Top 280 P. J. ORourke Quotes

Zero-sum thinking is an obsession of mine, but mostly in economics.

Distracting a politician from governing is like distracting a bear from eating your baby.

We need a government, alas, because of the nature of humans.

Lyndon Johnson faced some clear moral issues.

America gives every appearance of being a nation besotted with trashiness – divorce, illegitimacy, casual Fridays.

We journalists don’t have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scutter.

We all know the types who listen to Pete Seeger songs; even Pete admits they aren’t interesting.

Maybe the real secret to America’s greatness is that we hate one another.

America has to act. But, when America acts, other nations accuse us of being ‘hegemonistic’, of engaging in ‘unilateralism’, of behaving as if we’re the only nation on earth that counts. We are.

Head lice have their own animal-rights group, or may as well. The National Pediculosis Association doesn’t exactly advocate letting lice live with dignity, but it does oppose pediculicidal treatments.

There is the love and marriage and family kind of happiness, which is exceedingly boring to describe but nonetheless is important to have and dreadful not to have.

Raining on parades requires no skill or effort on the part of a politician.

America is not a wily, sneaky nation. We don’t think that way. We don’t think much at all, thank God.

Like it or not, I’ve come to appreciate soccer. Any kid can play, which fits with the inclusive agenda of progressive schools. Although the corollary to ‘any kid can play’ is that every kid must play because there is an iron grip to the warm hug of progressive inclusionism.

My working hypothesis is that stupidity in popular culture is a constant. Popular culture cannot get more stupid.

The minute somebody joins a committee… they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.

I’m too tough and sensitive to have to have some pubescent twerp with his mom’s earring in his tongue, who combs his hair with Redi-Whip and has an Ani DiFranco tattoo on his shin, come show me how a computer works.

Maybe climate change is a threat, and maybe climate change has been tarted up by climatologists trolling for research grant cash. It doesn’t matter.

Kabul is a walled city, which sounds romantic except the walls are pre-cast reinforced concrete blast barriers, 10 feet tall and 15 feet long and moved into place with cranes. The walls are topped with sandbags, and the sandbags are topped with guard posts from which gun barrels protrude.

Bill Clinton is not a hypocrite. If a man believes that it is just and moral to redistribute wealth, there is nothing hypocritical in his attempts to redistribute some of that wealth to himself.

Californians are people who insist on growing their own vegetables, but they won’t dig up the pretty lawn, won’t plant anything for fear of getting dirty, and they use fragrant bath salts from The Body Shop instead of smelly compost.

Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum.

The beauty of democracy is that an average, random, unremarkable citizen can lead it.

Now, do I think the baby boomers tend to be self-absorbed? I do.

We did not become libertarians because we are altruists.

Democrats hate stay-at-home spouses, no matter what gender or gender preference.

Lack of romance is my real objection to writing on a computer.

I rarely meet a politician that I don’t like personally. They are generally well endowed with charm. Therein lies the danger.

There is one thing women can never take away from men. We die sooner.

A very quiet and tasteful way to be famous is to have a famous relative. Then you can not only be nothing, you can do nothing too.

I like fiction and the kind of history that gives the grace and flavor of fiction to the past. No bloviation on current events, please. I can write that junk myself.

I’m a member of the 1960s generation. We didn’t have any wisdom.

Passover is my idea of a perfect holiday. Dear God, when you’re handing out plagues of darkness, locusts, hail, boils, flies, lice, frogs, and cattle murrain, and turning the Nile to blood and smiting the firstborn, give me a pass. And tell me when it’s over.

Medical researchers don’t know much about head lice because they don’t much care. The reason that they don’t much care is, paradoxically, that they know a lot. That is, they know one important thing: there is no evidence that head lice transmit disease.

Thank you, Occupy Wall Street. With your vivid example of anticapitalist squalor, I’ve been able to convince all three of my children to become investment bankers.

Mikhail Gorbachev was the Jimmy Carter of the Communist bloc. The Russians hate him.

The District of Columbia is an extreme example of disconnect between financial input and educational outcome. Unfortunately, extreme is not the same as abnormal.

