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?

Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.

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.

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

No industry in living memory has collapsed faster than daily print journalism.

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

Because of their size, parents may be difficult to discipline properly.

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

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

Seriousness is stupidity sent to college.

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.

You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they're going.

A penny will not buy a penny postcard or a penny whistle or a single piece of penny candy. It will not even, if you're managing the U.S. Mint, buy a penny.

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.

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

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

The library, with its Daedalian labyrinth, mysterious hush, and faintly ominous aroma of knowledge, has been replaced by the computer's cheap glow, pesky chirp, and data spillage.

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?'

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.

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

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

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

Agriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the first Thanksgiving dinner kickback to the Indians for subsidizing Pilgrim maize production with fish head fertilizer grants.

Don't send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals, when their cheery effect is needed.

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

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

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

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.

The purpose of sports - even foreign sports - is not to bore people.

Let's reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools - and use it on the teachers.

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.

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.

Hubris is one of the great renewable resources.

The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.

Everybody in the Middle East wants to explain why they're right.

The Communist bloc of old was a study in the failure of failure. Losers in the Soviet economy were the people at the end of the long lines for consumer goods. Worse losers were the people who had spent hours getting to the head of the line, only to be told that the goods were unavailable.

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.

The C student starts a restaurant. The A student writes restaurant reviews.

Being a humorist is not a voluntary thing. You can tell this because in a situation where saying a funny thing will cause a lot of trouble, a humorist will still say the funny thing. No matter how inappropriate.

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.

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.

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

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.

Harvard is the home of American ideas.

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

I usually agree with Rush Limbaugh; therefore I usually don't listen to him.

The budget doesn't have much control over the government. Then again, the government doesn't have much control over the budget.

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

Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the exception of guppies, who like to eat theirs.

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