Correct thinkers think that ‘baseball trivia’ is an oxymoron: nothing about baseball is trivial.
In the lexicon of the political class, the word ‘sacrifice’ means that the citizens are supposed to mail even more of their income to Washington so that the political class will not have to sacrifice the pleasure of spending it.
The future has a way of arriving unannounced.
Voters don’t decide issues, they decide who will decide issues.
It is said that God gave us memory so we could have roses in winter. But it is also true that without memory we could not have self in any season. The more memories you have, the more you have. That is why, as Swift said, No wise man ever wished to be younger.
Taking offense has become America’s national pastime; being theatrically offended supposedly signifies the exquisitely refined moral delicacy of people who feel entitled to pass through life without encountering ideas or practices that annoy them.
I suppose there’s a melancholy tone at the back of the American mind, a sense of something lost. And it’s the lost world of Thomas Jefferson. It is the lost sense of innocence that we could live with a very minimal state, with a vast sense of space in which to work out freedom.
Being elected to Congress is regarded as being sent on a looting raid for one’s friends.
Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.
The great task of life is transmission: the task of transmitting the essential tools and graces of life from our parents to our children.
It is extraordinary how extraordinary the ordinary person is.
A society that thinks the choice between ways of living is just a choice between equally eligible ‘lifestyles’ turns universities into academic cafeterias offering junk food for the mind.
The phrase ‘domestic cat’ is an oxymoron.
This is an age in which one cannot find common sense without a search warrant.
As advertising blather becomes the nation’s normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.
Baseball is a habit. The slowly rising crescendo of each game, the rhythm of the long season – these are the essentials and they are remarkably unchanged over nearly a century and a half. Of how many American institutions can that be said?
Sports serve society by providing vivid examples of excellence.
All I remember about my wedding day in 1967 is that the Cubs lost a double-header.
Freedom is not only the absence of external restraints. It is also the absence of irresistible internal compulsions, unmanageable passion, and uncensorable highlights.
Donald Trump is redundant evidence that if your net worth is high enough, your IQ can be very low and you can still intrude into American politics.