The body is forever teaching us lessons. There are all sorts of things that we can't do, shouldn't do, had better not do very often or do for too long as we get older. The body makes its presence known.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The prevalence of mobile homes does not correspond with the prevalence of poverty, or with much of anything else. All that can be confidently said about America's mobile homes is that they are massed in places where you wouldn't want to be in one. Florida's mobile homes lie athwart the path of hurricanes. Georgia's are in the way of tornadoes.

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.

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

I read good. I was an English major.

The more aspects of life that can be moved from private reign to public realm, the better it is for politics.

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

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

Arab-led Islamic fundamentalism destabilizes nations from Algeria to the Philippines.

Why can't death - if we must have it - be always glorious, as in 'The Iliad?'

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

There's a certain kind of behavior in the Arab world that, to me, resembles the way young men behave when there is no significant influence from women in their lives.

Fiscal conservatism is just an easy way to express something that is a bit more difficult, which is that the size and scope of government, and really the size and scope of politics in our lives, has grown uncomfortable, unwieldy, intrusive and inefficient.

I don't watch much television.

'You're stupid,' is not something even his most severe critics usually say to President Barack Obama.

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.

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

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.

Horses and horsepower alike are about status and being cool.

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.

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

Arguing, in the sense of attempting to convince others, has gone out of fashion with conservatives.

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

Writing is agony. I hate it.

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

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.

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

I think it's always easy to be sympathetic to parts of the government in detail; in their concrete manifestations. Because obviously, we don't have government for no reason.

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

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

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.

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

You're never going to read 'The Wealth of Nations,' and you shouldn't, really. It's 900 pages.

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

We have the British motor industry as a role model for what happens when you try to save an industrial dinosaur. Britain was the first country to industrialise and the first to de-industrialise. We should learn from this.

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.'

America's public schools have served their purpose. Free and compulsory education was good for a somewhat unpromising young nation.

My wife and I both come from Irish families. There are two kinds of Irish families: the hitting kind and the kidding kind. If you're fortunate - and both of us are - you come from the kidding kind of Irish family.

Some taxpayers may object to a print journalism bailout on the grounds that it mostly benefits the liberal elite. And we can't blame taxpayers for being reluctant to subsidize the reportorial careers of J-school twerps who should have joined the Peace Corps and gone to Africa to 'speak truth to power' to Robert Mugabe.

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

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

Philosophy was once considered science.

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

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