Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Ronald Reagan has held the two most demeaning jobs in the country; President of the United States and radio broadcaster for the Chicago Cubs.
Actually, there is only one first question of government, and it is How should we live? or What kind of people do we want our citizens to be?
Perhaps the soundest advice for parents is: Lighten up. People have been raising children for approximately as long as there have been people.
The most important business of one generation is the raising of the next generation. Nothing else you do in life will be as deeply satisfying.
The unpleasant sound Bush is emitting as he traipses from one conservative gathering to another is a thin, tinny "arf" - the sound of a lap dog.
Football brings out the sociologist that lurks in some otherwise respectable citizens. They say football is a metaphor for America's sinfulness.
Nationalism is blamed for this century's wars, but nationalism need not mean militarism. And the nation-state has been the laboratory of liberty.
What is really shocking in America isn't what's done in and by Washington that is illegal by that what is done in and by Washington that's legal.
Donald Trump is redundant evidence that if your net worth is high enough, your IQ can be very low and you can still intrude into American politics.
Americans complain a lot about the government and they voice a generalized suspicion of the government, but they constantly clammer for more of it.
Politics in a democracy is transactional: Politicians seek votes by promising to do things for voters, who seek promises in exchange for their votes.
The reformers' preferred metaphor is "leveling the playing field." They should listen to the logic of their language: fields are leveled by bulldozers.
The almost erotic pleasure of spending money that others have earned and saved is one reason people put up with the tiresome aspects of political life.
National security rests on the credible threat of a form of warfare universally condemned since the Dark Ages, the wholesale slaughter of noncombatants.
They are supposed to be dispassionate dispensers of Pure Justice, icy islands of emotionless calculation. In short, umpires should be acute Republicans.
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!'
Big government inevitably drives an upward distribution of wealth to those whose wealth, confidence and sophistication enable them to manipulate government.
Creative semantics is the key to contemporary government; it consists of talking in strange tongues lest the public learn the inevitable inconveniently early.
Baseball's rich in wonderful statistics, but it's hard to find one more beautiful than Stan Musial's hitting record. He didn't care where he was, he just hit.
Geology has joined biology in lowering mankind's self-esteem. Geology suggests how mankind's existence is contingent upon the geological consent of the planet.
Modern parents want to nurture so skillfully that Mother Nature will gasp in admiration at the marvels their parenting produces from the soft clay of children.
Commercial society regards people as bundles of appetites, a conception that turns human beings inside out, leaving nothing to be regarded as inherently private.
The euro pleases dispirited people for whom European history is not Chartres and Shakespeare but the Holocaust and the Somme. The euro expresses cultural despair.
That is the crux of modern conservatism - government taking strong measures to foster the attitudes and aptitudes necessary for increased individual independence.
A surreal and ultimately disgusting facet of the Iraq fiasco is the lag between when a fact becomes obvious and when the fiasco's architects acknowledge that fact.
Wars do not always begin with an abrupt, cymbal-crash rupture of conditions properly characterized as peace. There can be almost seamlessly incremental transitions.
When liberals advocate a value-added tax, conservatives should respond: Taxing consumption has merits, so we will consider it - after the 16th Amendment is repealed.
The cultivation - even celebration - of victimhood by intellectuals, tort lawyers, politicians and the media is both cause and effect of today's culture of complaint.
When a politician says, concerning an issue involving science, that the debate is over, you may be sure the debate is rolling on and not going swimmingly for his side.
Freedom is not only the absence of external restraints. It is also the absence of irresistible internal compulsions, unmanageable passion, and uncensorable highlights.
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.'
We have 3,141 counties in this country. That would be 20 per county. The idea that we can't assimilate these 8-year-old criminals with their teddy bears is preposterous.
If there were 10,000 U.S. forces ashore [in Lebanon], authorized to move about, there would be less risk to American lives than there is with an immobile force of 1,300.
Children who open their lunchboxes and find mothers' handwritten notes telling them how amazingly bright they are tend to falter when they encounter academic difficulties.
The Soviet Union tried for 70 years to plant Marxism with bayonets in Eastern Europe. Today there are more Marxists on the Harvard faculty than there are in Eastern Europe.
Barack Obama hopes his famous health care victory will mark him as a transformative president. History, however, may judge it to have been his missed opportunity to be one.
Since 1946, the Cubs have had two problems: They put too few runs on the scoreboard and the other guys put too many. So what is the new management improving? The scoreboard.
Hart is still like that little tub of vaguely milklike gunk that comes with airline coffee. It is labeled a "nondairy" product. Fine: we know what is is non, but what is it?
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.
The Revolution's most important result was Napoleon, whose most important result (as France learned in 1871, and again in 1914, and again in 1940) was the invention of Germany
The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, the United Nations is a disunited collection of regimes, many of which do not represent the nations they govern.
Sports is a moral undertaking because it requires of participants, and it schools spectators in the appreciation of, noble things - courage, grace under pressure, sportsmanship.
The education of this president [Obama] is a protracted and often amusing process . . . as he continues to alight upon the obvious with a sense of profound and original discovery.
If you seek Hamilton's monument, look around. You are living in it. We honor Jefferson, but live in Hamilton's country, a mighty industrial nation with a strong central government.
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.
The average American expends more time becoming informed about choosing a car than choosing a candidate. But, then, the consequences of the former choice are immediate and discernible.
Whatever right the Second Amendment protects is not as important as it was 200 years ago... The government should deconstitutionalize the subject by repealing the embarrasing Amendment.
Baseball, like Pericles' Athens (or any other good society), is simultaneously democratic and aristrocratic. Anyone can enjoy it, but the more you apply yourself, the more you enjoy it.
The euro currency both presupposes and promotes a fiction - that 'Europe' has somehow become, against the wishes of most Europeans, a political rather than a merely geographic expression.
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.