The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.
Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. Not all holes, or games, are created equal.
Some parents say it is toy guns that make boys warlike. But give a boy a rubber duck and he will seize its neck like the butt of a pistol and shout ‘Bang!’
I don’t think anyone has ever announced running for president that they want to change the Bill of Rights.
Fish have got to swim. Birds have got to fly, and Clintons have to run for office. It’s what they do. It’s a metabolic urge. That’s all they’ve done their entire life is borrow money from rich people to seek public office.
A politician’s words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.
I hear Democrats say, ‘The Affordable Care Act is the law,’ as though we’re supposed to genuflect at that sunburst of insight and move on. Well, the Fugitive Slave Act was the law, separate but equal was the law, lots of things are the law and then we change them.
We are given children to test us and make us more spiritual.
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.