The euro pleases dispirited people for whom European history is not Chartres and Shakespeare but the Holocaust and the Somme. The euro expresses cultural despair.

As has been said, standards are always out of date - that is why we call them standards.

Popularity makes no law invulnerable to invalidation. Americans accept judicial supervision of their democracy - judicial review of popular but possibly unconstitutional statutes - because they know that if the Constitution is truly to constitute the nation, it must trump some majority preferences.

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.

The strongest continuous thread in America's political tradition is skepticism about government.

Correct thinkers think that 'baseball trivia' is an oxymoron: nothing about baseball is trivial.

Leadership is, among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it - short-term pain for long-term gain.