It is only those who hope to transform human beings who end up by burning them, like the waste product of a failed experiment.

Billy Graham is a boring, racist charlatan.

Ronald Reagan said that he sought a "Star Wars" defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R.

Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human.

I do not believe any of the statistical claims that are made about public opinion. I don't see why anybody does.

Allow a friend to believe in a bogus prospectus or a false promise and you cease, after a short while, to be a friend at all.

I had real plans for my next decade and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read - if not indeed write - the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?