Most presidents come to Washington bright as freshly minted dimes and leave much diminished.

It is axiomatic: When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate.

All children find chaos congenial. Any unruliness, even by nature, advances the child's program of subverting authority.

Part of the beauty and much of the moral seriousness of sport derives from the severe justice of strenuous play in a circumscribed universe of rules that protect the integrity of competition. Records are worth recording, and worth striving to surpass, because they serve as benchmarks of excellence achieved under the pressure of competition.

Stalin's henchman Molotov, 96, died old and in bed, a privilege he helped to deny to millions.

Modern man's capacity for destruction is quixotic evidence of humanity's capacity for reconstruction. The powerful technological agents we have unleashed against the environment include many of the agents we require for its reconstruction.

I just got hooked on the radio, the voice of it all. It was my connection to metropolitan America, if you will. Sports, in particularly baseball then 'cause of its rich sediment of numbers, was one of the first things a young person could peg up with adults on - that is, you could know as much about Jimmy Fox as your father did.