People are not ants or bees. We do not reason or love or live or die collectively.

A lot of newspaper columns used to be written in a rat-a-tat-tat, fast-paced style – and they tended to be funny. They were a little relief from the grimmer, grayer parts of the newspaper, and one of the best people at doing this was Will Rogers.

We Americans, who invented traffic, are always being startled by the forms into which it has evolved around the world.

The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore.

Politics is the attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit.

Barack Obama is more irritating than the other nuisances on the Left.

I think the Baby Boom has enjoyed itself, maybe sometimes a little too much, and we’re continuing to enjoy ourselves, maybe a little too much.

There isn’t much room for an outsider point of view in print any more.

I’m fascinated by political enthusiasm.

America wasn’t founded so that we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damned well pleased.

Nancy Pelosi says the angry opposition to health care reform is like the angry opposition to gay rights that led to Harvey Milk being shot.

There are 1.3 billion people in China, and they all want a Buick.

We loved cars until the ’70s or so. Then they became appliances. They turned into motorized cup holders. Most of it has to do with urban sprawl. What began as pleasure ends up in necessity, as so many things do.

President Obama has contempt for real money.

My generation of Americans was the first to really care about racism and sexism, not to mention the I Ching, plus, of course, the Earth.

The First Amendment only says ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.’ It can disrespect all it wants.

Not much was really invented during the Renaissance, if you don’t count modern civilization.

Nobody likes insurance companies, especially health insurance companies.

I’m old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.

Corporate corruption has ecological merits. It’s helping to preserve that species known as Democrats – thought to be endangered as recently as the year 2000.

You’ve got to understand, people are motivated by fun. And they should be.

A deadly sins addendum is long overdue. Life has changed since Pope Gregory the Great scribbled his initial list in the sixth century.

Everybody in America who didn’t come over the Bering Strait ice bridge stole his land from somebody else.

All business is capitalistic. You require capital for any sort of business endeavour.

Network television has been attempting to lure viewers for years with its low-interest programming only to have those viewers discover later that their brains are bankrupt.

Banning paper and plastic and making shoppers carry their groceries home in their mouths like dogs is just the thing to make a little tin humanist in the Obama West Wing think he’s admiral of the Uzbek Navy.

Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe. When you quit looking on the bright side, the catastrophe is still there.

To mistrust science and deny the validity of scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You’d better go look for work as a plant or wild animal.

My working hypothesis is that stupidity in popular culture is a constant. Popular culture cannot get more stupid.

The whole melodrama of the Middle East would be improved if amnesia were as common here as it is in melodramatic plots.

I’ve never been able to get it straight about what these people who are worried about the trade deficit are worried about.

Art Nouveau got its inspiration from nature. The Bauhaus got its inspiration from engineering.

People say free trade causes dislocation. In actual fact, it’s the lowering of trade barriers that causes the dislocation.

The baby boomers’ politics have covered a wide band of silliness, from the Weather Underground to the Timothy McVeigh types. The great majority of us are well in the middle of that spectrum, but still, there’s been both leftie silliness and right-wing silliness.

Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.

Like most sensible people, you probably lost interest in modern art about the time that Julian Schnabel was painting broken pieces of the crockery that his wife had thrown at him for painting broken pieces of crockery instead of painting the bathroom and hall.

It’s better to make fun of yourself because you’ve always got someone around to make fun of, and they can’t sue you.

Democrats hate success.

Little islands of human happiness, peace, and prosperity are so exceptional at this point in history that I’m not even sure we can draw lessons from them.

Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes – the whole bag of tricks.

Wealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino’s box.

The divorce rate in 1946 was higher than it ever had been and as high as it ever would be until the ’70s. The reason was that prior relationships had not endured the strain of war.

Some people think that welfare reform should have hurt Bill Clinton with black voters.

The most futuristic aspect of the House of the Future was that it was made almost entirely of plastic.

I know quite a few fellow members of the news analysis and commentary business, and I have it from the highest-placed sources, on the record, that each and every one of our children is a genius.

