There are many who lust for the simple answers of doctrine or decree. They are on the left and right. They are not confined to a single part of the society. They are terrorists of the mind.

As I grew up, I knew that as a building it was on the level of Mount Olympus, the Pyramid of Giza, the nation's capital, the czar's winter palace, and the Louvre - except, of course, that it was better than all of those inconsequential places.

All I ever wanted to be president of was the American League.

Talking to Yogi Berra about baseball is like talking to Homer about the Gods.

If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will amd imagination? through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction.

A convention is a social pattern we have chosen to prefer over whatever the raw world simply proffers. It is a sign of the operation of the mind, drawing the assent of a sufficient number of other minds so that the agreement will be widely operative. A convention is not a custom; a custom is a habit in which a sufficient number acquiesce. A custom can appear as a convention, but it is really a lesser act, the result of passive acceptance rather than of the imposition of design. It is the difference between learning to live by the annual flooding of the river or by a calendar.

Winning has a joy and discrete purity to it that cannot be replaced by anything else.