To be homeless in America is to live like a fugitive. The destitute are our own native-born "illegals."

Jesus: a wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.

It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the earth can sustain, and that human civilization will collapse when the number of, say, tax lawyers exceeds the world's total population of farmers, weavers, fisherpersons, and pediatric nurses.

Anyone who has invented a better mousetrap, or the contemporary equivalent, can expect to be harassed by strangers demanding that you read their unpublished manuscripts or undergo the humiliation of public speaking, usually on remote Midwestern campuses.

Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.

There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.

Ineluctably, the insults inflicted in one war call forth new wars of retaliation, which may be waged within months of the original conflict or generations later.