Adam Smith’s huge failure was the fact that he did not foresee the industrial revolution.

I blame feminism and Facebook for the death of the American automobile. I’m a Republican, so I blame everything on feminism – or commies.

Even Jimmy Carter can’t be wrong all the time.

Sometimes the right response to evil is an appeal to powerful and effective social organization – an appeal to civilization itself.

Teasing and a sense of humor, if you can develop that in your kids, and if you can exercise it with the kids, just makes for a pleasanter atmosphere.

Horses and horsepower alike are about status and being cool.

In Henry Adams, I discovered not only the prototype of the modern thinker but also someone who is more interesting: a viper-toothed, puling, supercilious crank, thwarted in ambition, aging gracelessly, mad at the cosmos, and ashamed of his own jejune ideals. He is nevertheless very dear to me.

In Toledo, people grow out. Out to the suburbs. Out to the parts of America where the economy is more vigorous. And all too often, out to 48-inch waistbands.

As a nation, Kuwait has been, arguably, free of freedom itself. Claimed in turn by Constantinople, Riyadh, and Baghdad, Kuwait has survived by playing Turks off Persians, Arabs off one another, and the English off everyone.

When I’m in the car, I want the only one shouting to be me.

Writing is agony. I hate it.

A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.

There is only one thing that gives me hope as a Republican, and that is the Democrats. It’s going to be hard to do a worse job running American than the Republicans have, but if anybody can do it, it’s the Democrats.

Adam Smith pointed out that there were three things that make us more prosperous, in a general sort of way: freedom to pursue our own self-interest; specialization, which he called division of labor; and freedom of trade.

Democrats hate America being a world power because world power gives power to the nation instead of to Democrats.

The Tea Party has definitely increased political involvement, not only among Tea Party members but among people who oppose the Tea Party members. It’s been a general stimulus.

The idea of capitalism is not just success but also the failure that allows success to happen.

Only a few good leaders have paused to reflect seriously on being leaders.

Space has always been confusing to politics.

Californians devised a system of electricity sales that ignored every dimension of the free market.

Globalization is simply opening the free marketplace to encompass the entire world.

The words ‘Space Age’ have a quaint, nostalgic tone – sitting on midcentury modern furniture watching ‘The Jetsons.’

The idea of a world where all people are alike – in wealth or in anything else – is a fantasy for the stupid.

Each child is biologically required to have a mother. Fatherhood is a well-regarded theory, but motherhood is a fact.

As a former writer for the ‘National Lampoon,’ I’ve probably contributed to the sea of sarcasm in which we live.

Cars let us out of the barn and, while they were at it, destroyed the American nuclear family. As anyone who has had an American nuclear family can tell you, this was a relief to all concerned.

I realised the bohemian life was not for me. I would look around at my friends, living like starving artists, and wonder, ‘Where’s the art?’ They weren’t doing anything. And there was so much interesting stuff to do, so much fun to be had… maybe I could even quit renting.

Children live in the only successful Marxist state ever created: the family. ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need’ is the family’s practice as well as its theory. Even with today’s scattershot patterns of marriage and parenting, a family is collectivist to a more than North Korean degree.

You may be surprised to discover you’re rich, especially if you’re broke.

Rahm Emanuel is, we are almost certain, a vampire.

Computers seem a little too adaptively flexible, like the strange natives, odd societies, and head cases we study in the social sciences. There’s more opposable thumb in the digital world than I care for; it’s awfully close to human.

Political discourse has become so rotten that it’s no longer possible to tell the stench of one presidential candidate from the stink of another.

There’s something about Marxism that brings out warts; the only kind of growth this economic system encourages.

No Americans wants to see somebody lose their house because of health bills. Their boat? Maybe. Maybe the boat. But not the house.

Adam Smith is misread as being amoral precisely because people don’t read his first book, because they don’t read ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments.’

The poor are an especially important resource for innovation when they have the bravery and pluck to get out of the poor places in which they’re living.

The average IQ in America is – and this can be proven mathematically – average.

