I do have to travel a lot for speaking engagements.Collection: Travel
Something that confirms all fears and many conspiracy theories about government is finding out what our elected representatives would put into law if they could.Collection: Government
I'm too tough and sensitive to have to have some pubescent twerp with his mom's earring in his tongue, who combs his hair with Redi-Whip and has an Ani DiFranco tattoo on his shin, come show me how a computer works.Collection: Mom
Will Generation X and the Millennials do a better job running the world than the boomers have? Let's hope so.Collection: Hope
On inspection, Gaudi's architecture isn't whimsical at all.Collection: Architecture
People are always angry at America. They're absolutely certain that America either caused their problems or is deliberately not fixing their problems. But the anger is always directed at America and never at Americans.Collection: Anger
Children must be considered in a divorce considered valuable pawns in the nasty legal and financial contest that is about to ensue.Collection: Legal
TV ushered in the age of postliteracy. And we have gone so far beyond that. I mean, what with the Internet and Google and Wikipedia. We have entered the age of post-intelligence.Collection: Age
Let's reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools - and use it on the teachers.Collection: Teacher
Harvard is the home of American ideas.Collection: Home
The problem with public school is not overcrowding in the classroom. The problem is not teacher unions. The problem is not underfunding or lack of computer equipment. The problem is your damn kids.Collection: Teacher
Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.Collection: Failure
The minute somebody joins a committee... they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.Collection: Politics
There are plenty of problems in the world, and doubtless climate change - or whatever the currently voguish phrase for it all is - certainly is one of them. But it's low on my list.Collection: Environmental
Never fight an inanimate object.Collection: Funny
Tel Aviv is new, built on the sand dunes north of Jaffa in the 1890s, about the same time Miami was founded. The cities bear a resemblance in size, site, climate, and architecture, which ranges from the bland to the fancifully bland.Collection: Architecture
You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money.Collection: Money
Maybe climate change is a threat, and maybe climate change has been tarted up by climatologists trolling for research grant cash. It doesn't matter.Collection: Change
Whatever it is that the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government does it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy.Collection: Government
There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
The Clinton administration launched an attack on people in Texas because those people were religious nuts with guns. Hell, this country was founded by religious nuts with guns. Who does Bill Clinton think stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock?
The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas - fascism, communism, the atomic bomb.
A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.
We did not become libertarians because we are altruists.
In theory, taxes should be like shopping. What I buy is government services. What I pay are my taxes.
The whole melodrama of the Middle East would be improved if amnesia were as common here as it is in melodramatic plots.
Hubris is one of the great renewable resources.
There is a simple rule here, a rule of legislation, a rule of business, a rule of life: beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud. You can apply that rule to left-wing social programs, but you can also apply that rule to credit derivatives, hedge funds, all the rest of it.
President Bush said that if illegal immigrants want citizenship, they'd have to do three things: pay taxes, hold meaningful jobs, and learn English. Bush doesn't meet those qualifications.
Think what evil creeps liberals would be if their plans to enfeeble the individual, exhaust the economy, impede the rule of law, and cripple national defense were guided by a coherent ideology instead of smug ignorance.
Never be unfaithful to a lover, except with your wife.
The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.
The U.S. tax code was written by A students. Every April 15, we have to pay somebody who got an A in accounting to keep ourselves from being sent to jail.
What would annoy the most people most often? That is the true left-wing test of government intervention.
Globalization is simply opening the free marketplace to encompass the entire world.
There are 1.3 billion people in China, and they all want a Buick.
Liberals are always proposing perfectly insane ideas, laws that will make everybody happy, laws that will make everything right, make us live forever, and all be rich. Conservatives are never that stupid.
The library, with its Daedalian labyrinth, mysterious hush, and faintly ominous aroma of knowledge, has been replaced by the computer's cheap glow, pesky chirp, and data spillage.
The perpetuation of slavery, the exile and extermination of American Indians, and the passage of Jim Crow laws weren't carried out at the bidding of a few malefactors of great wealth.
The great thing about being a print journalist is that you are permitted to duck. Cameramen get killed while the writers are flat on the floor. A war correspondent for the BBC dedicated his memoir to 50 fallen colleagues, and I guarantee you they were all taking pictures. I am only alive because I am such a chicken.
People think the free market is a philosophy, they think that it is a creed. It is none of those things. Free market is a bathroom scale, it is a measuring tape, it's simply a measurement.
Explosion of positive rights started in 1932 with the election of Roosevelt.
Finland is a rich country. What have they got? They got Nokia phones and plywood. How'd they get so rich? Because they're free.
Sheep farming is heavily subsidized in Great Britain. Without the subsidies, the green grazing in the valley of the River Exe would be gone. The handsome agricultural landscape of which the British are so proud, carefully husbanded since Boudicca's day, would be replaced by natural growth. The most likely growth is real-estate developments.
Art Nouveau got its inspiration from nature. The Bauhaus got its inspiration from engineering.
Passover is my idea of a perfect holiday. Dear God, when you're handing out plagues of darkness, locusts, hail, boils, flies, lice, frogs, and cattle murrain, and turning the Nile to blood and smiting the firstborn, give me a pass. And tell me when it's over.
The two most frightening words in Washington are 'bipartisan consensus.' Bipartisan consensus is when my doctor and my lawyer agree with my wife that I need help.
Now, do I think the baby boomers tend to be self-absorbed? I do.
The world is being run by irresponsible spoiled brats.