Molly Ivins
And the funny thing is, I've always been an optimist - it's practically a congenital disorder with me.Collection: Funny
The thing is this: You got to have fun while you're fightin' for freedom, 'cause you don't always win.Collection: Veterans
The only reason to have a positive mental attitude is that it makes life better. It doesn't cure cancer.Collection: Attitude
In truth, there is no rational argument for guns in this society. This is no longer a frontier nation in which people hunt their own food. It is a crowded, overwhelmingly urban country in which letting people have access to guns is a continuing disaster.Collection: Society
Good thing we've still got politics in Texas - finest form of free entertainment ever invented.Collection: Politics
'Get along, go along' is not an inspirational philosophy, and only God knows how much moral cowardice it has covered up over the years. Serve your time, collect your chits, and cash 'em in for your home state? No, I'd say we could ask for more than that from our senators.Collection: Inspirational
It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.Collection: History
I have been attacked by Rush Limbaugh on the air, an experience somewhat akin to being gummed by a newt. It doesn't actually hurt, but it leaves you with slimy stuff on your ankle.Collection: Experience
So keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce.Collection: Freedom
As they say around the Texas Legislature, if you can't drink their whiskey, screw their women, take their money, and vote against 'em anyway, you don't belong in office.Collection: Money
In order to understand why George W. Bush doesn't get it, you have to take several strands of common Texas attitude, then add an impressive degree of class-based obliviousness. What you end up with is a guy who sees himself as a perfectly nice fellow - and who is genuinely disconnected from the impact of his decisions on people.Collection: Attitude
Keep fighting for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce.Collection: Freedom
Conservatives, in general, are anti-immigrant for the same reasons they have always been anti-immigrant - a proud tradition in our nation of immigrants going back to the days of the Founders, when Ben Franklin thought we were going to be overrun by Germans. But Business likes illegal workers.Collection: Business
I've said it before: War brings out the patriotic bullies. In World War I, they went around kicking dachshunds on the grounds that dachshunds were 'German dogs.' They did not, however, go around kicking German shepherds.Collection: War
The stakes they play for in politics are paper and money. The chips they play with are your life.Collection: Politics
Many a time freedom has been rolled back - and always for the same sorry reason: fear.Collection: Freedom
Am I the only person covering politics who ever noticed that Newt Gingrich is actually a nincompoop?Collection: Politics
Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful.
I have known George W. Bush slightly since we were both in high school, and I studied him closely as governor. He is neither mean nor stupid. What we have here is a man shaped by three intertwining strands of Texas culture, combined with huge blinkers of class. The three Texas themes are religiosity, anti-intellectualism, and machismo.
I dearly love the state of Texas, but I consider that a harmless perversion on my part and discuss it only with consenting adults.
Guns do kill. Unlike cars, that is all they do.
The trouble with capitalism as a system is that only those who have or can get capital can make it work for them, and that leaves out damn near all of us.
It really is possible to disagree with someone's policies without hating them. Grown-ups can do that.
Behind a smoke screen of high-profile female appointees and soothing slogans, George W. Bush is waging war on women.
You look at the large problems that we face - that would be overpopulation, water shortages, global warming and AIDS, I suppose - all of that needs international cooperation to be solved.
Naturally, when it comes to voting, we in Texas are accustomed to discerning that fine hair's-breadth worth of difference that makes one hopeless dipstick slightly less awful than the other. But it does raise the question: Why bother?
All anyone needs to enjoy the state legislature is a strong stomach and a complete insensitivity to the needs of the people. As long as you don't think about what that peculiar body should be doing and what it actually is doing to the quality of life in Texas, then it's all marvelous fun.
Fourteen-year-old boys are not part of a well-regulated militia. Members of wacky religious cults are not part of a well-regulated militia. Permitting unregulated citizens to have guns is destroying the security of this free state.
If you really wanted to settle down the Middle East, if what you wanted was change in the Middle East, it is perfectly obvious that the first step is resolving the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
As I occasionally survey the pack of sycophantic shih tzus in the Washington press corps, wriggling on their bellies to kiss the feet of those in power, I feel plumb discouraged about the future of journalism.
In Congress, there are some who are unashamed to aspire to eloquence, even to scholarship, but the only state legislator I ever knew who would not join in the mispronounceciation of a word for the sake of camaraderie with her fellows was former State Senator and Congresswoman Barbara Jordan.
Jimmy Carter was unquestionably the most moral president of my lifetime, but he wasn't much of a president.
I'm sorry to say cancer can kill you, but it doesn't make you a better person.
I believe that ignorance is the root of all evil. And that no one knows the truth.
There is more hooey spread about the Second Amendment. It says quite clearly that guns are for those who form part of a well-regulated militia, i.e., the armed forces including the National Guard. The reasons for keeping them away from everyone else get clearer by the day.
Havin' fun while freedom fightin' must be one of those lunatic Texas traits we get from the water - which is known to have lithium in it - because it goes all the way back to Sam Houston, surely the most lovable, the most human, and the funniest of all the great men this country has ever produced.
Anyone who watched George W. and Karl Rove while the former was governor of Texas will recognize a familiar pattern. Like much of Bush's social policy - from faith-based social services to railing against gay marriage - women's issues are one of the bones they've decided they can throw to the Christian right.
Raise hell - big time. I want y'all to get out there and raise hell about damned near everything. My word, there's a world out there that needs fixing. Get out there and get after it.
It's a monstrous idea to put people in prison and keep them there.
The Kurds will not be allowed to have an independent country because Turkey wouldn't stand for it; they have their own Kurdish population.
It's one thing to recognize that the gap between the rich and everybody else is growing like a cancer; it's another thing to come up with useful solutions.
One seldom expects the country's president to adequately note the passing of a rocker, but Jimmy Carter's assessment of Elvis Presley's appeal - 'energy, rebelliousness and good humor' - is remarkably close to the mark.
Those who imagine polygamy to be handy cover for promiscuity are apparently off the mark. If polygamists share one quality, it is that, polygamy aside, they are extraordinarily strait-laced.
We need to reform the political system, or we'll lose the democracy. I don't think it's that hard. It doesn't take rocket science. We've done it before successfully at the presidential level and tried it several places at the state level.
Arkansas, the state Bill Clinton loves and that loves him back, is a place with just no pretension at all.
The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion.
The reason there is no noblesse oblige about Dubya is because he doesn't admit to himself or anyone else that he owes his entire life to being named George W. Bush. He didn't just get a head start by being his father's son - it remained the single most salient fact about him for most of his life.
I believe in practicing prudence at least once every two or three years.
I really do think we're going through a period of concentration of ownership of media, and we're starting to see the effects at the editorial level, and it's all bad. This increased pressure for profits every quarter, smaller news hole, less coverage of important stuff - the extent that it's become one giant infotainment industry.
If Bush does make it to the White House, he and Laura should have Ken Starr over for dinner.