We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did.
Our fate is matched by the total freedom we have to react to our fate. It is as if we were dealt a hand of card. Once we have them, we are free to play them as we choose.
Any politician who starts shouting election-year demagoguery about the rich and the poor should be asked, “What about the other 90 percent of the people?”
Whenever someone refers to me as someone “who happens to be black,” I wonder if they realize that both my parents are black. If I had turned out to be Scandinavian or Chinese, people would have wondered what was going on.
Any policy is a success by sufficiently low standards and a failure by sufficiently high standards.
Those government officials who want more power are not going to stop unless they get stopped.
Extrapolations are the last refuge of a groundless argument.
Everyone may be called “comrade,” but some comrades have the power of life and death over other comrades.
Racism does not have a good track record. It’s been tried out for a long time and you’d think by now we’d want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management.
What all these lofty and vague phrases boil down to is that the court can impose things that the voters don’t want and the Constitution does not require, but which are in vogue in circles to which the court responds.
You may scoff at the Tooth Fairy if you like. But the Tooth Fairy’s approach has gotten more politicians elected than any economist’s analysis.
Anyone who does not understand the utter cynicism of politics does not understand politics.
Whatever we wish to achieve in the future, it must begin by knowing where we are in the present- not where we wish we were, or whee we wish others to think we are, but where we are in fact.
Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism.
An e-mail from a reader says that liberals like to take the moral high ground, even though their own moral relativism means that there is no moral high ground.
What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less.
Just as a poetic discussion of the weather is not meteorology, so an issuance of moral pronouncements or political creeds about the economy is not economics. Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy.
People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.
If we spend our time with regrets over yesterday, and worries over what might happen tomorrow, we have no today in which to live.
One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring.