The more aspects of life that can be moved from private reign to public realm, the better it is for politics.
— P. J. O'Rourke
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.
The poor are an especially important resource for innovation when they have the bravery and pluck to get out of the poor places in which they're living.
Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.
Disney's Tomorrowland is deeply, thoroughly, almost furiously unimaginative.
Art Nouveau got its inspiration from nature. The Bauhaus got its inspiration from engineering.
The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas - fascism, communism, the atomic bomb.
When I board an airplane these days, all the middle-aged men are dressed like me - when I was an 8-year-old. They're in shorts and T-shirts. And it's not just on airplanes. It's in business offices, teachers' lounges, and churches.
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.
Writing on a computer makes saving what's been written too easy. Pretentious lead sentences are kept, not tossed. Instead of sitting surrounded by crumpled paper, the computerized writer has his mistakes neatly stored in digital memory.
I think every high school student who was alert during the early '60s got very embittered by the slow progress and the violence surrounding the Civil Rights Movement.
I have no idea if some societies, anthropologically speaking, aren't really suited for democracy. I don't think that's true.
The people who despise America are the editors of the 'New Statesman.' Their green-card applications must have been turned down.
My ignorance is widespread.
My dad died when I was young; my mom remarried with more haste than sense to a fellow... he wasn't evil or anything, but he was worthless.
The car provided Americans with an enviable standard of living. You could not get a steady job with high wages and health and retirement benefits working on the General Livestock Corporation assembly line putting udders on cows.
Just because a subject is serious doesn't mean it doesn't have plenty of absurdities.
The idea of a stag hunt evokes chivalry - knights in jerkins and hose, ladies on sidesaddles with wimples and billowing dresses, a white stag symbolizing something-or-other, and Robin Hood getting in the way. An actual stag hunt is more like a horseback meeting of a county planning commission.
The young are adept at learning, but even more adept at avoiding it.
Not much was really invented during the Renaissance, if you don't count modern civilization.
I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense.
The most futuristic aspect of the House of the Future was that it was made almost entirely of plastic.
On inspection, Gaudi's architecture isn't whimsical at all.
The only advantage to being a middle-aged man is that when you put on a jacket and tie, you're the Scary Dad. Never mind that no one has had an actually scary dad since 1966. The visceral fear remains.
Americans are good at pursuing happiness. And the Americans who pursue happiness most diligently show that we're also good at running it down and killing it.
Lack of romance is my real objection to writing on a computer.
Everybody is xenophobic to an extent.
Everybody with a gun has a checkpoint in Lebanon. And in Lebanon, you'd be crazy not to have a gun. Though, I assure you, all the crazy people have guns, too.
I was very much in favor of the Iraq invasion.
The beauty of democracy is that an average, random, unremarkable citizen can lead it.
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.'
I am unboreable in the great outdoors.
Cars let us out of the barn and, while they were at it, destroyed the American nuclear family. As anyone who has had an American nuclear family can tell you, this was a relief to all concerned.
Harvard is the home of American ideas.
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.
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.
Each child is biologically required to have a mother. Fatherhood is a well-regarded theory, but motherhood is a fact.
More modern poetry is written than read.
Disney's House of the Future had the clean simplicity prized in the 1950s as relief from decades of frayed patchwork, jury-rigging, and make-do clutter caused by Depression and war.
What Alexander Graham Bell thought up occupied less space than a flower vase. Now it's so small that I have to search all my pockets to discover I've received a spam text.
Jeans fit the mature male one of two ways, both dirigible in nature. You make a public impression that's either Hindenburg or Goodyear blimp.
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.
Excessive speed and quantity are, like chattiness and digression, besetting sins of cyber-assisted authorship.
You've got to understand, people are motivated by fun. And they should be.
You're never going to read 'The Wealth of Nations,' and you shouldn't, really. It's 900 pages.
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.
Ending wars is very simple if you surrender.
My whole family can talk. They are all car salesmen. They are all funny.
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.
Freedom is for fun.
