Adam Smith is misread as being amoral precisely because people don't read his first book, because they don't read 'The Theory of Moral Sentiments.'
— P. J. O'Rourke
Politics won't allow for the truth.
Death is so important that God visited death upon his own son, thereby helping us learn right from wrong well enough that we may escape death forever and live eternally in God's grace.
I believe in God. God created the world.
Richard Nixon was the best thing that ever happened to journalism. I mean this guy was wonderful. Just when you thought he could get no worse, he got worse.
Kuwait City is not gorgeous, actually, but it's got a kind of Epcot Center thing going for it. It's not pretty. But it's striking, I'll give it that. It's not as over-the-top as Abu Dhabi or Dubai. But nearly.
One nice thing about making jokes is that you don't have to prove them.
I like to have interesting things to write about. And when one says something is 'interesting,' one almost always means 'bad.'
Governments have monopolies on certain things, like eminent domain and deadly force.
Abstract anger is great for rhetorical carrying on. You can go on endlessly about the post office, but it doesn't mean you're mad at your mailman.
The whole idea of our government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.
Hubris is one of the great renewable resources.
Finland is a rich country. What have they got? They got Nokia phones and plywood. How'd they get so rich? Because they're free.
You don't despair about something like the Middle East, you just do the best you can.
Soldiers are not policemen, and it's very unfair, even for those soldiers who have some police training, to burden them with police duties. It's not what they're trained for, or equipped for.
I do have to travel a lot for speaking engagements.
Nobody likes insurance companies, especially health insurance companies.
I don't think anybody's really been successful with theorizing about value or creating a price theory.
Wealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino's box.
If death weren't around to 'finalize' the Darwinian process, we'd all still be amoebas.
The job of the president of the United States is to talk to the public, is to explain to them. Now, some presidents talk too much, like Bill Clinton. Some presidents try to talk but don't know how, like George Bush senior.
Most people sort of enjoy going to work because of the socialisation, a chance to flirt with co-workers and so on, but actually hate the job they do.
The great majority of Baghdad is a slum - a lot of it's new, but it's still slum. It's usually this concrete-block, one-room design with a door and a window, arranged one-up, one-down, often with a shop with nothing in it on the first floor, and then a one-room apartment above it. There's street after street after street of that stuff.
I had always thought of Egypt as a rather secular country. And I think it is, but people are quite observant of the strictures of Ramadan.
I live in New Hampshire. We're in favor of global warming. Eleven hundred more feet of sea-level rises? I've got beachfront property. You tell us up there, 'By the end of the century, New York City could be underwater,' and we say, 'Your point is?'
Politics is the attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit.
Even the dumber parts of our government are not run by idiots. These are ordinary people like us, doing a job. By and large, they're trying to do it as well as they can. Or at least as often as people in the private sector try to do as well as they can.
Distracting a politician from governing is like distracting a bear from eating your baby.
Positive rights are the right to shelter, the right to education, the right to health care, the right to a living wage. These things are - these are, I would call them, more properly, political rights rather than positive rights. And they are extremely tricky, because now we are dealing with things that are zero sum.
I read good. I was an English major.
Little islands of human happiness, peace, and prosperity are so exceptional at this point in history that I'm not even sure we can draw lessons from them.
I'm a rather decisive type.
Fortunately, I'm married to someone who's a pretty excellent parent!
Political systems are run by self-selecting politicians. We don't draft people; it's not jury duty.
The Bible is very clear about one thing: Using politics to create fairness is a sin.
I'm a member of the 1960s generation. We didn't have any wisdom.
Why can't death - if we must have it - be always glorious, as in 'The Iliad?'
Jimmy Carter was - he still - he remains to this day America's most ex of ex-presidents. You just can't believe that we elected this doofus. He was a bright enough guy and sort of well-meaning. But he was about as prepared to be president of the United States as your goofy old uncle, you know, the one that memorises baseball statistics.
Fascism is very much a mob movement.
One of the few benefits of being a journalist is that you're not in the Army.
If we were to inspect ourselves or members of our family and our friends, we would see that we don't really have to go all the way overseas to be mystified - we can be mystified right at home.
I've got a 1990 Porsche 911. It's just a Carrera, a very simple, straightforward little thing that goes like stink. I love it.
Health care's not about insurance! Health care's about getting treatment.
I think it's always easy to be sympathetic to parts of the government in detail; in their concrete manifestations. Because obviously, we don't have government for no reason.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the archetypal extremely smart person who went into politics anyway instead of doing something worthwhile for his country.
Something is worth what somebody will pay for it. Nothing else, nothing more, nothing less.
People think the free market is a philosophy, they think that it is a creed. It is none of those things. Free market is a bathroom scale, it is a measuring tape, it's simply a measurement.
One of the enduring problems with certain societies in the world - and this is certainly true of a lot of places in the Middle East - is that the capacity for self-governance and self-organizing just isn't there. It has to do with history.
The body is forever teaching us lessons. There are all sorts of things that we can't do, shouldn't do, had better not do very often or do for too long as we get older. The body makes its presence known.
The inherent purpose of American government is let people seek their own goals and to encourage them to be responsible on the various adventures they have on their way to those goals, good, bad, and otherwise.
