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.
— P. J. O'Rourke
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.
Regulation creates a moral hazard.
Of course, no one wants to ban the vote. Voting should remain available for sporting and recreational purposes. But certain types of votes clearly should be curtailed - 'assault votes,' for example, in which the only purpose of the vote is to harm others.
The Communist bloc of old was a study in the failure of failure. Losers in the Soviet economy were the people at the end of the long lines for consumer goods. Worse losers were the people who had spent hours getting to the head of the line, only to be told that the goods were unavailable.
I don't understand anything about America's culture.
In Hong Kong there is agglomeration beyond my fondest imaginings. The Kowloon district claims a population density four times that of New York City.
What is obnoxious about the motives of politicians - whatever those motives may be - is that politicians must announce their motives as visionary and grand.
Head lice have their own animal-rights group, or may as well. The National Pediculosis Association doesn't exactly advocate letting lice live with dignity, but it does oppose pediculicidal treatments.
Some people think that welfare reform should have hurt Bill Clinton with black voters.
My generation of Americans was the first to really care about racism and sexism, not to mention the I Ching, plus, of course, the Earth.
I myself am a parent in a small business. Number of employees: one.
I like to argue with the radio.
The budget doesn't have much control over the government. Then again, the government doesn't have much control over the budget.
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.
Neither liberal nor conservative politicians can resist the temptation to stand as mighty sequoias of rectitude amid the lowly underbrush of fundraising.
In thirteen years, every aspect of the universe can change - ask a thirteen-year-old.
The whole melodrama of the Middle East would be improved if amnesia were as common here as it is in melodramatic plots.
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.
What Enron was doing, what caused investors to embrace it in a rapture of baffled awe, was hiding debt.
Voting has proliferated in the United States, and it has reached a point where there is now almost one vote available per citizen over the age of eighteen.
To blame the existence of al Qaeda on poverty like Egypt's is a slur on the poor.
Arab-led Islamic fundamentalism destabilizes nations from Algeria to the Philippines.
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.
Gun violence has cost us too many political leaders, and hardly ever the worst ones.
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.
There are selves too big for one person to contain. You cannot call them selfish. There is nothing -ish about such selves. They are the self, as it were, itself.
As a nation, Kuwait has been, arguably, free of freedom itself. Claimed in turn by Constantinople, Riyadh, and Baghdad, Kuwait has survived by playing Turks off Persians, Arabs off one another, and the English off everyone.
I'm fascinated by political enthusiasm.
I usually agree with Rush Limbaugh; therefore I usually don't listen to him.
If I were a congressman who had voted for the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, I'd claim it was forced on our country by a sinister international organization.
The prevalence of mobile homes does not correspond with the prevalence of poverty, or with much of anything else. All that can be confidently said about America's mobile homes is that they are massed in places where you wouldn't want to be in one. Florida's mobile homes lie athwart the path of hurricanes. Georgia's are in the way of tornadoes.
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.
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.
Israel is slightly smaller than New Jersey. Moses in effect led the tribes of Israel out of the District of Columbia, parted Chesapeake Bay near Annapolis, and wandered for forty years in Delaware.
Our regulatory bodies strive to create honest dealings, fair trades, and a situation in which no one has an advantage over anyone else. But human beings aren't honest. And all trades are made because one person thinks he's getting the better of the other, and the other person thinks the same.
Every vote should carry a serial number, so that responsibility for harmful or careless use of the vote can be traced. Concealed voting should be outlawed.
In the Soviet Union, no industry went under until they all did.
We Americans, who invented traffic, are always being startled by the forms into which it has evolved around the world.
I have never been to a museum in Hong Kong, or a movie or a play. I've never gone club-hopping. I've never taken the tram to Victoria Peak.
No doubt the ridiculous politicians are right to like politics. They have found careers in which success can be achieved by being ridiculous. Imagine Jimmy Carter or George W. Bush rising to the top of any other profession.
In Henry Adams, I discovered not only the prototype of the modern thinker but also someone who is more interesting: a viper-toothed, puling, supercilious crank, thwarted in ambition, aging gracelessly, mad at the cosmos, and ashamed of his own jejune ideals. He is nevertheless very dear to me.
America gives every appearance of being a nation besotted with trashiness - divorce, illegitimacy, casual Fridays.
Is Bill Clinton so good at politics, or are other politicians so bad?
Why is Iraq so easy to harm and so hard to help?
Arguing, in the sense of attempting to convince others, has gone out of fashion with conservatives.
When the government runs out of lenders, it can do something that households are forbidden to do: print money.
Moviemakers are rewarded with tax write-offs if, when seeking a location that looks like America, they seek it in America.
Maybe the real secret to America's greatness is that we hate one another.
Politics is - once in a while - a forum for serious debate about political philosophy.
