The great task of life is transmission: the task of transmitting the essential tools and graces of life from our parents to our children

For as long as I can remember the slogan has been ... the federal government ought to behave more like families, because families balance their budgets. It turns out that families looked around and said, "You know what? Let's behave more like the government!"

Perhaps the soundest advice for parents is: Lighten up. People have been raising children for approximately as long as there have been people.

A politician's words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.

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.

Politicians fascinate because they constitute such a paradox; they are an elite that accomplishes mediocrity for the public good.

Baseball, like Pericles' Athens (or any other good society), is simultaneously democratic and aristrocratic. Anyone can enjoy it, but the more you apply yourself, the more you enjoy it.