Being a humorist is not a voluntary thing. You can tell this because in a situation where saying a funny thing will cause a lot of trouble, a humorist will still say the funny thing. No matter how inappropriate.

The C student starts a restaurant. The A student writes restaurant reviews.

Israel is slightly smaller than New Jersey. Moses in effect led the tribes of Israel out of the District of Columbia, parted Chesapeake Bay near Annapolis, and wandered for forty years in Delaware.

The Communist bloc of old was a study in the failure of failure. Losers in the Soviet economy were the people at the end of the long lines for consumer goods. Worse losers were the people who had spent hours getting to the head of the line, only to be told that the goods were unavailable.

Everybody in the Middle East wants to explain why they're right.

The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.

Hubris is one of the great renewable resources.

Like most sensible people, you probably lost interest in modern art about the time that Julian Schnabel was painting broken pieces of the crockery that his wife had thrown at him for painting broken pieces of crockery instead of painting the bathroom and hall.

Maybe climate change is a threat, and maybe climate change has been tarted up by climatologists trolling for research grant cash. It doesn't matter.

Let's reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools - and use it on the teachers.

The purpose of sports - even foreign sports - is not to bore people.

Abstract anger is great for rhetorical carrying on. You can go on endlessly about the post office, but it doesn't mean you're mad at your mailman.

The best and brightest don't go into politics. The best and brightest are at Goldman Sachs.

Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.

In theory, taxes should be like shopping. What I buy is government services. What I pay are my taxes.

Don't send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals, when their cheery effect is needed.

Agriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the first Thanksgiving dinner kickback to the Indians for subsidizing Pilgrim maize production with fish head fertilizer grants.

The 1960s was an era of big thoughts. And yet, amazingly, each of these thoughts could fit on a T-shirt.

Infant mortality and life expectancy are reasonable indicators of general well-being in a society.

Liberals have invented whole college majors - psychology, sociology and women's studies - to prove that nothing is anybody's fault.

Passover is my idea of a perfect holiday. Dear God, when you're handing out plagues of darkness, locusts, hail, boils, flies, lice, frogs, and cattle murrain, and turning the Nile to blood and smiting the firstborn, give me a pass. And tell me when it's over.

I live in New Hampshire. We're in favor of global warming. Eleven hundred more feet of sea-level rises? I've got beachfront property. You tell us up there, 'By the end of the century, New York City could be underwater,' and we say, 'Your point is?'

The library, with its Daedalian labyrinth, mysterious hush, and faintly ominous aroma of knowledge, has been replaced by the computer's cheap glow, pesky chirp, and data spillage.

The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.