2013 has been an interesting year, to say the least. It’s been called the worst year for President Obama, the worst year for Christians worldwide, and many other things. As I’ve watched stories on everything from guns to foreign relations, and religious freedom to racism, 2013 seems filled with controversy.

Now that 2013 is drawing to a close, a look back at some of the more memorable statements made this year seems appropriate. If you’ve not been paying attention to much of what has been taking place in our world, allow this list to serve a crash course. For others it will be a reminder of what has been. And still for others it will be the hope for a better 2014.

The 30 Best Quotes of 2013
by John Hawkins

30) “Oh, the guy who bombed Boston is on the loose in my neighborhood? Super glad I don’t have an AR-15 with 30 round mags” Said nobody, ever. — Katie Pavlich

29) I wanted to know why we were promised a state of the art website and we got an abacus and a sundial. I want to know what we got for our money. I want to know if this thing could be fixed in two months why didn’t you have it up and running in the three years prior to October the 1st? — Congressman Trey Gowdy on healthcare.gov

28) When lefties “discuss” issues, a lot of their so-called “discussion” amounts to nothing more than rationalization about how & why some person should be excluded from further discussion. Either him, or the points he has just brought up. They truly do seem to think we become more “learned,” by way of knowing less. — Morgan Freeberg

27) Part of what’s so problematic with Washington is how many Republicans want a show vote to pretend to their constituents they’re fighting for what they say they’re fighting for, rather than actually fighting for it and actually winning. In both parties, you’ve got entrenched politicians who have barely veiled contempt for the American people. They think their voters are gullible rubes — and you give them a little “show vote,” you tell them, “Hey, I’m totally with you,” then they go to Washington and they don’t actually do what they say. — Ted Cruz

26) Liberals love diversity. That’s why they love to punish anyone who doesn’t think, act, eat, drink, drive and speak exactly like them. — Congressman Steve Stockman

25) One of the best peace speeches I ever read was one delivered back in the 1930s — by Adolf Hitler! He knew that peace speeches would keep the Western democracies from matching his military buildup with their own, or attacking him to prevent his buildup from continuing. Peace speeches by Iran today serve the same purpose of buying time — until they can create a nuclear bomb. — Thomas Sowell

24) There is no scientific evidence that bullying causes suicide. None at all. Lots of teenagers get bullied (between 1 in 4 and 1 in 3 teenagers report being bullied in real life, fewer report being bullied online). Very few commit suicide. Among the people who commit suicide, researchers have no good data on how many of them have been bullied.

It is journalistically irresponsible to claim that bullying leads to suicide. Even in specific cases where a teenager or child was bullied and subsequently commits suicide, it’s not accurate to imply the bullying was the direct and sole cause behind the suicide. — Kelly McBride

23) “I don’t see why anyone needs …” is code for: “I don’t do it, so let’s ban it.” The corollary is: “I enjoy this, so you have to subsidize it.” — Ann Coulter

22) What would you think of a person who earned $24,000 a year but spent $35,000? Suppose on top of that, he was already $170,000 in debt. You’d tell him to get his act together — stop spending so much or he’d destroy his family, impoverish his kids and wreck their future. Of course, no individual could live so irresponsibly for long. But tack on eight more zeroes to that budget and you have the checkbook for our out-of-control, big-spending federal government. — John Stossel

21) No Republican presidential candidate has won the black vote since the 1920s (Here’s to you, Herbert Hoover!), the majority of black voters had become Democrats by the 1940s, Republicans’ gains in the South were concentrated among educated and relatively affluent suburbanites, the same as they were everywhere else in the country, not among the redneck bloc. The Southern congressional caucus went Republican in 1994, not in 1964. — Kevin Williamson

20) If Republicans are opposed to what mass immigration is doing to the country demographically, ethnically, socially and politically, there are, as Reagan used to say, “simple answers, just no easy answers.”

Those answers: No amnesty, secure the border, enforce laws against businesses that hire illegals, and impose a moratorium on new immigration so wages can rise and immigrants enter the middle class and start voting as did the children and grandchildren of the immigrants of 1890-1920 by 1972.

So what are the Republicans doing?

Going back on their word, dishonoring their platform, and enraging their loyal supporters, who gave Mitt 90 percent of his votes, to pander to a segment of the electorate that gave Mitt less than 5 percent of his total votes.

Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. — Pat Buchanan

19) I was a liberal once. I knew that liberal policy was wrong — but I also knew that conservatives were evil. Racist, sexist, uncaring, one step from Nazis. This was a religious truth to me. Well, of course it was. All leftists are taught this. That’s how the left keeps you in the fold despite the evidence of your own eyes. Leftists do to their followers what the townspeople did to Jim Carrey’s character in that movie The Truman Show. They teach them to fear and hate the unknown so much that they won’t test alternative ideas no matter how bad things get. “Life in Liberal World may be a mess, Truman,” they tell you, “but oh the horrors that wait for you out there in Conservative Land!” — Andrew Klavan

18) ) The homicide rate in the U.S. is around average. Russia’s homicide rate is four times ours; rates in Africa average around five times ours; the rate in Brazil is five times ours; Mexico, which has stringent gun control laws, has double our homicide rate; murder rates in the Caribbean approximate those in Africa. It is true that Western European countries in general have lower rates than we do, but that is mostly because African-Americans commit murders at eight times the rate of whites. The murder rate in Norway is very low, but it is indistinguishable from the rate among Norwegian-Americans. It is also noteworthy that the homicide rate in the U.S. today is only one-half what it was in the early 1990s. That decline, which has occurred during a time when gun laws have generally been liberalized, is never addressed by gun control advocates. — John Hinderaker

17) Right now, politicians have the power to suddenly decide to tax us all at 100% and then spend the money replacing all of our roads with a high-speed rail system. What keeps them from doing that? Common sense? Come on, look at the morons we have in government — Congress is filled with idiots who couldn’t run a lemonade stand and who have grand visions to transform the nation. No, the only thing stopping them is that they’re divided into two parties who viscerally hate each other. If they ever got along, a big new government overreach like the Patriot Act or a giant boondoggle like Obamacare would be passed every couple weeks. By the end of the year, we’d have the government spying on our every movement as we lived flat broke in shanty towns, eating our government-allotted corn cob half we’d get every other day. — Frank J. Fleming

16) Because many of us make mistakes that can have bad consequences, some intellectuals believe that it is the role of government to intervene and make some of our decisions for us. From what galaxy government is going to hire creatures who do not make mistakes is a question they leave unanswered. — Thomas Sowell

When signing these bills, Governor Jerry Brown dismissed sexual orientation modification as “quackery,” and Governor Chris Christie said that “people are born gay.” Both these statements ignore empirical evidence that, for many teenagers, sexual orientation is unstable and malleable. The most comprehensive study of sexuality to date, the 1992 National Health and Social Life Survey, found that, without any intervention whatsoever, three out of four boys who think they are gay at sixteen don’t think they are gay by the age of twenty-five.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2007 report, Adolescent Health in the United States, surveyed 10,000 teenagers and found that the vast majority of sixteen-year olds who reported only same-sex sexual attractions reported only opposite-sex sexual attractions one year later. Because these surveys produced such unexpected results, similar studies were soon replicated all over the Western world. The outcomes were almost identical, with population-based samples now reaching into the hundreds of thousands. — Robert Carle

15) ) The total fiscal overhang of our federal, state, and local governments — their combined debt and unfunded liabilities — is around $140 trillion, and growing. That is about twice the annual economic output of human civilization, and nearly the value of all the financial assets in the world. It is something close to a mathematical certainty that those debts and obligations will not be made good on at their present value. — Kevin Williamson

14) What is going on here is that a cadre of people who have a very narrow skill-set — primarily law or some public policy degree which featured very little math, and that math was Math for Liberal Arts — have decided that they can comprehend the workings of everyone else’s job in America, simply because they went to a Good School.

Well, actually, most of them didn’t go to a Good School (by which I mean a truly elite school like Harvard or Princeton); most of them went to lesser schools. But they have Harvard grads in their social circle, so they now count themselves as part of the club.

They do not know what they don’t know.

They believe they are masters of the universe, but in fact are masters of almost nothing at all, not even the narrow range of material they studied before immediately going into a career of government work or government agitation.

They believe themselves to be transcendentally hypercompetent, a delusion that they are permitted to cling to only because they’ve never been in positions of actual responsibility where their decisions will result in well-defined failure or well-defined success.

Obama is of course the apotheosis of this type. He not just their high priest, but their demi-god, a half-god born upon the earth.

