I grew up in central Illinois midway between Chicago and St. Louis and I made an historic blunder. All my friends became Cardinals fans and grew up happy and liberal and I became a Cubs fan and grew up embittered and conservative.
In democracy, as quaintly understood, voters pick their representatives. American democracy increasingly reverses that. Legislative districts are drawn to protect incumbents who, effectively, pick their voters.
Liberalism is wrong because it doesn’t work. If a company is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.
All politicians are to some extent salesmen.
Long before Einstein told us that matter is energy, Machiavelli and Hobbes and other modern political philosophers defined man as a lump of matter whose most politically relevant attribute is a form of energy called self-interestedness. This was not a.
Ronald Reagan has held the two most demeaning jobs in the country; President of the United States and radio broadcaster for the Chicago Cubs.
Modern man’s capacity for destruction is quixotic evidence of humanity’s capacity for reconstruction. The powerful technological agents we have unleashed against the environment include many of the agents we require for its reconstruction.
A decrease in the quantity of legislation generally means an increase in the quality of life.
Geology has joined biology in lowering mankind’s self-esteem. Geology suggests how mankind’s existence is contingent upon the geological consent of the planet.
The realistic way to reduce the amount of money in politics is to reduce the amount of politics in money – the importance of government in allocating wealth and opportunity.
What the federal government does basically is borrow money from people and mail it to people.
Civilization depends on, and civility often requires, the willingness to say, ‘What you are doing is none of my business’ and ‘What I am doing is none of your business.’
The essence of constitutionalism in a democracy is not merely to shape and condition the nature of majorities, but also to stipulate that certain things are impermissible, no matter how large and fervent a majority might want them.
Disparagement of television is second only to watching television as an American pastime.
The sequester has forced liberals to clarify their conviction that whatever the government’s size is at any moment, is the bare minimum neccessary to forestall intolerable suffering.
For Conservatives, seeing is believing. For liberals, believing is seeing.
The proof of liberal virtue is generousity with other people’s money.
So the Clinton-Gore era culminates with an election as stained as the blue dress, a Democratic chorus complaining that the Constitution should not be the controlling legal authority, and Clinton’s understudy dispatching lawyers to litigate this: It depends on what the meaning of ‘vote’ is.
Hyperbole expands in societies where articulateness atrophies.
The people who flood our living-rooms with a smorgasbord of commercial messages about fetid breath, moist underarms and troubled intestines know this: an appropriate time, place and manner to sell a product is any that sells the product.