I have never been to a museum in Hong Kong, or a movie or a play. I've never gone club-hopping. I've never taken the tram to Victoria Peak.

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.

My generation of Americans was the first to really care about racism and sexism, not to mention the I Ching, plus, of course, the Earth.

Only a few good leaders have paused to reflect seriously on being leaders.

I blame feminism and Facebook for the death of the American automobile. I'm a Republican, so I blame everything on feminism - or commies.

I am unboreable in the great outdoors.

I like Michael Moore, but I think of him more as a rabble-rouser. On his TV show, when he went to the home of the guy who invented the car alarm and set off all the car alarms on the block... pretty funny.

Politics is - once in a while - a forum for serious debate about political philosophy.

There are selves too big for one person to contain. You cannot call them selfish. There is nothing -ish about such selves. They are the self, as it were, itself.

I look around my house, and everything except the kids and dogs was made in China. And I'm not sure about the kids. They have brown eyes and small noses.

Jack Abramoff is the world's best lobbyist - for the Federal Penitentiary System.

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 anti-individualist enemies that Ayn Rand battled are still the enemy, but they've shifted their line of attack. Political collectivists are no longer much interested in taking things away from the wealthy and creative.

The only advantage to being a middle-aged man is that when you put on a jacket and tie, you're the Scary Dad. Never mind that no one has had an actually scary dad since 1966. The visceral fear remains.

When I was fifteen, I dreamed of living in the big city, as many a young person does if he is artistic and sensitive. By 'artistic and sensitive' I mean short, skinny, unkissed, bad at sports, and carrying a C average in high school.

As I get older, all sorts of things become less funny. Once one has children, any cruelty involving children becomes far less amusing than when one was at the mercy of one's friends' and relatives' children.

The prevalence of mobile homes does not correspond with the prevalence of poverty, or with much of anything else. All that can be confidently said about America's mobile homes is that they are massed in places where you wouldn't want to be in one. Florida's mobile homes lie athwart the path of hurricanes. Georgia's are in the way of tornadoes.

I grew up going to public school, and they were huge public schools. I went to a school that had 3,200 kids, and I had grade school classes with 40-some kids. Discipline was rigid. Most of the learning was rote. It worked.

Something that confirms all fears and many conspiracy theories about government is finding out what our elected representatives would put into law if they could.

The average IQ in America is - and this can be proven mathematically - average.

I read good. I was an English major.

The more aspects of life that can be moved from private reign to public realm, the better it is for politics.

When I'm in the car, I want the only one shouting to be me.

Even Jimmy Carter can't be wrong all the time.

Arab-led Islamic fundamentalism destabilizes nations from Algeria to the Philippines.

Why can't death - if we must have it - be always glorious, as in 'The Iliad?'

I'm a member of the 1960s generation. We didn't have any wisdom.

There's a certain kind of behavior in the Arab world that, to me, resembles the way young men behave when there is no significant influence from women in their lives.

Fiscal conservatism is just an easy way to express something that is a bit more difficult, which is that the size and scope of government, and really the size and scope of politics in our lives, has grown uncomfortable, unwieldy, intrusive and inefficient.

I don't watch much television.

'You're stupid,' is not something even his most severe critics usually say to President Barack Obama.

As a nation, Kuwait has been, arguably, free of freedom itself. Claimed in turn by Constantinople, Riyadh, and Baghdad, Kuwait has survived by playing Turks off Persians, Arabs off one another, and the English off everyone.

I don't even know which end of a computer one is supposed to gaze into. I've never used a computer.

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.

Horses and horsepower alike are about status and being cool.

The laws of the marketplace are physical laws, and they don't become suspended in a crisis any more than the law of gravity does.

After the events of the 20th century, God, quite reasonably, left Europe. But He's still here in the United States.

Arguing, in the sense of attempting to convince others, has gone out of fashion with conservatives.

People say free trade causes dislocation. In actual fact, it's the lowering of trade barriers that causes the dislocation.

Writing is agony. I hate it.

Gay marriage acceptance is happening in the blink of an eye.

In Toledo, people grow out. Out to the suburbs. Out to the parts of America where the economy is more vigorous. And all too often, out to 48-inch waistbands.

Who, other than a crazy person, does anything besides hang up on a robo-call? Any call, any person, anywhere, under any circumstances.

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.

Detroit is beautiful - though you probably have to be a child of the industrial Midwest, like me, to see it.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the archetypal extremely smart person who went into politics anyway instead of doing something worthwhile for his country.

Northwest Ohio is flat. There isn't much up. The land is so flat that a child from Toledo is under the impression that the direction hills go is down. Sledding is done down from street level into creek beds and road cuts.

I'm old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.

You're never going to read 'The Wealth of Nations,' and you shouldn't, really. It's 900 pages.

No Americans wants to see somebody lose their house because of health bills. Their boat? Maybe. Maybe the boat. But not the house.