Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Being elected to Congress is regarded as being sent on a looting raid for one's friends.
As has been said, standards are always out of date - that is why we call them standards.
Disparagement of television is second only to watching television as an American pastime.
Well, you know, the definition of second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.
Few things are as stimulating as other people's calamities observed from a safe distance.
As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.
If your job is to leaven ordinary lives with elevating spectacle, be elevating or be gone.
Pessimism is as American as apple pie - frozen apple pie with a slice of processed cheese.
Most presidents come to Washington bright as freshly minted dimes and leave much diminished.
A decrease in the quantity of legislation generally means an increase in the quality of life.
[P]rogressivism is a top-down, continent-wide tissue of taxes, mandates, and other coercions.
What the federal government does basically is borrow money from people and mail it to people.
It (baseball) has no clock, no ties and no Liberal intrusions into the organized progression.
Stalin's henchman Molotov, 96, died old and in bed, a privilege he helped to deny to millions.
The strongest continuous thread in America's political tradition is skepticism about government.
Correct thinkers think that 'baseball trivia' is an oxymoron: nothing about baseball is trivial.
Only in football is long-term injury the result not of accidents but of the game played properly.
Liberalism is wrong because it doesn't work. If a company is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.
Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.
I don't think anyone has ever announced running for president that they want to change the Bill of Rights.
All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are up to a point.
Americans are overreaching; overreaching is the most admirable and most American of the many American excesses.
A politician's words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.
The First Amendment...begins with the five loveliest words in the English language: 'Congress shall make no law'.
Baseball's best teams lose about sixty-five times a season. It is not a game you can play with your teeth clenched.
The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.
When a politician says the debate is over, you can be sure of two things; the debate is raging; and he's losing it.
Capital punishment, like the rest of the criminal justice system, is a government program, so skepticism is in order.
According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.
All children find chaos congenial. Any unruliness, even by nature, advances the child's program of subverting authority.
Remember Henry Adam's jest that the succession of presidents from Washington to Grant disproved the theory of evolution?
The best use of history is as an inoculation against radical expectations, and hence against embittering disappointments.
Leadership is, among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it - short-term pain for long-term gain.
Each achieves one or both of two objectives — making liberals feel good about themselves and being good to liberal candidates.
Political nature abhors a vacuum, which is what often exists for a year or two in a party after it loses a presidential election.
Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.
Politicians fascinate because they constitute such a paradox; they are an elite that accomplishes mediocrity for the public good.
Today it would be progress if everyone would stop talking about values. Instead, let us talk, as the Founders did, about virtues.
I am opposed to term limits because if we did not have seasoned professionals, we would not have the good government that we have.
Voters cannot hold officials responsible if they do not know what government is doing, or which parts of government are doing what.
There is no reason to think today's levels of [drug] addiction are anywhere near the levels that would be reached under legalization.
The business of America is not business. Neither is it war. The business of america is justice and securing the blessings of liberty.
Modern Americans travel light, with little philosophic baggage other than a fervent belief in their right to the pursuit of happiness.
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.
The great task of life is transmission: the task of transmitting the essential tools and graces of life from our parents to our children
Like a snail crossing a sidewalk, the Clinton Administration leaves a lengthening trail of slime, this time on America's national honor.
Baseball exemplifies a tension in the American mind, the constant pull between our atomistic individualism and our yearning for community.
There is an aura of changelessness to sport. There is the flux of competition, but it occurs within the ordering confinement of clear rules.
Canada has one great novelist (Robertson Davies), which means it has one for every twenty-five million citizens - the world's highest ratio.
Invariably, it is this for which I write: the joy ... of an argument firmly made, like a nail straightly driven, its head flush to the plank.