It has made mincemeat of Barack Obama's pose of thoughtfulness. It has demonstrated that he lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the most basic economic realities. It has dramatized environmentalism's descent into infantilism.

The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.

It is said that God gave us memory so we could have roses in winter. But it is also true that without memory we could not have self in any season. The more memories you have, the more you have. That is why, as Swift said, No wise man ever wished to be younger.

We know next to nothing about virtually everything. It is not necessary to know the origin of the universe; it is necessary to want to know. Civilization depends not on any particular knowledge, but on the disposition to crave knowledge

We are suffering from a kind of slow-motion barbarization from within.

Baseball's best teams lose about sixty-five times a season. It is not a game you can play with your teeth clenched.

Long before Einstein told us that matter is energy, Machiavelli and Hobbes and other modern political philosophers defined man as a lump of matter whose most politically relevant attribute is a form of energy called "self-interestedness". This was not a portrait of man "warts and all". It was all wart - except that the dominating attribute was not considered a blemish.