The best use of history is as an inoculation against radical expectations, and hence against embittering disappointments.

All politicians are to some extent salesmen.

Voters don't decide issues, they decide who will decide issues.

There can be no reasonable right to live on sidewalks. Society needs order, and hence has a right to a minimally civilized ambience in public spaces. Regarding the homeless, this is not merely for aesthetic reasons because the anesthetic is not merely unappealing. It presents a spectacle of disorder and decay that becomes a contagion.

Once when the Yankee's Lou Pinella was batting he questioned a Palermo strike call. Pinella demanded, "Where was that pitch at?" Palermo told him that a man wearing Yankee pinstripes in front of 30,000 people should not end a sentence with a preposition. So Pinella, no dummy, said, "OK, where was that pitch at, asshole?"

Today more Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses than for property crimes

Baseball exemplifies a tension in the American mind, the constant pull between our atomistic individualism and our yearning for community.