Supposedly, summer vacation happens because that’s when the kids are home from school, although having the kids home from school is no vacation. And supposedly the kids are home from school because of some vestigial throwback to our agricultural past.

I write because I like to make things and the only things I am good at making things with are words.

In thirteen years, every aspect of the universe can change – ask a thirteen-year-old.

I don’t even know which end of a computer one is supposed to gaze into. I’ve never used a computer.

The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year’s Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you’re married to.

Fascism is very much a mob movement.

Never fight an inanimate object.

Never wear anything that panics the cat.

The whole idea of our government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.

New Hampshire polling data are unreliable because, when you call the Granite State’s registered Republicans and independents in the middle of dinner and ask them who they’re going to vote for, they have a mouth full of mashed potatoes and you can’t understand what they say.

Fortunately, I’m married to someone who’s a pretty excellent parent!

Any terrorism is an attack on libertarian values.

I read good. I was an English major.

I am unboreable in the great outdoors.

President Bush said that if illegal immigrants want citizenship, they’d have to do three things: pay taxes, hold meaningful jobs, and learn English. Bush doesn’t meet those qualifications.

Of course, no one wants to ban the vote. Voting should remain available for sporting and recreational purposes. But certain types of votes clearly should be curtailed – ‘assault votes,’ for example, in which the only purpose of the vote is to harm others.

In its worse forms, conservatism is a matter of ‘I hate strangers and anything that’s different.’

Disney’s House of the Future had the clean simplicity prized in the 1950s as relief from decades of frayed patchwork, jury-rigging, and make-do clutter caused by Depression and war.

Liberals are always proposing perfectly insane ideas, laws that will make everybody happy, laws that will make everything right, make us live forever, and all be rich. Conservatives are never that stupid.

I’ve got a 1990 Porsche 911. It’s just a Carrera, a very simple, straightforward little thing that goes like stink. I love it.

I had always thought of Egypt as a rather secular country. And I think it is, but people are quite observant of the strictures of Ramadan.

You can learn all about the human condition from covering the crime beat in a big city – you don’t need to go to Beirut for that – but a foreign correspondent begins to understand poverty from a different perspective.

We’ve come into the world of ‘1984,’ but it turns out to be ‘1984’-Lite.

One of the enduring problems with certain societies in the world – and this is certainly true of a lot of places in the Middle East – is that the capacity for self-governance and self-organizing just isn’t there. It has to do with history.

People are always angry at America. They’re absolutely certain that America either caused their problems or is deliberately not fixing their problems. But the anger is always directed at America and never at Americans.

The Clinton administration launched an attack on people in Texas because those people were religious nuts with guns. Hell, this country was founded by religious nuts with guns. Who does Bill Clinton think stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock?

If ever there were a place where people not only tend not to face economic facts, but it’s almost their purpose not to face economic facts, it’s Washington.

Detroit is beautiful – though you probably have to be a child of the industrial Midwest, like me, to see it.

If we heard that somebody starved to death in Sweden or Switzerland, we would be shocked.

Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.

Voting has proliferated in the United States, and it has reached a point where there is now almost one vote available per citizen over the age of eighteen.

Just because a subject is serious doesn’t mean it doesn’t have plenty of absurdities.

Call a man ‘ignorant,’ and you have license to show the world your vast fund of knowledge and wise him up.

Each child is biologically required to have a mother. Fatherhood is a well-regarded theory, but motherhood is a fact.

The problem in Afghanistan is really not so much land as water. It’s a dry country with ample amounts of water running through it, but not to good enough effect.

Something that confirms all fears and many conspiracy theories about government is finding out what our elected representatives would put into law if they could.

The only advantage to being a middle-aged man is that when you put on a jacket and tie, you’re the Scary Dad. Never mind that no one has had an actually scary dad since 1966. The visceral fear remains.

Never be unfaithful to a lover, except with your wife.

Mistreatment of al Qaeda members and their friends and hangers-on is something I number among my moral concerns. But it’s number 1,000,000,001.

Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.

America is a meritocracy.

College professors used to be badly paid and worth it. Colleges used to be modest institutions; they should go back to being modest institutions.

