Married couples who quarrel bitterly every day may really need each other as deeply as those who appear to be desperately in love.

For women, the sexual act is a means to a higher end. For a man, it is an end in itself.

In history-as-politics, the 'future' is that vacuum in time waiting to be filled with the antics of statesmen.

Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our antimaterialist, otherworldly, New Age, spiritual types. But if the material world is merely illusion, an honest guru should as content with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice, tofu, and seaweed slime.

In social institutions, the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. There will never be a state as good as its people, or a church worthy of its congregation, or a university equal to its faculty and students.

Only a fool would leave the enjoyment of rainbows to the opticians. Or give the science of optics the last word on the matter.

King Arthur and his armored goons of the Round Table functioned as the Politburo of a slave state: Camelot. Of all who have written on the Matter of Arthur, from Malory to White, only Mark Twain understood this. But Mark Twain was a great writer.