Reagan: and I think that the countdown for Communism began then.

-- Address at National Review's 35th anniversary banquet, upon his retirement as editor, 1990

Above all, conservatives tend to intuit that materialist terminology is insufficient to express the depth of American attachments to their ideals. It remains, for some reason, arresting that one speaks of the "sanctity" of life, of our "devotion" to our ideals, of the "holy" causes in which we engage. American conservatives never exclude those who discountenance transcendent perspectives, but we tend to live by them.

-- "To Preserve What We Have," essay in The Wall Street Journal, 2002

Ah, but the sea always has something lying in wait for you. . . . You are moving at racing speed, parting the buttery sea as with a scalpel, and the waters roar by, themselves exuberantly subdued by your powers to command your way through them. Triumphalism -- and the stars also seem to be singing together for joy.

-- "Thoughts on a Final Passage," essay, 2004

Despair is inappropriate for a culture as buoyant as our own.