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.
