Twenty years ago rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for IBM.
Freedom means the freedom to behave coarsely, basely, foolishly.
Constitutional arguments that seem as dry as dust can have momentous consequences.
Americans are overreaching; overreaching is the most admirable and most American of the many American excesses.
Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it.
If you seek Hamilton’s monument, look around. You are living in it. We honor Jefferson, but live in Hamilton’s country, a mighty industrial nation with a strong central government.
Leadership is, among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it – short-term pain for long-term gain.
Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose.
Politicians fascinate because they constitute such a paradox; they are an elite that accomplishes mediocrity for the public good.
If your job is to leaven ordinary lives with elevating spectacle, be elevating or be gone.
Perhaps the soundest advice for parents is: Lighten up. People have been raising children for approximately as long as there have been people.
Political nature abhors a vacuum, which is what often exists for a year or two in a party after it loses a presidential election.
Democrats believe, plausibly, that middle-class entitlements are instantly addictive and, because there is no known detoxification, that class, when facing future choices between trimming entitlements or increasing taxes, will choose the latter.
Corporations do not pay taxes, they collect them, passing the burden to consumers as a cost of production. And corporate taxation is a feast of rent-seeking – a cornucopia of credits, exemptions and other subsidies conferred by the political class on favored, and grateful, corporations.
Big government inevitably drives an upward distribution of wealth to those whose wealth, confidence and sophistication enable them to manipulate government.
Voters cannot hold officials responsible if they do not know what government is doing, or which parts of government are doing what.
The strongest continuous thread in America’s political tradition is skepticism about government.
Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.
Politics in a democracy is transactional: Politicians seek votes by promising to do things for voters, who seek promises in exchange for their votes.
World War II was the last government program that really worked.