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.
