Top 45 Christopher Buckley Quotes

I’ve lived in Washington since 1981 and have been a faithful reader of ‘The Washington Post’ ever since.

We live – on a spinning planet in a world of spin.

Joe Scarborough was one of 74 Republicans elected to the Congress in 1994 in response to the missteps of the early Clinton era. He was the first Republican elected to Congress from his northern Florida district since the 1870s and handily won re-election three times.

I worked at the White House in the early Reagan administration at a time when the deficit rocket really started to take off.

I certainly wish I were as good-looking as Aaron Eckhart.

My father would have been impressed by Barack Obama’s mind and style and grace of manner, as well as by – I’m certain – his abilities as a writer.

When the going gets tough in Washington, presidents appoint ‘blue ribbon’ commissions.

It’s odd to think of yourself as an orphan at 55.

I think people assumed because of my last name that I was a real right-winger. And if you cared to look at my writing, you would be hard pressed to deduce that I’m an ideological right-winger.

Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship.

Catch-22’s admirers cross boundaries – ideological, generational, geographical.

My wife and I spent the winter in Worcestershire. This allowed me to tell everyone back home in the States, ‘We are wintering in Worcestershire.’ This may be a sentence that has never actually been uttered in human history, even by people who spend all their winters in Worcestershire.

Lobbyists didn’t descend from a spaceship. They evolved organically from the way we do business.

I had worked for George Bush as a speechwriter, and I read a lot of White House memoirs. They all have two themes: ‘It Wasn’t My Fault’ and ‘It Would Have Been Much Worse if I Hadn’t Been There.’

I love Oscar Wilde, still the wittiest writer of anyone, dead or living.

If I were to win the Nobel Prize in Literature – which I think it’s fairly safe to say is not going to happen – I would still expect the headline on my obituary to read: ‘Christopher Buckley, son of William F. Buckley, Jr., is dead at 78.’

Pop was a devout Roman Catholic; I’m a lapsed Catholic. I’m not the village atheist, but I exert my right not to believe, and I doubt I would have been very public about that were he still alive, simply just so as not to hurt his feelings.

Coming to terms with Donald Trump as the Republican nominee is like being told you have Stage 1 or Stage 2 cancer. You know you’ll probably survive, but one way or the other, there’s going to be a lot of throwing up.

I’m accused of, and perhaps rightly so, of not being mean enough. I’ve been taken to task in many a book review; a good satirist has to, you know, has to kill.

Catch-22’s first readers were largely of the generation that went through World War II. For them, it provided a startlingly fresh take, a much-needed, much-delayed laugh at the terror and madness they endured.

I want Tom Clancy, the Maryland novelist, to write the story of the rest of my life.

I think my identity as a ‘conservative’ is entirely inherited. People see the name Buckley, and they think ‘conservative.’

I am post-Catholic.

If the question is, ‘Do I wish I made thirty million dollars a year,’ the answer is, ‘You bet.’ If the question is, ‘Do I wish I could write like Tom Clancy,’ the answer must remain, ‘No.’

The laws have become so straight-jacketing that presidents and their aides dare not keep journals or diaries, lest they be subpoenaed by avid special prosecutors.

My mother spent a month in a Swiss hospital after a terrible ski accident.

My instincts are conservative, but my inclinations are also libertarian.

In public relations, you live with the reality that not every disaster can be made to look like a misunderstood triumph.

My dad’s one true quest in life was for the Platonic ideal of peanut butter. And I remember one day he announced, with a look of utter transfiguration on his face, that he had found paradise on Earth in a jar with a yellow cap. And it was called Red Wing.

Whatever you thought of his politics, Ronald Reagan was a great man, a courageous man. He took an assassin’s bullet and joked to the doctors as they desperately worked to save his life.

The cliche in American politics is that one week is an eternity.

I can say this, now that my own beloved and irreplaceable parents are gone: George and Barbara Bush are parents anyone would kill to have.

George H. W. Bush may be a World War II hero and New England Yankee blue blood, but he has the tear ducts of a Sicilian grandmother.

How many Republicans does it take to change a light bulb? Three. One to mix the martinis, one to change the light bulb, and one to reminisce about how good the old one was.

I once spoke to 9,000 people, but they managed to fit them all into a structure that resembled a Zeppelin hangar, so it was a contained space in which whatever laughter I generated could ricochet and hang around for a bit, encouraging others to join in.

I was an only child with a lot of time to kill. I suspect a lot of writers are only children, or only children become writers because it’s a way of being alone.

The needs of the nation are not necessarily convergent with the needs of the deadline satirist.

I had some adventures at the White House, but hardly enough to fill a full memoir.

I grew up in the GOP sandbox. My dad took me, age 7, to meet Herbert Hoover, in his apartment at the Waldorf Towers. He gave me a silver dollar. Being a young Republican, I spent it on comic books.

President Obama came to office proclaiming that he aims to solve problems, not hand them on to our children. Most presidents say that sort of thing.

The tradition of putting candles on Christmas trees actually began in Germany. The person who came up with the idea is thought to have been Martin Luther, father of the Reformation.

I remember standing in the crow’s nest as we entered the misty Panama Canal, and the strange sensation as the 4,000-ton ship rose higher and higher inside the lock.

I was an only child who had every advantage, every blessing, absolutely.

I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets.

The Republican Party once could lay claim to the mantle of being the fiscally responsible, or ‘Daddy,’ Party.