Think of the old cliché about ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.’ This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head.

Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.

In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people's sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people.

Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.

People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.

Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.