But they are all just like him — sky-high on personal estimation of their capabilities, and yet scandalously short on actual accomplishments.

And these are the people who presume that they can run the world for us, and do our jobs better than us. — Ace

13) This country has a mental health problem disguised as a gun problem and a tyranny problem disguised as a security problem. — Joe Rogan

12) In the early days of the feminist movement, every small victory was celebrated. There was exultation, liberation, a sense of joy at women’s progress that seems largely absent today. Somehow the mood of the movement has shifted into reverse: The closer women get to real power, the more they cling to the idea that they are powerless. To rejoice about feminist victories these days counts as betrayal. — Hanna Rosin

11) Our Bill of Rights isn’t a bill of needs. — Scottie Hughes

10) During the sexual revolution, we crossed a line from sex being something you do to defining who you are. When it enters into that territory, we move beyond the possibility of having a society in which sex acts were tolerated, in the Mrs. Patrick Campbell sense — “I don’t care what they do, so long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses” — and one where it is insufficient to be anything but a cheerleader for sexual persuasion of all manner and type, because to be any less so is to hate the person themselves. Sex stopped being an aspect of a person, and became their lodestar — in much the same way religion is for others. — Ben Domenech

9) If John Boehner started preaching the virtues of socialism tomorrow morning, the entire planet would turn capitalist by noon. Boehner is a walking, talking charisma vortex. When he’s not speaking or crying, he has the look of a man about to apologize. And Mitch McConnell sounds like Foghorn Leghorn. They may be decent men, but Boehner and McConnell are the leaders of and chief communicators for the Republican Party. Why? — Yates Walker

8) Today’s “that goes too far” easily becomes tomorrow’s “right” with a morally vacuous media leading the charge and a morally exhausted people who are afraid to say “stop,” for fear they’ll be labeled “bigots.” — Cal Thomas

7) You have a friend who is a lifelong couch potato with diabetes and a heart problem. He declares his intention to run a marathon with no training whatsoever. You advise him against this, fearing he won’t be able to handle it and hurt himself. He runs the marathon, almost dies at Mile 16, and then blames you for not carrying him 26.2 miles. This is the GOP’s obligation to Obamacare, a law it had no hand in passing because it was afraid of exactly this meltdown. — Mary Katharine Ham

6) Republicans spent a lot of time whining that, if Obama was prepared to negotiate with the Iranians, the Syrians, and the Russians, why wouldn’t he negotiate with the GOP? Well, the obvious answer is Rouhani, Assad, and Putin don’t curl up in a fetal position at the first tut-tut from Bob Schieffer or Diane Sawyer. — Mark Steyn

5) I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white. — Thomas Sowell

4) As some of you may know, our team began 81 years ago — in 1932 — with the name “Boston Braves.” The following year, the franchise name was changed to the “Boston Redskins.” On that inaugural Redskins team, four players and our Head Coach were Native Americans. The name was never a label. It was, and continues to be, a badge of honor.

In 1971, our legendary coach, the late George Allen, consulted with the Red Cloud Athletic Fund located on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and designed our emblem on the Redskins helmets. Several years later, Coach Allen was honored by the Red Cloud Athletic Fund. On the wall at our Ashburn, Virginia, offices is the plaque given to Coach Allen — a source of pride for all of us. Washington Redskins is more than a name we have called our football team for over eight decades. It is a symbol of everything we stand for: strength, courage, pride, and respect — the same values we know guide Native Americans and which are embedded throughout their rich history as the original Americans. — Daniel Snyder

3) We are lending money we don’t have to kids who can’t pay it back to train them for jobs that no longer exist. That’s nuts. — Mike Rowe

2) Compromise is very difficult in a political environment in which a deal is not a deal. Whether the question is trading robust immigration enforcement for an amnesty benefiting those illegals already present in the country or trading tax increases for spending cuts according to some agreed-upon ratio, the main obstacle is not ideology or partisan self-interest, but the belief — a well-justified belief — that cutting a long-term deal is pointless, because such deals will not stand. — Kevin Williamson

1) They said, ‘Listen, before you did this the politics of it were great: The Dems were the bad guys, the Republicans were the good guys. Now we all look like a bunch of squishes. Well, there is an alternative: You can just not be a bunch of squishes. — Ted Cruz on a private meeting with other Republican Senators