Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Most people prefer living in a healthier town.
Joe Lieberman can be cloying and sanctimonious.
Sexual signals can be received without being consciously sent.
If there's one epithet the Right never tires of, it's 'elitism.'
Not all negativity is bad. In politics, it's a necessary clarifying tool.
Political analysts tend to overinterpret the results of isolated elections.
As a political party, the Libertarians have always been more party than political.
Book collecting is a largely solitary, mostly male, and completely absorbing activity.
Political assumptions can remain constant for long periods and then change very quickly.
The invasion of Iraq was, in ways that have since become hard to dispute, a terrible mistake.
Republicans with any moral sense are desperate for a supportable alternative to Donald Trump.
Seeing the rich and famous screw up makes us feel superior, or at least not quite so inferior.
I think part of the reason anyone goes into journalism is to get a response to what they write.
To count as transformative, a president needs to synthesize the moment and mood of the country.
Paternalism is the method of government activism most amenable to an impoverished public sector.
Artists like to talk about what they do with people who've read their books, or seen their films.
Both Left and Right take pleasure in mildly persecuting those who fail to meet their civic ideals.
Israel never meant to take over the West Bank and Gaza - it got stuck with them after the 1967 war.
Professional politicians often claim they are not professional politicians. Trump genuinely isn't one.
Conservative journalists don't just have the inside track on Republican strategy - they help devise it.
The cradle-to-grave welfare state diminishes individual initiative and can breed a pervasive sclerosis.
Paradoxically, I think working at an Internet magazine intensifies the attraction of beautiful printed objects.
For the grifter, ripping people off is seldom the point. The grifter is an artiste who invests in the long con.
The book has had a good run. For 550 years, it was the most practical way to deliver writing to multiple readers.
I think 'Slate''s editorial staff understands the intersection of journalism and technology better than any other.
Within half an hour of posting a piece on 'Slate,' I get a direct, often hostile and personal, response from readers.
In practice, conservatives are no less inclined than liberals to adopt superior stances or to tell people how to live their lives.
The first conversation I ever had about the Internet was in 1993 with Robert Wright, who was then a colleague at the 'New Republic.'
Objecting to someone because of his religious beliefs is not the same thing as prejudice based on religious heritage, race, or gender.
Like other forms of gambling, wagering on the Internet isn't illegal because it's bad. It's bad because we've chosen to make it illegal.
Where Reagan channeled disenchantment with overweening government, Obama symbolized America's transformation into a multiracial country.
Trade, tourism, cultural exchange, and participation in international institutions all serve to erode the legitimacy of repressive regimes.
Only when legislators judge that the risk of continuing to support Trump outweighs the risk of abandoning him will they begin to jump ship.
It's tempting to dismiss the debate about the National Security Agency spying on Americans as a technical conflict about procedural rights.
The most important newspapers in this country need to exist. Our democracy needs them. Life as we know it would be unthinkable without them.
The party where humorless thought police work to enforce a rigid ideological discipline isn't made up of Democrats. It comprises Republicans.
Because conscription appeals to essentially no one, the United States has lived with the All-Volunteer Force since the end of the Vietnam War.
Members of the middle class do not have to worry about falling off $250,000 sailboats because they don't have $250,000 sailboats to fall off of.
Thanks to Twitter, I learn about the revolutions in the Middle East via Arab activists and writers, not just from American foreign correspondents.
Politicians try to make friends, build constituencies, and avoid gaffes. Trump does the opposite, seeking out land mines in order to detonate them.
If you want to go around saying that giving women the vote wrecked the country and still be taken seriously, it helps to be handing out $100 bills.
By 2003, if you didn't understand that the United States was inflicting torture on those deemed enemy combatants, you weren't paying much attention.
Though there are some debatable exceptions, sanctions rarely play a significant role in dislodging or constraining the behavior of despicable regimes.
I hope my children will grow up to love literature, but I expect they will absorb it as readily via a screen or pod as from glued quires of printed pages.
To describe Peter Thiel as simply a libertarian wildly understates the case. His belief system is based on unapologetic selfishness and economic Darwinism.
Obama is the rare Democrat who talks easily about faith and values and who does so without upsetting those offended by the mixture of religion and politics.
The conservative position that all spending is evil obliterates any distinction between investment and consumption, between the long-term and the short-term.
In authoritarian societies, cultural institutions tend to become ideological proxies - think of the National Ballet in Cuba or the East German gymnastics team.
Like academic Marxists, who are their sisters under the skin, libertarians are far more interested in an ideal world than in the one where ordinary humans live.
The best thing you can say about libertarians is that because their views derive from abstract theory, they tend to be highly principled and rigorous in their logic.