If we were to inspect ourselves or members of our family and our friends, we would see that we don't really have to go all the way overseas to be mystified - we can be mystified right at home.

Even the most left-wing politicians worship wealth creation - as the political-action-committee collection plate is passed.

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.

I don't mind America becoming a Third World country. The weather is better in the Third World than it is where I live in New Hampshire. And household help will be much cheaper.

The Bible is very clear about one thing: Using politics to create fairness is a sin.

I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a 'learning experience.' Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I've done as a 'learning experience.' It makes me feel less stupid.

Californians are people who insist on growing their own vegetables, but they won't dig up the pretty lawn, won't plant anything for fear of getting dirty, and they use fragrant bath salts from The Body Shop instead of smelly compost.

The great apologist has to have lived large and wild. If he's going to kiss the world's boo-boos and make up, he'd better plant some bruises first. A master apologizer has to be a Lord Byron, a Rick in Casablanca, a Lee Atwater, anyway.

The problem in Afghanistan is really not so much land as water. It's a dry country with ample amounts of water running through it, but not to good enough effect.

People will tell you anything but what they do is always the truth.

Barack Obama is more irritating than the other nuisances on the Left.

Upbeat is for people who want to feel good about their cause: the reformers, the progressives, the revolutionaries, the utopians, the collectivists, and the rest of the altruistic scum of the earth. Why do these people want to feel good? They want to feel good in order to convince themselves that they are good.

For decades in America, there has been an effort to ensure that the rights of those who are not sane are the same as the rights of those who are.

A lot of newspaper columns used to be written in a rat-a-tat-tat, fast-paced style - and they tended to be funny. They were a little relief from the grimmer, grayer parts of the newspaper, and one of the best people at doing this was Will Rogers.

Every vote should carry a serial number, so that responsibility for harmful or careless use of the vote can be traced. Concealed voting should be outlawed.

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.

The Afghans themselves say that if you put two Afghans in a room, you get three factions.

I had always thought of Egypt as a rather secular country. And I think it is, but people are quite observant of the strictures of Ramadan.

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.

When you're a war correspondent, the reader is for you because the reader is saying, 'Gee, I wouldn't want to be doing that.' They're on your side.

Mikhail Gorbachev was the Jimmy Carter of the Communist bloc. The Russians hate him.

As a longtime former resident of 15 years in Washington, I wish that everybody would stay off the Mall with their political cause so that we can get out there, you know, and play flag football or Frisbee, or walk the dog or something - you know, which is, you know, what the National Mall should be for, in my personal opinion.

One nice thing about making jokes is that you don't have to prove them.

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.

Everybody is xenophobic to an extent.

I've never been able to get it straight about what these people who are worried about the trade deficit are worried about.

Maybe the real secret to America's greatness is that we hate one another.

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.

If I were a congressman who had voted for the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, I'd claim it was forced on our country by a sinister international organization.

Americans are good at pursuing happiness. And the Americans who pursue happiness most diligently show that we're also good at running it down and killing it.

Toledo is better than exciting, it's happy. Because nothing is more conducive to unhappiness than taking yourself seriously, and taking yourself seriously is difficult when you're baseball team is the Mud Hens.

Network television has been attempting to lure viewers for years with its low-interest programming only to have those viewers discover later that their brains are bankrupt.

The one thing that's terrible about traveling for fun is writing about it.

Finland is a rich country. What have they got? They got Nokia phones and plywood. How'd they get so rich? Because they're free.

There are 1.3 billion people in China, and they all want a Buick.

Love can never be fully explained.

The great majority of Baghdad is a slum - a lot of it's new, but it's still slum. It's usually this concrete-block, one-room design with a door and a window, arranged one-up, one-down, often with a shop with nothing in it on the first floor, and then a one-room apartment above it. There's street after street after street of that stuff.

One of the enduring problems with certain societies in the world - and this is certainly true of a lot of places in the Middle East - is that the capacity for self-governance and self-organizing just isn't there. It has to do with history.

America's grossly unfair tax system won't lead to class war. Or, if it does, the war will be brief.

If you talk to most businessmen, they'll say that what they do is for the public good, but you know they're just greedy, and consumers are just consuming for the sake of their own greed.

Democrats hate stay-at-home spouses, no matter what gender or gender preference.

Nobody is making Americans buy Chinese goods.

Accuse a person of breaking all Ten Commandments, and you've written the promo blurb for the dust cover of his tell-all memoir.

Chinese economic development has cost many American workers their jobs. That's the price of progress.

Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.

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.

Until I carried my wife off to New Hampshire, she defined wilderness as the Bronx.

If you want to join the Republican party, they have to let you in. There's nothing they can do about it. I mean, if Republicans will take Al D'Amato, they'll take anybody.

Our regulatory bodies strive to create honest dealings, fair trades, and a situation in which no one has an advantage over anyone else. But human beings aren't honest. And all trades are made because one person thinks he's getting the better of the other, and the other person thinks the same.

I don't think anybody's really been successful with theorizing about value or creating a price theory.