Age gives you an excuse for not being very good at things that you were not very good at when you were young.
Seldom do people think things through foolishly. More often, they do not bother to think things through at all, so that even brainy individuals can reach untenable conclusions because their brainpower means little if it is not deployed and applied.
What is called an educated person is often someone who has had a dangerously superficial exposure to a wide spectrum of subjects.
The only people I truly envy are those who can play a musical instrument and those who can eat anything they want without gaining weight.
Nowhere in the world do you find this evenness that people use as a norm. And I find it fascinating that they will hold up as a norm something that has never been seen on this planet, and regard as an anomaly something that is seen in country after country.
Ronald Reagan had a vision of America. Barack Obama has a vision of Barack Obama.
Minimum wage laws appear to give low-income workers something for nothing – and appearances are what count in politics. Realities can be left to others, so long as appearances get votes.
President Obama keeps telling us that he is “creating jobs.” But more and more Americans have no jobs. The unemployment rate has declined slightly, but only because many people have stopped looking for jobs. You are only counted as unemployed if you are still looking for a job.
Systemic processes tend to reward people for making decisions that turn out to be right – creating great resentment among the anointed, who feel themselves entitled to rewards for being articulate, politically active, and morally fervent.
It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.
There are few talents so richly rewarded – especially in politics and the media – as the ability to portray parasites as victims, and portray demands for preferential treatment as struggles for equal rights.
When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.
We need laws written by people who have confronted life in the real world, not in the sheltered world of trust fund recipients of the insulated cocoon of academia.
Before the Iraq war I was quite disturbed by some of the neoconservatives, who were saying things like, “What is the point of being a superpower if you can’t do such-and-such, take on these responsibilities?” The point of being a superpower is that people will leave you alone.
Any politician who can be elected only by turning Americans against other Americans is too dangerous to be elected.