Conservatism: Always Three Steps Ahead!

William F. Buckley, the conservative figurehead who began to resemble something like a melted wax candle the older he got, recently passed on and we thought it would be appropriate to revisit some of the erudition and prescience he was celebrated for, with some help from the folks at Radar Magazine:

"Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto Nazi, or I'll sock you in your goddamn face and you'll stay plastered." — To Gore Vidal, 1968

"New York should undertake to quarantine all addicts, even as smallpox carriers would be quarantined during a plague." — 1965

"The Beatles are not merely awful.... They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of antimusic." — September 8, 1964

"But whatever the exact net result in the restricted field of school desegregation, what a price we are paying for Brown! It would be ridiculous to hold the Supreme Court solely to blame for the ludicrously named 'civil rights movement' — that is, the Negro revolt.... But the Court carries its share of the blame." — National Review, June 2, 1964

"The central question that emerges . . . is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists."