I blame feminism and Facebook for the death of the American automobile. I'm a Republican, so I blame everything on feminism - or commies.
— P. J. O'Rourke
Explosion of positive rights started in 1932 with the election of Roosevelt.
I've only been to New Zealand once, about 1989. It was incredibly beautiful, kind of like the ideal of where I live in New England - all that and then some - but I can't say I was there long enough to get any very clear idea.
Charles McCarry is the best modern writer on the subject of intrigue - by the breadth of Alan Furst, by the fathom of Eric Ambler, by any measure.
Catchphrases flourish in contemporary American English.
Toledo is better than exciting, it's happy. Because nothing is more conducive to unhappiness than taking yourself seriously, and taking yourself seriously is difficult when you're baseball team is the Mud Hens.
Northwest Ohio is flat. There isn't much up. The land is so flat that a child from Toledo is under the impression that the direction hills go is down. Sledding is done down from street level into creek beds and road cuts.
Gay marriage acceptance is happening in the blink of an eye.
People say, 'Oh, politics is so polarized today,' and I'm thinking... '1861, that was polarized.'
Kids are disorganized.
A fundamental American question is, 'What's the big idea?'
We have the British motor industry as a role model for what happens when you try to save an industrial dinosaur. Britain was the first country to industrialise and the first to de-industrialise. We should learn from this.
As a longtime former resident of 15 years in Washington, I wish that everybody would stay off the Mall with their political cause so that we can get out there, you know, and play flag football or Frisbee, or walk the dog or something - you know, which is, you know, what the National Mall should be for, in my personal opinion.
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.
I don't watch much television.
I knew Hunter Thompson since the '70s, and I loved him, but he would wear me out as I got older.
Conservatives really don't believe in politics as the primary instrument of getting along in life and therefore don't tend to put their energy into it a way people left of center do.
In its worse forms, conservatism is a matter of 'I hate strangers and anything that's different.'
People say free trade causes dislocation. In actual fact, it's the lowering of trade barriers that causes the dislocation.
I'm on Medicare now. If I go and have a big operation, it costs me nothing. It should cost me a little. I'm not rich, but I can afford a few grand if I have to have my appendix taken out. I can pitch in a little bit.
Political leaders are expert at saying nothing.
When you're a war correspondent, the reader is for you because the reader is saying, 'Gee, I wouldn't want to be doing that.' They're on your side.
There is no horizon in Toledo. There are too many trees.
The Tea Party has definitely increased political involvement, not only among Tea Party members but among people who oppose the Tea Party members. It's been a general stimulus.
Politics is the one field you don't age out of.
A lot of newspaper columns used to be written in a rat-a-tat-tat, fast-paced style - and they tended to be funny. They were a little relief from the grimmer, grayer parts of the newspaper, and one of the best people at doing this was Will Rogers.
I grew up going to public school, and they were huge public schools. I went to a school that had 3,200 kids, and I had grade school classes with 40-some kids. Discipline was rigid. Most of the learning was rote. It worked.
America is not a wily, sneaky nation. We don't think that way. We don't think much at all, thank God.
A Kindle returns us to the inconvenience of the scroll, except with batteries and electronic glitches. It's as handy as bringing Homer along to recite the 'Iliad' while playing a lyre.
Simply because something is a populist movement doesn't make it either good or bad.
If there are three words that need to be used more in American journalism, commentary, politics, personal life... it's the magic words 'I don't know.'
People love to be told what they know already.
The bar is set pretty low if you want to be a hip, accessible conservative.
It's hard to be serious in life.
Libertarianism is a way of measuring how the government and other kinds of systems respect the individual. At the core of libertarianism is the idea that the individual is sacrosanct and that anything that's done contrary to the well-being of the individual needs some pretty serious justification.
All business is capitalistic. You require capital for any sort of business endeavour.
No Americans wants to see somebody lose their house because of health bills. Their boat? Maybe. Maybe the boat. But not the house.
Opinions of language are as interesting as opinions of arithmetic.
The one thing that's terrible about traveling for fun is writing about it.
In Toledo, people grow out. Out to the suburbs. Out to the parts of America where the economy is more vigorous. And all too often, out to 48-inch waistbands.
When I'm in the car, I want the only one shouting to be me.
The best and brightest don't go into politics. The best and brightest are at Goldman Sachs.
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.
Writing is agony. I hate it.
America has to act. But, when America acts, other nations accuse us of being 'hegemonistic', of engaging in 'unilateralism', of behaving as if we're the only nation on earth that counts. We are.
I like fiction and the kind of history that gives the grace and flavor of fiction to the past. No bloviation on current events, please. I can write that junk myself.
If you ask the government to solve all of your problems, it's a bit like asking your wife to cook and clean, to raise the children, to hold down a second job to help with the family finances, to keep her parents happy and well and keep your parents happy and well, and to also - to do the lawn and clean the gutters.
I like Michael Moore, but I think of him more as a rabble-rouser. On his TV show, when he went to the home of the guy who invented the car alarm and set off all the car alarms on the block... pretty funny.
A friend of mine at the American Enterprise Institute says there are two parties: the silly party and the stupid party. I'm too old for the silly party, so I had to join the stupid party.
I spent a lot of time behind the Iron Curtain, and their cars were abysmal.
