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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it.

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.

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.

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

The pursuit of perfection often impedes improvement.

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

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.