46 quotes found
“The columnist gives these words to the longings of an 11-year-old he meets with Tourette's syndrome: "Wisdom is encoded in our common language. We all have, to some extent, a complex, sometimes adv...”
“In war the moral is to the material as three to one. Napoleon”
“if we could tax Americans' cognitive dissonance we could balance the budget. The American people want all kinds of incompatible things, they're human beings, and they want high services, low taxes,...”
“Government could avoid having opinions about so many things if it would quit subsidizing so many things.”
“Who teaches young people to be so exquisitely sensitive to perceived slights, so ready to read affronts into routine events in everyday life? Their teachers no doubt.”
“Economics has accurately been called the science of the single instance.”
“The United States is a successful nation that is constantly susceptible to melancholy because things are not perfect.”
“There is no hatred as corrupting as intellectual hatred.”
“There is nothing quite like a dose of unvarnished history for inoculating people against the tendency to indict the present for failing to measure up to a sentimental notion of the past.”
“Get evangelical Christian made them receptive to the possibility of redemption in the here and now.”
“Lacking an articulable defense of the cultural values under siege, he became a vessel of smoldering animosities.”
“Americans would prefer that immigrants do their jobs and then disappear at the end of the day.”
“Our hatred of government is not caused mainly by government's goals, whatever their wisdom, but by government's techniques." Philip Howard”
“Law, rather than harnessing the passions, is increasingly pressed into their service.”
“Washington DC is happiest when in indignation overdrive.”
“Civilization depends on, and civility often requires, the willingness to say, "What you are doing is none of my business" and "What I am doing is none of your business.”
“Matthew Arnold was a fastidious social critic and hence an accomplished complainer. When he died, an acquaintance said: "Poor Matt, he's going to Heaven, no doubt but he won't like God.”
“Behavior was better when cinemas were opulent.”
“Television news is akin to audible wallpaper.”
“Coarseness occurs in a land where platitude inflames this sense of entitlement to more of almost everything, but less of manners and taste, with their irritating intimations of authority and hierar...”
