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.
Capital punishment, like the rest of the criminal justice system, is a government program, so skepticism is in order.
Football brings out the sociologist that lurks in some otherwise respectable citizens. They say football is a metaphor for America’s sinfulness.
She is so totally absorbed in a vocation – both a gift and a mastering passion – that she has no time to be absorbed with the self’s worries about itself. And that is the moral of the story: You can pursue happiness by wearing a torn jersey. You can catch it by being good at something you love.
I say statecraft is soulcraft. Just as all education is moral education because learning conditions conduct, most legislation is moral legislations because it conditions the action and the thought of the nation in broad and important spheres in life.
Actually, there is only one first question of government, and it is How should we live? or What kind of people do we want our citizens to be?
Today more Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses than for property crimes.
Baseball exemplifies a tension in the American mind, the constant pull between our atomistic individualism and our yearning for community.
Today it would be progress if everyone would stop talking about values. Instead, let us talk, as the Founders did, about virtues.
We know next to nothing about virtually everything. It is not necessary to know the origin of the universe; it is necessary to want to know. Civilization depends not on any particular knowledge, but on the disposition to crave knowledge.
There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.
All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are up to a point.
I’ve lived in Washington now for 44 years, and that’s a lot of folly to witness up close. Whatever confidence and optimism I felt towards the central government when I got here on January 1, 1970 has pretty much dissipated at the hands of the government.