College professors used to be badly paid and worth it. Colleges used to be modest institutions; they should go back to being modest institutions.
— P. J. O'Rourke
Teasing and a sense of humor, if you can develop that in your kids, and if you can exercise it with the kids, just makes for a pleasanter atmosphere.
Being a humorist is not a voluntary thing. You can tell this because in a situation where saying a funny thing will cause a lot of trouble, a humorist will still say the funny thing. No matter how inappropriate.
Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum.
We've come into the world of '1984,' but it turns out to be '1984'-Lite.
The baby boomers' politics have covered a wide band of silliness, from the Weather Underground to the Timothy McVeigh types. The great majority of us are well in the middle of that spectrum, but still, there's been both leftie silliness and right-wing silliness.
The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore.
There is the love and marriage and family kind of happiness, which is exceedingly boring to describe but nonetheless is important to have and dreadful not to have.
Even the most left-wing politicians worship wealth creation - as the political-action-committee collection plate is passed.
Will Generation X and the Millennials do a better job running the world than the boomers have? Let's hope so.
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.
Don't send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals, when their cheery effect is needed.
To mistrust science and deny the validity of scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You'd better go look for work as a plant or wild animal.
You're not a baby boomer if you don't have a visceral recollection of a Kennedy and a King assassination, a Beatles breakup, a U.S. defeat in Vietnam, and a Watergate.
Globalization is simply opening the free marketplace to encompass the entire world.
If you think health care is expensive now, just wait 'til it's free.
Adam Smith's huge failure was the fact that he did not foresee the industrial revolution.
I think the Baby Boom does have a tendency to get its nose in everything. The Greatest Generation had a better tendency to leave people alone. Of course, they also had a better tendency to hate everybody's guts.
I think the Baby Boom has enjoyed itself, maybe sometimes a little too much, and we're continuing to enjoy ourselves, maybe a little too much.
My life would have gone along perfectly well, politically speaking, if it hadn't been for girls.
The most brilliant satire of all time was 'A Modest Proposal' by Jonathan Swift. You'll notice how everything got straightened out in Ireland within days of that coming out.
If we heard that somebody starved to death in Sweden or Switzerland, we would be shocked.
The divorce rate in 1946 was higher than it ever had been and as high as it ever would be until the '70s. The reason was that prior relationships had not endured the strain of war.
The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.
We loved cars until the '70s or so. Then they became appliances. They turned into motorized cup holders. Most of it has to do with urban sprawl. What began as pleasure ends up in necessity, as so many things do.
The anti-individualist enemies that Ayn Rand battled are still the enemy, but they've shifted their line of attack. Political collectivists are no longer much interested in taking things away from the wealthy and creative.
The world is being run by irresponsible spoiled brats.
I was never a Democrat. I went from Republican to Maoist and then back again.
We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scutter.
Politicians are wonderful people as long as they stay away from things they don't understand, such as working for a living.
I come from Toledo, Ohio, a town that has been hurt badly by the shift of the automobile business towards Japan. And yet I remember how the car workers lived in the neighborhood that I grew up in. My father was a car salesman, and I remember how we lived. I remember how modestly we lived.
Adam Smith pointed out that there were three things that make us more prosperous, in a general sort of way: freedom to pursue our own self-interest; specialization, which he called division of labor; and freedom of trade.
If ever there were a place where people not only tend not to face economic facts, but it's almost their purpose not to face economic facts, it's Washington.
If you talk to most businessmen, they'll say that what they do is for the public good, but you know they're just greedy, and consumers are just consuming for the sake of their own greed.
I think that humor has become a principle means of communication among Americans about politics.
Once you've built the big machinery of political power, remember you won't always be the one to run it.
All previous populist movements were demanding things from governments, whereas the Tea Party is saying, 'Give us less, go away.' That's heartening to see.
I had a confused early hippie phase, which was like a cafeteria tray of sloppy, semi-Marxist thoughts, absorbed second-hand.
As a former writer for the 'National Lampoon,' I've probably contributed to the sea of sarcasm in which we live.
Now, do I think the baby boomers tend to be self-absorbed? I do.
There are 1.3 billion people in China, and they all want a Buick.
The good thing about SUVs is they have storage.
Lyndon Johnson faced some clear moral issues.
Inside every Sancho Panza there's a Don Quixote struggling to get out.
Guns are the ultimate bulwark against government misbehavior.
There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as 'caring' and 'sensitive' because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money.
Liberals have invented whole college majors - psychology, sociology and women's studies - to prove that nothing is anybody's fault.
I've never been able to get it straight about what these people who are worried about the trade deficit are worried about.
Only a few good leaders have paused to reflect seriously on being leaders.
Everybody in the Middle East wants to explain why they're right.
