There is no horizon in Toledo. There are too many trees.

The Tea Party has definitely increased political involvement, not only among Tea Party members but among people who oppose the Tea Party members. It's been a general stimulus.

Politics is the one field you don't age out of.

Kids are disorganized.

America is not a wily, sneaky nation. We don't think that way. We don't think much at all, thank God.

A Kindle returns us to the inconvenience of the scroll, except with batteries and electronic glitches. It's as handy as bringing Homer along to recite the 'Iliad' while playing a lyre.

People love to be told what they know already.

It's hard to be serious in life.

College professors used to be badly paid and worth it. Colleges used to be modest institutions; they should go back to being modest institutions.

I think that humor has become a principle means of communication among Americans about politics.

We've come into the world of '1984,' but it turns out to be '1984'-Lite.

The divorce rate in 1946 was higher than it ever had been and as high as it ever would be until the '70s. The reason was that prior relationships had not endured the strain of war.

There is the love and marriage and family kind of happiness, which is exceedingly boring to describe but nonetheless is important to have and dreadful not to have.

We loved cars until the '70s or so. Then they became appliances. They turned into motorized cup holders. Most of it has to do with urban sprawl. What began as pleasure ends up in necessity, as so many things do.

Lyndon Johnson faced some clear moral issues.

Will Generation X and the Millennials do a better job running the world than the boomers have? Let's hope so.

I was never a Democrat. I went from Republican to Maoist and then back again.

Adam Smith pointed out that there were three things that make us more prosperous, in a general sort of way: freedom to pursue our own self-interest; specialization, which he called division of labor; and freedom of trade.

If death weren't around to 'finalize' the Darwinian process, we'd all still be amoebas.

I believe in God. God created the world.

I like to have interesting things to write about. And when one says something is 'interesting,' one almost always means 'bad.'

Health care's not about insurance! Health care's about getting treatment.

You don't despair about something like the Middle East, you just do the best you can.

Little islands of human happiness, peace, and prosperity are so exceptional at this point in history that I'm not even sure we can draw lessons from them.