Firing Line

Himself - Host:
Such is the notoriety of Mr. Hayek's opposition to state centralism that they even compose limericks about him on college campuses. Last week at Berkeley I heard this one.

Himself - Host:
There was a young man from Nyack, Who slept with a girl on a kayak. To do this while tanning, Requires central planning, In spite of the writings of Hayek.

Mortimer J. Adler:
When one prays to God one believes in God as one does not believe if one affirms God's existence as a philosopher. So one has gone beyond philosophy. The leap of faith is not from less sure grounds for the affirmation of God's existence to more sure grounds, but it's from the affirmation of God's existence to belief in God as benevolent, caring, just, and merciful.

William F. Buckley:
Your discovery of God was in the nature of an epiphany rather than in the nature of philosophical deduction.

Mortimer J. Adler:
Absolutely.

William F. Buckley:
But having had that epiphany you then proceeded - I know from a knowledge of your books - to make certain deductions which in your judgment directed thought about God in a fruitful channel, but not necessarily led to His discovery.

Mortimer J. Adler:
No. The leap of faith involves going beyond argument to what cannot be proved, and the sign that one has made that leap is asking God for help.

Mortimer J. Adler:
The two great political philosophers that Bloom admires most are Plato and Rousseau, and neither is a democrat in my sense of the term. Neither would take Mill's view that democracy is the ideal form of government with a long future and almost no past.

William Buckley:
I should like to begin by asking Mr. Wolfe whether he thinks on second thought that he behaved... insouciantly... toward the plight of the Panthers.

Tom Wolfe:
[blinks] Insouciantly?

William Buckley:
You like that word? You can have it.

Tom Wolfe:
It's a good nine-dollar word, yeah.

William Buckley:
Tom Wolfe is probably the most skillful writer in America. I mean that he can do more things with words than anyone else. He is like the pianist, Henry Scott, who can play "The Flight of the Bumblebee" wearing mittens.

Jack Kerouac:
I'm a Republican. My father, my mother, my sister and I have always voted Republican, always.

William Buckley:
[sarcastically] Have you no ambition?

Jack Kerouac:
Tolstoy, who wrote "War and Peace," you know, who said that at one time the hourglass, the sand is coming down from one top of the hourglass down to the other, and that will be the end of war. I think that war will be over very soon. Although, I don't know for sure. That's what Tolstoy said.

William Buckley:
Considering that all twelve members of a jury have to agree that there is no reasonable doubt as to a person's guilt before that person gets convicted, it seems to me that the individual is protected.

F. Lee Bailey:
Most juries are made up of three members, sometimes two. For instance: If you were injected into jury proceedings in the average community, I rather doubt that the jury would ever vote against your sentiments simply because you would talk them all into the ground. That's usually what happens. We are apt to find a ten-to-two vote on the first ballot, one way. But, if you don't win the strong guy, you can forget about the rest.

William Buckley:
There has been a discernible movement in social thought on the basis of which one never blames the criminal for anything at all. One blames his mother or his father or society or the Republican Party or the books he did read or the books he didn't read.

William Buckley:
Mister George Wallace, as everybody knows, is the Governor of Alabama from 1963 to 1967, at which point he turned his office over to his wife, an act of political chivalry which could have occurred only to a southerner.

George Wallace:
We had negro citizens by the thousands who voted in 1958 when I first ran for governor. And, I might say, in the run-off for governor, they voted for me.

William Buckley:
[sarcastically] Is that because they didn't have the education you were talking about?

George Wallace:
Are you against caring for the poor and the old?

William Buckley:
[smiles] I knew you would answer that way. I hate the poor. I'm for shooting them.

William Buckley:
For instance Harrison Salsbury of The New York Times, who has himself been accused of being much too liberal...

Mark Lane:
Who accused him of that?

William Buckley:
[pauses] Me.

Mark Lane:
[smirks] Oh.

Timothy Leary:
The people who are using marijuana today tend to be the highly-educated. They come from the best colleges. There is no LSD or marijuana problem at Podunk Junior College in Arkansas. It's at Harvard, Princeton, and even at Yale that fifty to seventy percent of the undergraduates are seriously experimenting with the most important thing that can be experimented with: Their own consciousness.

William Buckley:
Are you confusing adjustment with education? Why did you mention the difference between Podunk College and Yale University? What makes you think they're better adjusted at Yale than at Podunk?

Timothy Leary:
[falls silent]

William F. Buckley:
Are you a pacifist?

Robert Vaughn:
No, definitely not.

William F. Buckley:
[surprised] You're not a pacifist?

Robert Vaughn:
[smiles] Hit me.

Robert Vaughn:
I am interested in the rule of world law, not the rule of the jungle. And the rule of the jungle is unilateral intervention by the United States in areas where they have no sanction by their allies or the dissonance in the United Nations.

William F. Buckley:
And you consider that world law consists of whatever arithmetical tabulation you have at any given moment in the General Assembly of the United States?

Robert Vaughn:
Yes. Arithmetical tabulation in relation to the process of voting is called democracy, and that's why I agree with it.

William F. Buckley:
This is a Vaughn contribution to international thought. Is that what you're writing your thesis about?

Robert Vaughn:
[laughs] Yes, it is, and I'm delighted that it occurred on this show.

William F. Buckley:
[acidly, pointing to the floor] Yes. We should put a plaque right here.

Noam Chomsky:
It is at least arguable and, perhaps even sometimes true, that a terroristic act does diminish the amount of violence in the world. Hence, a person who is opposed to violence will not be opposed to that terroristic act.