Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.Collection: Power
Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.Collection: Parenting
The young are adept at learning, but even more adept at avoiding it.Collection: Learning
Staying married may have long-term benefits. You can elicit much more sympathy from friends over a bad marriage than you ever can from a good divorce.Collection: Marriage
When I was fifteen, I dreamed of living in the big city, as many a young person does if he is artistic and sensitive. By 'artistic and sensitive' I mean short, skinny, unkissed, bad at sports, and carrying a C average in high school.Collection: Sports
Medical researchers don't know much about head lice because they don't much care. The reason that they don't much care is, paradoxically, that they know a lot. That is, they know one important thing: there is no evidence that head lice transmit disease.Collection: Medical
If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health, slow your mind, make you fat - in other words, turn you into an adult.Collection: New
Never wear anything that panics the cat.Collection: Pet
Agriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the first Thanksgiving dinner kickback to the Indians for subsidizing Pilgrim maize production with fish head fertilizer grants.Collection: Thanksgiving
The beauty of democracy is that an average, random, unremarkable citizen can lead it.Collection: Beauty
Tom DeLay may or may not have broken campaign finance laws, but he did his best to look like he was breaking them.Collection: Finance
Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum.Collection: Politics
Kabul is a walled city, which sounds romantic except the walls are pre-cast reinforced concrete blast barriers, 10 feet tall and 15 feet long and moved into place with cranes. The walls are topped with sandbags, and the sandbags are topped with guard posts from which gun barrels protrude.Collection: Romantic
The more aspects of life that can be moved from private reign to public realm, the better it is for politics.Collection: Politics
Gay marriage acceptance is happening in the blink of an eye.Collection: Marriage
Teasing and a sense of humor, if you can develop that in your kids, and if you can exercise it with the kids, just makes for a pleasanter atmosphere.Collection: Humor
The idea of capitalism is not just success but also the failure that allows success to happen.Collection: Success
There is the love and marriage and family kind of happiness, which is exceedingly boring to describe but nonetheless is important to have and dreadful not to have.Collection: Happiness
The best and brightest don't go into politics. The best and brightest are at Goldman Sachs.Collection: Politics
Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.Collection: Death
I think it's been hard for people to understand how Islam can be a good religion, and yet the Islamists are evil. Those of us who have had experience with Islam understand this, just as we understand the difference between snake handlers and people going to church on Sunday morning.Collection: Religion
In Israel, waves of anger and fear circulate all the time, but so do jokes and gossip and silky evening breezes. So, too, in America.Collection: Fear
A very quiet and tasteful way to be famous is to have a famous relative. Then you can not only be nothing, you can do nothing too.Collection: Famous
Abstract anger is great for rhetorical carrying on. You can go on endlessly about the post office, but it doesn't mean you're mad at your mailman.Collection: Anger
To mistrust science and deny the validity of scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You'd better go look for work as a plant or wild animal.Collection: Science
There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 380SL convertible.Collection: Women
Children live in the only successful Marxist state ever created: the family. 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need' is the family's practice as well as its theory. Even with today's scattershot patterns of marriage and parenting, a family is collectivist to a more than North Korean degree.Collection: Parenting
The problem, when comparing contemporary television to television in 1974, is that TV has become not just bad but sad.Collection: Sad
I think that humor has become a principle means of communication among Americans about politics.Collection: Humor
The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.Collection: Work
Computers seem a little too adaptively flexible, like the strange natives, odd societies, and head cases we study in the social sciences. There's more opposable thumb in the digital world than I care for; it's awfully close to human.Collection: Computers
Positive rights are the right to shelter, the right to education, the right to health care, the right to a living wage. These things are - these are, I would call them, more properly, political rights rather than positive rights. And they are extremely tricky, because now we are dealing with things that are zero sum.Collection: Health
Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.Collection: Society
If you think health care is expensive now, just wait 'til it's free.Collection: Health
Don't send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals, when their cheery effect is needed.Collection: Christmas
Because of their size, parents may be difficult to discipline properly.Collection: Parenting
Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe. When you quit looking on the bright side, the catastrophe is still there.Collection: Government
By the end of the 1950s, American cars were so reliable that their reliability went without saying even in car ads. Thousands of them bear testimony to this today, still running on the roads of Cuba though fueled with nationalized Venezuelan gasoline and maintained with spit and haywire.Collection: Car
Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.Collection: Funny
The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.Collection: Politics
All change is bad. But sometimes it has to be done.Collection: Change
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.Collection: Politics
The great majority of Baghdad is a slum - a lot of it's new, but it's still slum. It's usually this concrete-block, one-room design with a door and a window, arranged one-up, one-down, often with a shop with nothing in it on the first floor, and then a one-room apartment above it. There's street after street after street of that stuff.Collection: Design
When you pay a hospital bill, you're really paying two hospital bills - one bill for you because you have a job and/or insurance and can pay the hospital. and another bill, which is tacked onto your bill, to cover the medical expenses of someone who doesn't have a job and/or insurance and can't pay the hospital.Collection: Medical
Politics is the attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit.Collection: Power
There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as 'caring' and 'sensitive' because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money.Collection: Government
Adam Smith pointed out that there were three things that make us more prosperous, in a general sort of way: freedom to pursue our own self-interest; specialization, which he called division of labor; and freedom of trade.Collection: Freedom
The good news is that, according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for everything. The bad news is that, according to the Obama administration, you're rich.Collection: Politics
They are just really stupid people in Hollywood. You write them a script, and they say they love it, they absolutely love it. Then they say, 'But doesn't it need a small dog, and an Eskimo, and shouldn't it be set in New Guinea?' And you say, 'But it is a sophisticated romantic comedy set in Paris.'Collection: Romantic
If government were a product, selling it would be illegal.Collection: Government