Call a man 'ignorant,' and you have license to show the world your vast fund of knowledge and wise him up.
— P. J. O'Rourke
The words 'Space Age' have a quaint, nostalgic tone - sitting on midcentury modern furniture watching 'The Jetsons.'
The 18,000 NASA employees are full of galactic talents and abilities and are ready to accomplish whatever they're directed to do.
When elites see a homeless person in the gutter, they assume he's saving a parking place.
War diminishes both civil and economic rights.
There is no 20-year period in American history when stocks lost money.
You can't destroy America by destroying our elite. Think about America's elite. Think about it down through history. Destroy our elite, and about half the time, you're doing us a favor.
There are two factors in American politics that may seem strange to Europeans: race and religion.
People are not ants or bees. We do not reason or love or live or die collectively.
Some day you will be wheeled in for a heart bypass operation, and a surgeon will be the person who is now behind the counter when you renew your car registration at the department of motor vehicles.
I am a student of stupidity. I am a political reporter.
Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered.
The idea of a world where all people are alike - in wealth or in anything else - is a fantasy for the stupid.
A person has got to balance work and life and family in order to be a balanced person.
A 'farm' today means 100,000 chickens in a space the size of a Motel 6 shower stall.
The C student starts a restaurant. The A student writes restaurant reviews.
Californians devised a system of electricity sales that ignored every dimension of the free market.
I know quite a few fellow members of the news analysis and commentary business, and I have it from the highest-placed sources, on the record, that each and every one of our children is a genius.
Space has always been confusing to politics.
America is a meritocracy.
Why do elites hate the poor? It's xenophobia. They don't know any poor people - except their off-the-books Brazilian nanny and illegal immigrant cleaning lady from Upper Revolta who don't speak English.
War expands government powers. The trouble is that, when the war goes away, the government powers do not.
Rich people don't like to be in the military. The shoes are ugly and the uniforms itch. Rich people don't go in much for revolution or terrorism, either.
The number of American presidential candidates varies with the sunspot cycle and the phases of the moon.
The difference between American parties is actually simple. Democrats are in favor of higher taxes to pay for greater spending, while Republicans are in favor of greater spending, for which the taxpayers will pay.
We did not become libertarians because we are altruists.
There is only one thing that gives me hope as a Republican, and that is the Democrats. It's going to be hard to do a worse job running American than the Republicans have, but if anybody can do it, it's the Democrats.
Term limits aren't enough. We need jail.
Wealth brings great benefits to the world. Rich people are heros.
The foundation of collectivism is simple: There should be no important economic differences among people. No one should be too rich.
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.
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.
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.
Californians are people who insist on growing their own vegetables, but they won't dig up the pretty lawn, won't plant anything for fear of getting dirty, and they use fragrant bath salts from The Body Shop instead of smelly compost.
'You're stupid,' is not something even his most severe critics usually say to President Barack Obama.
Funding for the original manned Voyager Mars Program was scratched in 1968, before humans had gotten out of Low Earth Orbit. Mid-'60s plans for a Venus fly-by with astronauts actually flying by it met the same fate.
Modern elites live in bubbles of liberal affluence like Ann Arbor, Brookline, the Upper West Side, Palo Alto, or Chevy Chase. These places used to have impoverished neighborhoods nearby, but the poor people got chased out by young singles living in group homes, hipsters, and urban homesteading gay couples.
Sometimes the right response to evil is an appeal to powerful and effective social organization - an appeal to civilization itself.
Any terrorism is an attack on libertarian values.
The laws of the marketplace are physical laws, and they don't become suspended in a crisis any more than the law of gravity does.
After the events of the 20th century, God, quite reasonably, left Europe. But He's still here in the United States.
Everybody in America who didn't come over the Bering Strait ice bridge stole his land from somebody else.
Upbeat is for people who want to feel good about their cause: the reformers, the progressives, the revolutionaries, the utopians, the collectivists, and the rest of the altruistic scum of the earth. Why do these people want to feel good? They want to feel good in order to convince themselves that they are good.
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.
Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.
Infant mortality and life expectancy are reasonable indicators of general well-being in a society.
If it were not for government regulation of big corporations, executives at companies like Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, they could have cheated investors out of millions.
Fall of the Berlin wall? Being there was fun. Nations that flaked off of the Soviet Union in southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus? Being there was not so fun.
Liberals consider people to be nuisances.
Barack Obama is more irritating than the other nuisances on the Left.