I spent a lot of time behind the Iron Curtain, and their cars were abysmal.

The great thing about being a print journalist is that you are permitted to duck. Cameramen get killed while the writers are flat on the floor. A war correspondent for the BBC dedicated his memoir to 50 fallen colleagues, and I guarantee you they were all taking pictures. I am only alive because I am such a chicken.

Ending wars is very simple if you surrender.

The good news is that, according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for everything. The bad news is that, according to the Obama administration, you’re rich.

The laws of the marketplace are physical laws, and they don’t become suspended in a crisis any more than the law of gravity does.

If I were a congressman who had voted for the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, I’d claim it was forced on our country by a sinister international organization.

I’m a political conservative.

When I board an airplane these days, all the middle-aged men are dressed like me – when I was an 8-year-old. They’re in shorts and T-shirts. And it’s not just on airplanes. It’s in business offices, teachers’ lounges, and churches.

A humorist doesn’t really do that much note-taking.

Finland is a rich country. What have they got? They got Nokia phones and plywood. How’d they get so rich? Because they’re free.

When I was fifteen, I dreamed of living in the big city, as many a young person does if he is artistic and sensitive. By ‘artistic and sensitive’ I mean short, skinny, unkissed, bad at sports, and carrying a C average in high school.

Staying married may have long-term benefits. You can elicit much more sympathy from friends over a bad marriage than you ever can from a good divorce.

Accuse a person of breaking all Ten Commandments, and you’ve written the promo blurb for the dust cover of his tell-all memoir.

There’s a love of rhetorical skill in the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden doesn’t just go on tape cassettes and say, ‘America sucks.’ He recites poetry; he finds things that ‘America sucks’ rhymes with.

Are you a Democrat because you’re a union member? Then why, after eight years of Bill Clinton, does some Chinese guy in Guangdong province have your job?

If we were to inspect ourselves or members of our family and our friends, we would see that we don’t really have to go all the way overseas to be mystified – we can be mystified right at home.

To blame the existence of al Qaeda on poverty like Egypt’s is a slur on the poor.

I am a student of stupidity. I am a political reporter.

Obama’s space policy doesn’t differ much from George W. Bush’s.

The 1960s was an era of big thoughts. And yet, amazingly, each of these thoughts could fit on a T-shirt.

I think it’s been hard for people to understand how Islam can be a good religion, and yet the Islamists are evil. Those of us who have had experience with Islam understand this, just as we understand the difference between snake handlers and people going to church on Sunday morning.

Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.

Charles McCarry is the best modern writer on the subject of intrigue – by the breadth of Alan Furst, by the fathom of Eric Ambler, by any measure.

When you’re a war correspondent, the reader is for you because the reader is saying, ‘Gee, I wouldn’t want to be doing that.’ They’re on your side.

What Alexander Graham Bell thought up occupied less space than a flower vase. Now it’s so small that I have to search all my pockets to discover I’ve received a spam text.

There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 380SL convertible.

One of the few benefits of being a journalist is that you’re not in the Army.

The foundation of collectivism is simple: There should be no important economic differences among people. No one should be too rich.

A Kindle returns us to the inconvenience of the scroll, except with batteries and electronic glitches. It’s as handy as bringing Homer along to recite the ‘Iliad’ while playing a lyre.

What is obnoxious about the motives of politicians – whatever those motives may be – is that politicians must announce their motives as visionary and grand.

Detroit’s industrial ruins are picturesque, like crumbling Rome in an 18th-century etching.

The best and brightest don’t go into politics. The best and brightest are at Goldman Sachs.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the archetypal extremely smart person who went into politics anyway instead of doing something worthwhile for his country.

Whatever it is that the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government does it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy.

I like making things. I have a wood shop at home. I am a terrible carpenter but I love doing it.

When the government runs out of lenders, it can do something that households are forbidden to do: print money.

Something is worth what somebody will pay for it. Nothing else, nothing more, nothing less.

Moviemakers are rewarded with tax write-offs if, when seeking a location that looks like America, they seek it in America.

