Dave Rubin > Quotes

“Exhibit A: I’m guessing you’re no fan of socialism, which was a founding principle of the Nazi movement. The name “Nazi” is an acronym for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, which most of today’s Democrat socialists conveniently forget. Actually, that’s an understatement. These people don’t just overlook this truth, they’ve totally rewritten history on the matter. These days, Nazism gets associated with conservatism at the drop of a hat, but historically it stems from the left. Adolf Hitler? An art-loving vegetarian who seized power by wooing voters away from Germany’s Social Democrat and communist parties. Italy’s Benito Mussolini? Raised on Karl Marx’s Das Kapital before starting his career as a left-wing journalist and, later, implementing a deadly fascist regime.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” In other words, today’s progressives have now become the sexists and racists they’ve claimed to hate.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Harvard University has chosen to make it harder for Asian applicants to be accepted into the university because they outperform their peers. So yes, systemic racism is real . . . at America’s top university.”
― Dave Rubin, Don’t Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Suddenly, out of nowhere, rationalizing Islamic terror had become a progressive position. According to progressives, it was another 2-D argument: brown people = good, white people = bad.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“It’s no coincidence that social justice warriors are frequently out of shape, poorly dressed, and have messy hair, along with their overall disheveled appearance. If some dress for success, they dress for failure.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Trust me, beaut fades, but dumb is forever.”
― Dave Rubin, Don’t Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.” T”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“This is because outward virtue signaling is separate from being a considerate, moral person. Whereas the latter is central for common decency (and is something we should all strive for), the former is just a display of faux morality. One that’s designed to offer protection from the mob ever turning on them. It’s a protection racket—a form of insurance. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Elder was right and he damn well knew it. “The biggest burden that black people have is being raised without fathers,” he declared. “A black kid raised without a dad is five times more likely to be poor and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of school, and twenty times more likely to end up in jail. When I hear people tell me about systemic racism or unconscious racism I always say ‘give me an example.’ And almost nobody can do it. I give the facts . . . and [according to left-wingers] the facts are racist.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“I’ve reluctantly reached after years of watching my old “team” transform into a baying mob of hysterical puritans—a feral gang that sows division through identity politics and encourages societal tribes to rank themselves in a pecking order of “oppression.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“I’m black—not African American. That’s a term I don’t like. I was born in America and I’ve never been to Africa. It’s an absurd term. A term that Jesse Jackson crammed down the throats of the media. It’s ridiculous.”
― Dave Rubin, Don’t Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Segregating Americans into identity groups—the very essence of bigotry—has been fully embraced by modern progressivism, which has absolutely nothing to do with classical liberalism”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Worse still, they implement all of these things with brute force: violence, censorship, character assassination, smear campaigns, doxing, trolling, deplatforming, and online witch hunts. Tricks that are deliberately designed to leave people down and out. Ideally, jobless and without the resources to push back.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Thomas Sowell nailed it when he said: “No government of the left has done as much for the poor as capitalism has. Even when it comes to the redistribution of income, the left talks the talk but the free market walks the walk.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Everyone pays the same, that 18 percent, except a tiny bit more for those at the top, along with a bit of relief for those at the bottom. In a perfect world I’d do the 18 percent tax across the board, but perhaps a classical liberal is just a guilty libertarian. As it stands right now, the top 1 percent already pay 90 percent of the money generated through federal tax, while the lower 10 percent pay basically nothing—yet still we’re told the rich need to pay more. This is nothing but class warfare, which is good for votes, but bad for policy. And if the”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“So yes, saying “I don’t know” is a good thing. Bullshitting your way through life is not dignified and over time it can never really work. Eventually people see through it and then are very likely to second-guess everything else you say going forward.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“I’m a free-speech absolutist. Yes, even when it comes to opinions I find abhorrent. In fact, specifically when it comes to those opinions. The only exceptions to this rule have already been specified by the Supreme Court of the United States: calling for direct violence against a person or specific group, yelling “fire” in a crowded theater (with the intent to incite iminent lawless action), and defaming somebody through libel or slander. Everything else should get a free pass, every single time. No exceptions, ever.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“As he noted in The Daily Signal, children from fatherless homes are likelier to drop out of high school, die by suicide, have behavioral disorders, join gangs, commit crimes, and end up in prison. They are also more likely to live in poverty-stricken households. Conversely, nuclear families—whether black or white—are richer in all ways.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Free-thinking is the new counterculture, which makes it cutting-edge and subversive, like punk rock or hip-hop in the early 1980s.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“The motto is no longer ‘I think therefore I am.’ It’s not even ‘I’m a victim therefore I am.’ It’s now, ‘I self-flagellate therefore I am,’” he says. “It’s almost a theater of the absurd. The currency is victimhood by proxy. Whoever can grovel the most is the currency of the radical left.” Don’t be like them. Be better.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Dressing well not only can determine what energy you put into the universe, but also what you get in return.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Stand tough. You can only become the kind of person you admire through surviving hardship. As human beings, we usually only learn to take life seriously when our world comes into question. So although a mob attack might seem like a worst-case scenario, recognize that it’s actually an opportunity for growth and self-discovery. Then act upon it. Never apologize. This means having the courage of your convictions, right when the pile-on is at its most intense. At this point, it might be tempting to wave the white flag of surrender and apologize, but don’t do it. This is the precise moment when you must keep going with your head held high. Accept that you’ll lose friends. Everything clicks once you start figuring out who you are, but the process of self-discovery is often painful, requiring you to let go of people. Fight hard to maintain your friendships, especially the old ones, but don’t be anyone’s doormat. At some point you may have to let someone go. This is very sad, but embrace it like you would any breakup. And believe it or not, you’ll make new friends who’ll accept you exactly for who you are.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“When we fail to live a life outside politics, we become a slave to it. While it’s certainly important to be aware of all the issues I’ve discussed here, it’s way more important to live a well-rounded, fully-realized life that’s regularly removed from all the drama.
In order to do this, we must learn to distinguish between being politically engaged and politically obsessed.”
― Dave Rubin, Don’t Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“the left is now characterized by a weird form of self-flagellation.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Fortunately, this all happened in the alternative reality of Twitter, where such things are posted by anonymous accounts with anime avatars.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Let’s secure the border, figure out who is here illegally, and offer them a pathway to citizenship. Likewise, let’s take in new immigrants in numbers that will help our economy, rather than make them reliant on the citizens who are already here.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Laugh at both the state of the world and at ourselves. In doing so, it allows us to acknowledge our flaws while also transcending them.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“literally designed to keep us trapped in a constant state of conflict, suspense, and panic: social technology.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“The less people seem to know about something, the more they pontificate on it.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“There are two things that could survive a nuclear war: cockroaches and the myth of the gender pay gap.
… young women who don’t have kids are outearning their male peers. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, unmarried, childless females under age 30 who live in cities earn 8 percent more than their male peers in 147 of 150 U.S. cities. In Atlanta and Memphis, the figure is approximately 20 percent more, while young women in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Diego make 17 percent, 12 percent, and 15 percent more, respectively. Besides, even if men and women do earn different sums, statistical disparity doesn’t always mean discrimination—sometimes they are the reward for life choices, which is fair. This is good news, unless you crave victimhood.”
― Dave Rubin, Don’t Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason