Politicians have such large egos that it usually takes them an inordinately long time to grasp when they've become a pathetic joke.
— Timothy Noah
One can imagine nonviolent or minimally violent ways to reduce or eliminate hatred, but there's no mollifying evil.
Universities are basically socialist institutions.
Whenever a Kurd wants to measure the depth of some foreign leader's commitment to Kurdish autonomy, he listens for one particular word. That word is 'federal.' Anyone who will say he favors Kurdish federalism can be counted a friend of the Kurds.
One of the enduring mysteries of America's occupation of Iraq is why a nation that so little relishes peacekeeping nonetheless refuses to turn the job over to the United Nations.
Without the three-fifths rule, there wouldn't have been a Constitution of the United States - not one that governed the American South, at any rate - because the South wouldn't have ratified it.
The liberation of Iraq, which is already hard to justify from the perspective of American interests, at least had the virtue of freeing Iraqis from a brutal dictator. Despite all the anarchy and violence, life has gotten better for most Iraqis.
Rule of thumb: When Democrats lose, they blame the candidate. When Republicans lose, they blame the opposition.
I'm all for lifting the payroll-tax cap, if only to make payroll taxes a little less regressive.
It never fails to astonish me how cheaply a politician can be bought.
What if an asteroid were to strike planet Earth? What could we possibly do to prevent it? However many guys we have working on this problem, it can't possibly be enough.
The advantage of a market-based national defense is obvious: Every citizen would receive an individualized amount of military protection, based on the value each of us placed on defending the homeland.
Expressing truth is hard work.
What I've learned, and will try to remember from now on, is that defending your country's credibility is never sufficient reason to fight a war.
The promise of Obama's presidency, in many people's minds, is partly that America will move toward becoming a post-racial society. It's pretty clear, though, that we aren't there yet.
There's no shortage of Democrats who are at least as committed as Schwarzenegger to reducing greenhouse gases.
The financial services industry is a ward of the state.
You can be president of the United States and have the best, most bipartisan-seeming idea in the world. But if it doesn't have a constituency, you might as well be town clerk of Toad Suck, Arkansas.
If one does not wish to take the word of journalists, human rights groups, and the United Nations that Iraq conducted a deliberate campaign to eradicate the Kurdish population, there's always the word of the Iraqis themselves.
What is the engine that drives economic growth in an ideopolis? The university.
Washington culture has always had a difficult time acknowledging untruth.
In Washington, the accepted method for passing along information about how the government fails to meet real-world needs is to leak it.
There's a growing consensus that the best way to defeat communism in Cuba is to get its citizens hooked on American goods.
The problem with wanting the tax code to be 'simpler, fairer,' and 'pro-growth' is that it's impossible to achieve all three at the same time.
We live in a diverse nation, but it isn't that diverse. If any one state showed results so dramatically different from the results in each of the other 50 states, the likeliest explanation would be that someone had tampered with the polls.
Cable television and the Internet have created an unending demand for information, and there simply isn't enough truth to go around.
The Bush administration got a lot of things horribly wrong in its disaster response to the New Orleans flood, and it deserves almost all of the bitter recriminations hurled its way.
Within the narrow confines of Permanent Washington - the journalists, lobbyists, and congressional lifers who are the city's avatars of centrism and continuity - Ford is considered the beau ideal of American leadership.
Markets can do many wonderful things, which is why I'm glad to live in a capitalist country.
The United States is not, nor has ever been, anything close to a fascist country.
The white working class likes being pandered to even less than it likes being insulted.
On Wall Street, financial crisis destroys jobs. Here in Washington, it creates them. The rest is just details.
The Supreme Court needs jurists, not politicians.
Whatever the reason, American Muslims appear far less inclined to support the global jihad than their European counterparts.
Spoken language's elaborate rhythms and inflections convey more meaning per word than the printed word.
The gulf between Virginia and Maryland isn't only a function of geography. It's also sociological. Indeed, it's probably not much of an exaggeration to say that Maryland suburbanites and Virginia suburbanites constitute two mutually hostile tribes.
Various people have explained why Henry Kissinger is a bad choice to run an investigation into what went wrong on Sept. 11. He's a liar. He's an apologist for corrupt regimes.
If the 1992 and 2000 elections were any guide, third-party candidates are death on the mainstream parties with which they're most naturally aligned.
The Kurds were the only people in Iraq who were completely unguarded in expressing their gratitude to the United States for setting them free.
The Sudan bombing is a blot on the Clinton presidency, and a blot it ought to remain.
Is class snobbery a social reality in the United States? Absolutely, and the kind that's codified by meritocracy is probably more toxic than the old-fashioned kind based on bloodlines.
With so much to be aware of, awareness bracelets have reverted to signifying nothing more than color itself. Idealism has devolved into fashion.
An orthodox belief in big government's inefficiency cannot coexist with an orthodox belief in private industry's inability to compete with big government.
The only agency of the federal government with a more demoralized workforce than Homeland Security is the Small Business Administration, a notorious turkey farm that should have been abolished years ago.
Bottom line: A market approach to national defense would give us a lousy national defense.
Capitalism can't deliver decent health care.
To argue that universal health care would wreck the U.S. lead in cancer survival, you'd have to argue that universal health care would wreck the entire U.S. economy.
Is New Ageism inherently fascist? Of course not, though I'm happy to pronounce its babble about chakras and cosmic energy errant quackery.
The central con of the political coalition assembled by Ronald Reagan and maintained by his successors was that government was a common enemy.
Electing Barack Obama president was a glorious Jackie Robinson moment for the United States of America. Obama didn't just win; he became the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter to win a popular-vote majority.
