On a throne at the center of a sense of humor sits a capacity for irony. All wit rests on a cheerful awareness of life’s incongruities. It is a gentling awareness, and no politician without it should be allowed near power.
A decrease in the quantity of legislation generally means an increase in the quality of life.
The realistic way to reduce the amount of money in politics is to reduce the amount of politics in money – the importance of government in allocating wealth and opportunity.
What the federal government does basically is borrow money from people and mail it to people.
Civilization depends on, and civility often requires, the willingness to say, ‘What you are doing is none of my business’ and ‘What I am doing is none of your business.’
The essence of constitutionalism in a democracy is not merely to shape and condition the nature of majorities, but also to stipulate that certain things are impermissible, no matter how large and fervent a majority might want them.
Disparagement of television is second only to watching television as an American pastime.
The sequester has forced liberals to clarify their conviction that whatever the government’s size is at any moment, is the bare minimum neccessary to forestall intolerable suffering.
For Conservatives, seeing is believing. For liberals, believing is seeing.
The proof of liberal virtue is generousity with other people’s money.
So the Clinton-Gore era culminates with an election as stained as the blue dress, a Democratic chorus complaining that the Constitution should not be the controlling legal authority, and Clinton’s understudy dispatching lawyers to litigate this: It depends on what the meaning of ‘vote’ is.
Hyperbole expands in societies where articulateness atrophies.
The people who flood our living-rooms with a smorgasbord of commercial messages about fetid breath, moist underarms and troubled intestines know this: an appropriate time, place and manner to sell a product is any that sells the product.
There is an aura of changelessness to sport. There is the flux of competition, but it occurs within the ordering confinement of clear rules.
All children find chaos congenial. Any unruliness, even by nature, advances the child’s program of subverting authority.
National security rests on the credible threat of a form of warfare universally condemned since the Dark Ages, the wholesale slaughter of noncombatants.
Greek philosophers considered sport a religious and civic-in a word, moral-undertaking. Sport, they said, is morally serious because mankind’s noblest aim is the loving contemplation of worthy things, such as beauty and courage.
Most presidents come to Washington bright as freshly minted dimes and leave much diminished.
Commercial society regards people as bundles of appetites, a conception that turns human beings inside out, leaving nothing to be regarded as inherently private.
Nationalism is blamed for this century’s wars, but nationalism need not mean militarism. And the nation-state has been the laboratory of liberty.
Man is messy, but any creature that can create space vehicles can probably cope.