In Hong Kong there is agglomeration beyond my fondest imaginings. The Kowloon district claims a population density four times that of New York City.

I don’t understand anything about America’s culture.

The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas – fascism, communism, the atomic bomb.

The young are adept at learning, but even more adept at avoiding it.

Rich people don’t like to be in the military. The shoes are ugly and the uniforms itch. Rich people don’t go in much for revolution or terrorism, either.

The one thing that’s terrible about traveling for fun is writing about it.

Modern elites live in bubbles of liberal affluence like Ann Arbor, Brookline, the Upper West Side, Palo Alto, or Chevy Chase. These places used to have impoverished neighborhoods nearby, but the poor people got chased out by young singles living in group homes, hipsters, and urban homesteading gay couples.

All religions must be made child-proof. Our teachers’ unions have done good work in this field, K through 12. Delaying first communions and bar mitzvahs until age 21 would be another positive step.

China is trying to become America without democracy while America is trying to become France without cheese calories.

I live in New Hampshire. We’re in favor of global warming. Eleven hundred more feet of sea-level rises? I’ve got beachfront property. You tell us up there, ‘By the end of the century, New York City could be underwater,’ and we say, ‘Your point is?’

The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.

All change is bad. But sometimes it has to be done.

I think that humor has become a principle means of communication among Americans about politics.

Gossip is what you say about the objects of flattery when they aren’t present.

Northwest Ohio is flat. There isn’t much up. The land is so flat that a child from Toledo is under the impression that the direction hills go is down. Sledding is done down from street level into creek beds and road cuts.

Gun violence has cost us too many political leaders, and hardly ever the worst ones.

I was very much in favor of the Iraq invasion.

After all, what is your host’s purpose in having a party? Surely not for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose, they’d have simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi.

America’s grossly unfair tax system won’t lead to class war. Or, if it does, the war will be brief.

Watching Republicans in Washington is like watching lemmings, if lemmings jumped into cesspools instead of off cliffs.

The problem, when comparing contemporary television to television in 1974, is that TV has become not just bad but sad.

There are two factors in American politics that may seem strange to Europeans: race and religion.

There are a few things that people all around the world need to admit to themselves. Trade restraints slow economic growth, the euro is not a reserve currency, and scoreless sports ties are boring.

Love can never be fully explained.

The anti-individualist enemies that Ayn Rand battled are still the enemy, but they’ve shifted their line of attack. Political collectivists are no longer much interested in taking things away from the wealthy and creative.

Abstract anger is great for rhetorical carrying on. You can go on endlessly about the post office, but it doesn’t mean you’re mad at your mailman.

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.

Jeans fit the mature male one of two ways, both dirigible in nature. You make a public impression that’s either Hindenburg or Goodyear blimp.

Tel Aviv is new, built on the sand dunes north of Jaffa in the 1890s, about the same time Miami was founded. The cities bear a resemblance in size, site, climate, and architecture, which ranges from the bland to the fancifully bland.

Kids are disorganized.

The whole idea of our government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.

One nice thing about making jokes is that you don’t have to prove them.

Public schools helped create the idea of America and inculcate Americans with a few rudiments of knowledge. To judge by that very American item, the Internet, a few rudiments is all anyone cares to have.

In theory, taxes should be like shopping. What I buy is government services. What I pay are my taxes.

Health care’s not about insurance! Health care’s about getting treatment.

Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.

Of all the American educational system’s problems, none is more severe than the academic year beginning before Labor Day.

If death weren’t around to ‘finalize’ the Darwinian process, we’d all still be amoebas.

Tom DeLay may or may not have broken campaign finance laws, but he did his best to look like he was breaking them.

Seriousness is stupidity sent to college.

I myself am a parent in a small business. Number of employees: one.

After the events of the 20th century, God, quite reasonably, left Europe. But He’s still here in the United States.

People think the free market is a philosophy, they think that it is a creed. It is none of those things. Free market is a bathroom scale, it is a measuring tape, it’s simply a measurement.

Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.

Gay marriage acceptance is happening in the blink of an eye.

A friend of mine at the American Enterprise Institute says there are two parties: the silly party and the stupid party. I’m too old for the silly party, so I had to join the stupid party.

I grew up going to public school, and they were huge public schools. I went to a school that had 3,200 kids, and I had grade school classes with 40-some kids. Discipline was rigid. Most of the learning was rote. It worked.

Pete Seeger is a modest, unassuming, cheerful, and kind-natured man. He’s a good folk singer, if you can stand folk singing. And he’s such an excellent banjo player that you almost don’t wish you had a pair of wire cutters.

Why do elites hate the poor? It’s xenophobia. They don’t know any poor people – except their off-the-books Brazilian nanny and illegal immigrant cleaning lady from Upper Revolta who don’t speak English.

I’ve only been to New Zealand once, about 1989. It was incredibly beautiful, kind of like the ideal of where I live in New England – all that and then some – but I can’t say I was there long enough to get any very clear idea.

The importance of local governance may not be obvious to an America accustomed to treating city and state downfalls with doses of federal comeuppance. Sometimes there’s a reason for that – the Civil War. More often, all reasoning seems absent – No Child Left Behind.

In a free country, government is a dull and onerous responsibility. It is a parent-teacher conference.

I don’t think anybody’s really been successful with theorizing about value or creating a price theory.

Soldiers are not policemen, and it’s very unfair, even for those soldiers who have some police training, to burden them with police duties. It’s not what they’re trained for, or equipped for.

Infant mortality and life expectancy are reasonable indicators of general well-being in a society.

Hubris is one of the great renewable resources.

More modern poetry is written than read.

Let’s reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools – and use it on the teachers.

Politics won’t allow for the truth.

If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health, slow your mind, make you fat – in other words, turn you into an adult.

There are plenty of problems in the world, and doubtless climate change – or whatever the currently voguish phrase for it all is – certainly is one of them. But it’s low on my list.

Richard Nixon was the best thing that ever happened to journalism. I mean this guy was wonderful. Just when you thought he could get no worse, he got worse.

We will win an election when all the seats in the House and Senate and the chair behind the desk in the Oval Office and the whole bench of the Supreme Court are filled with people who wish they weren’t there.

The problem with public school is not overcrowding in the classroom. The problem is not teacher unions. The problem is not underfunding or lack of computer equipment. The problem is your damn kids.

The number of American presidential candidates varies with the sunspot cycle and the phases of the moon.

Israel is slightly smaller than New Jersey. Moses in effect led the tribes of Israel out of the District of Columbia, parted Chesapeake Bay near Annapolis, and wandered for forty years in Delaware.

Politicians will talk strategy and tactics and policies and programs until they’re blue in the face, or you strangle them and they turn blue.

Excessive speed and quantity are, like chattiness and digression, besetting sins of cyber-assisted authorship.

There are selves too big for one person to contain. You cannot call them selfish. There is nothing -ish about such selves. They are the self, as it were, itself.

Some day you will be wheeled in for a heart bypass operation, and a surgeon will be the person who is now behind the counter when you renew your car registration at the department of motor vehicles.

Most people sort of enjoy going to work because of the socialisation, a chance to flirt with co-workers and so on, but actually hate the job they do.

Is Bill Clinton so good at politics, or are other politicians so bad?

Who, other than a crazy person, does anything besides hang up on a robo-call? Any call, any person, anywhere, under any circumstances.

Why can’t death – if we must have it – be always glorious, as in ‘The Iliad?’

As I get older, all sorts of things become less funny. Once one has children, any cruelty involving children becomes far less amusing than when one was at the mercy of one’s friends’ and relatives’ children.

What Enron was doing, what caused investors to embrace it in a rapture of baffled awe, was hiding debt.

Why is Iraq so easy to harm and so hard to help?

People are not ants or bees. We do not reason or love or live or die collectively.

Liberals have invented whole college majors – psychology, sociology and women’s studies – to prove that nothing is anybody’s fault.

Once you’ve built the big machinery of political power, remember you won’t always be the one to run it.

There’s one more terrifying fact about old people: I’m going to be one soon.