The Apologizer Bunny keeps going and going and going.

Episcopalians have always preferred the flying buttress to the pillar of the church.

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.

Randian heroes come off as metaphors for Jews because they are beset by irrational forces that try to bar them from the professions and use their virtues against them to bring about their destruction.

We worship education but hate learning. We worship success but hate the successful. We worship fame but hate the famous.

The American way of stress is comparable to Freud's 'beloved symptom', his name for the cherished neurosis that a patient cultivates like the rarest of orchids and does not want to be cured of. Stress makes Americans feel busy, important, and in demand, and simultaneously deprived, ignored, and victimized. Stress makes them feel interesting and complex instead of boring and simple, and carries an assumption of sensitivity not unlike the Old World assumption that aristocrats were high-strung. In short, stress has become a status symbol.

Of all the old maid's blessing, the greatest is carte blanche. Spinsterhood is powerful; once a woman is called "that crazy old maid" she can get away with anything.