People are so busy dreaming the American Dream, fantasizing about what they could be or have a right to be, that they're all asleep at the switch. Consequently we are living in the Age of Human Error.

Affirmative action was designed originally for "women and other minorities" but the phrase has become just another tortured euphemism. Female conscientiousness and eagerness to please have always made women good students and natural test takers. Jews have gloried in scholarship throughout the ages, and Asians of both sexes score so high on SATs and IQ tests that they regard affirmative action as an impediment. Affirmative action really means favoritism for blacks for the sake of racial peace, but the favor is pure chimera, and so, increasingly, is the peace.

I cherish the review-as-literature; as lapidary journalism in the eighteenth-century mode, the last hard sparkling diamond in theessayists's tarnished crown. To me, writing a good review is not just a way to make extra money, but a sacred duty.

America is the only country in the world where you can suffer culture shock without leaving home.

People are so busy dreaming the American Dream, fantasizing about what they could be or have a right to be, that they're all asleep at the switch. Consequently we are living in the Age of Human Error.

We want a president who is as much like an American tourist as possible. Someone with the same goofy grin, the same innocent intentions, the same naive trust; a president with no conception of foreign policy and no discernible connection to the U.S. government, whose Nice Guyism will narrow the gap between the U.S. and us until nobody can tell the difference.

Kings and queens might do wicked things, but they don't nag. One thing I like about Bloody Mary: she never said a word about lung cancer.