Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Voters care only that student loans remain freely available and that they cost taxpayers as little as possible.
Presidential election results in 2008 and 2012 clarified that talk radio was not, in fact, running the country.
Rule of thumb: When Democrats lose, they blame the candidate. When Republicans lose, they blame the opposition.
What I've come to believe is that psychological advice isn't worth much if it isn't rooted in personal experience.
One can imagine nonviolent or minimally violent ways to reduce or eliminate hatred, but there's no mollifying evil.
With its Medicaid expansion, Obamacare may turn out to be the most equality-promoting policy enacted in a generation.
Nothing energizes me more than to burrow myself under a pile of received wisdom and emerge triumphant with the truth.
The House of Representatives eliminated the filibuster way back in the 19th century, and somehow it managed to survive.
No man is an island. If you want to blame anybody for poisoning the world with that socialistic idea, blame John Donne.
There's a growing consensus that the best way to defeat communism in Cuba is to get its citizens hooked on American goods.
Whatever the reason, American Muslims appear far less inclined to support the global jihad than their European counterparts.
Vote Republican if you like, but don't kid yourself that a Republican president would replace Obamacare with anything at all.
If Romney were a chair, he'd be a squishy, expensively upholstered easy chair that bore the imprint of whoever last sat on it.
The typical family of four with employer-based health insurance is not the same as the typical family of four. It's better-off.
Politicians have such large egos that it usually takes them an inordinately long time to grasp when they've become a pathetic joke.
Cable television and the Internet have created an unending demand for information, and there simply isn't enough truth to go around.
Whenever the very rich hold views at odds with those of the entire population, the federal government tends to do the rich's bidding.
In Washington, the accepted method for passing along information about how the government fails to meet real-world needs is to leak it.
Ultimate success for a carbon tax would mean so complete a shift to renewable energy that the tax would stop raising much revenue at all.
If you want to slow medical inflation in the private sector, it makes sense to expand the government's investment in private health care.
Is New Ageism inherently fascist? Of course not, though I'm happy to pronounce its babble about chakras and cosmic energy errant quackery.
In removing the friction involved in paying bills, electronic billing has substantially increased the friction involved in not paying them.
I've come to the conclusion that the government needs to impose price controls on tuition increases - and so, I think, has President Obama.
You have to let the market reward effort and skill. But a system in which inequality of incomes constantly increases over time is worrisome.
The Kurds were the only people in Iraq who were completely unguarded in expressing their gratitude to the United States for setting them free.
The problem with wanting the tax code to be 'simpler, fairer,' and 'pro-growth' is that it's impossible to achieve all three at the same time.
The central con of the political coalition assembled by Ronald Reagan and maintained by his successors was that government was a common enemy.
Gun Owners of America is a lobby group dedicated to the proposition that the National Rifle Association is a bunch of accommodationist sissies.
The embourgeoisement of China's proletariat may be the inevitable result of its industrialization, but 'inevitable' isn't the same as 'speedy.'
The Clinton administration cared a lot about the middle class and the poor. But it also cared a lot - too much, in retrospect - about the rich.
With so much to be aware of, awareness bracelets have reverted to signifying nothing more than color itself. Idealism has devolved into fashion.
What I've learned, and will try to remember from now on, is that defending your country's credibility is never sufficient reason to fight a war.
Creativity seldom thrives in an atmosphere of great discipline or scrutiny. That's one reason we tend not to want our leaders to get too creative.
To pine for the days before public education became a practical reality is to pine for an America held back by mass ignorance and mass illiteracy.
We all need to save money to send our kids to college, to buy our first house, and to retire. But the truth is that most of us don't save very much.
If the 1992 and 2000 elections were any guide, third-party candidates are death on the mainstream parties with which they're most naturally aligned.
It's no surprise that Mitt Romney bent himself into a pretzel to disavow the portions of Obamacare that derive from his own reform in Massachusetts.
The GOP doesn't seem particularly afraid of being perceived as blocking reform, despite efforts by the Obama White House to establish that narrative.
Economic inequality is less troubling if you live in a country where any child, no matter how humble his or her origins, can grow up to be president.
What type of 'person' is the for-profit corporation? A spoiled brat - all rights and no responsibilities, a traditional conservative argument would say.
The idea that the business world's needs get ignored in Washington is perpetuated by business so it can fulfill even more of its needs, real or imagined.
An orthodox belief in big government's inefficiency cannot coexist with an orthodox belief in private industry's inability to compete with big government.
If the Pentagon truly confined itself to providing defense, then presumably we wouldn't need a whole separate government agency to provide 'Homeland Security.'
The pathological degree to which former Vice President Dick Cheney operated in secrecy led to government abuses that we'll probably spend years learning about.
When the only people in mainstream discourse who care about the working class are Wall Street investors, it really is time to ask where our politics went wrong.
In shuttering Yucca Mountain, Obama makes it extremely likely that nuclear power in the United States will continue its long, slow, and extremely welcome death.
When Grover Norquist launched his project to name anything and everything after Ronald Reagan, I humbly proposed that the deficit be re-christened 'the Reagan.'
To cut the federal budget without cutting entitlements is like giving up chocolate-chip cookies and then deciding it's OK to eat the ones that don't have any nuts.
To argue that universal health care would wreck the U.S. lead in cancer survival, you'd have to argue that universal health care would wreck the entire U.S. economy.
GOP candidates routinely sign a pledge never, ever to raise taxes. Democratic candidates aren't even asked to sign a parallel pledge never, ever to cut entitlements.