Politics & Power Quote by William F. Buckley, Jr.

“Standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’” is Buckley at his most theatrically self-aware: he turns conservatism into a physical gag, a lone body planted in the road, bellowing at an oncoming machine. The line works because it’s half confession, half dare. It admits that “history” is coded as forward motion, moral momentum, the progressive assumption that tomorrow is better by default. Buckley doesn’t waste time arguing over whether that assumption is true; he lampoons it by treating history like a bully with right-of-way.

The verb “yelling” matters. This isn’t the calm stewardship conservatives often claim for themselves; it’s noisy, unpopular, and intentionally frictional. Buckley is giving his side permission to be the irritant in the room, to trade sophistication for disruption when the culture’s consensus starts to feel like a runaway train. The subtext is a rebuke to mid-century liberal confidence: the belief that technocracy, courts, and social planning can solve the human condition if we just keep pushing.

Context sharpens the edge. Writing in the early Cold War and then shaping the postwar American right through National Review, Buckley wasn’t defending a static past so much as building an intellectual counter-establishment against New Deal liberalism, secularization, and later the social revolutions of the 1960s. The quote’s genius is that it makes “reactionary” sound principled. It reframes resistance as moral clarity: not fear of change, but suspicion of changes that arrive with applause already preloaded.