If your job is to leaven ordinary lives with elevating spectacle, be elevating or be gone.

Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.

The pursuit of perfection often impedes improvement.

Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it.

As advertising blather becomes the nation’s normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.

Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose.

Today more Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses than for property crimes.

Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. Not all holes, or games, are created equal.

World War II was the last government program that really worked.

Leadership is, among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it – short-term pain for long-term gain.

Americans are overreaching; overreaching is the most admirable and most American of the many American excesses.

Pessimism is as American as apple pie – frozen apple pie with a slice of processed cheese.

The future has a way of arriving unannounced.

The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.

Some parents say it is toy guns that make boys warlike. But give a boy a rubber duck and he will seize its neck like the butt of a pistol and shout “Bang!”

Voters don’t decide issues, they decide who will decide issues.

Look, three love affairs in history, are Abelard and Eloise, Romeo and Juliet and the American media and this President at the moment. But this doesn’t matter over time. Reality will impinge. If his programs work, he’s fine. If it doesn’t work, all of the adulation of journalists in the world won’t matter.

Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.

If you seek Hamilton’s monument, look around. You are living in it. We honor Jefferson, but live in Hamilton’s country, a mighty industrial nation with a strong central government.

If your job is to leaven ordinary lives with elevating spectacle, be elevating or be gone.

A society that thinks the choice between ways of living is just a choice between equally eligible “lifestyles” turns universities into academic cafeterias offering junk food for the mind.

Politicians fascinate because they constitute such a paradox; they are an elite that accomplishes mediocrity for the public good.

A politician’s words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.

Being elected to Congress is regarded as being sent on a looting raid for one’s friends.

In the lexicon of the political class, the word “sacrifice” means that the citizens are supposed to mail even more of their income to Washington so that the political class will not have to sacrifice the pleasure of spending it.

There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.