We have the British motor industry as a role model for what happens when you try to save an industrial dinosaur. Britain was the first country to industrialise and the first to de-industrialise. We should learn from this.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Writing is agony. I hate it.

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

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

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

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.

Horses and horsepower alike are about status and being cool.

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.

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

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.

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

I don't watch much television.

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.

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.