The vitamin has been reified. A chemical intangible originally defined as a unit of nutritive value, it was long ago reified into a pill. Now it is a pill; no one except a few precise scientists define it as anything else. Once the vitamin became a pill, it became real according to the precepts of American Cartesianism: I swallow it, therefore it is.

Animal rights activists gives disillusioned feminists an excuse to go back to being women protecting wee creatures without compromising their radical credentials

God may have loved the common people, but a trip to any shopping mall suggests that He made far too many of them.

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.

The American woman's concept of marriage is a clearly etched picture of something uninflated on the floor. A sleeping-bag withoutair, a beanbag without beans, a padded bra without pads. To work on it, you start pumping--what the magazines call "breathing life into your marriage." Do enough of this and the marriage becomes a kind of Banquo's ghost, a quasi-living entity.

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.

Southerners have a genius for psychological alchemy...If something intolerable simply cannot be changed, driven away or shot they will not only tolerate it but take pride in it as well.