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.

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

There are a number of Americans who shouldn't vote. The number is 57 percent, to judge by the combined total of Clinton and Perot ballots in the 1996 presidential election.

Jimmy Carter was - he still - he remains to this day America's most ex of ex-presidents. You just can't believe that we elected this doofus. He was a bright enough guy and sort of well-meaning. But he was about as prepared to be president of the United States as your goofy old uncle, you know, the one that memorises baseball statistics.

Obama, in pursuit of power, has been as greedy and irresponsible as any Wall Street tycoon in pursuit of money.

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.

Our earliest evidence of government, in the ruins of Babylon and Egypt, shows nothing but ziggurats and pyramids of wasted taxpayer money, the TARP funds and shovel-ready stimulus programs of their day.

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.

Neither liberal nor conservative politicians can resist the temptation to stand as mighty sequoias of rectitude amid the lowly underbrush of fundraising.

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

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

The real purpose of welfare is to get rid of poor people entirely. Everybody knows welfare has bad effects; that's the point.

I'm a political conservative.

The Nobel Peace Prize has always been a joke - albeit a grim one. Alfred Bernhard Nobel famously invented dynamite and felt sorry about it.

The U.S. tax code was written by A students. Every April 15, we have to pay somebody who got an A in accounting to keep ourselves from being sent to jail.

Freedom is for fun.

What would annoy the most people most often? That is the true left-wing test of government intervention.

The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.

The bar is set pretty low if you want to be a hip, accessible conservative.

I live in rural New Hampshire, and we are, frankly, short on people who are black, gay, Jewish, and Hispanic. In fact, we're short on people. My town has a population of 301.

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.

I just wasn't cut out to be a Chinese Tiger Mom. I'm more of an Irish Setter Dad.