But our culture is in truly bad shape if we have come to define respecting something as the failure to set it on fire.

There can be no more ancient and traditional American value than ignorance. English-only speakers brought it with them to this country three centuries ago, and they quickly imposed it on the Africans--who were not allowed to learn to read and write--and on the Native Americans, who were simply not allowed.

Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs though, it's intimate and psychological, a mystery resist to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.

That's the really neat thing about Dan Quayle, as you must have realized from the first moment you looked into those lovely blue eyes: impeachment insurance.

Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss.

Whenever people can access deities directly without the intervention of a religious hierarchy, they don't need to have hierarchy so much.

Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don't get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goats cheese... get up at dawn to run, break for a mid-morning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.