Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.

I believe there's something very salutary in, say, beating up a gay-bashing policeman. Preferably one fights through the courts, through the laws, through education, but if at a neighborhood level violence is necessary, I'm all for violence. It's the only thing Americans understand.

The New York Times is the worst in that hardly anybody can write English over there. Most of it reads like slight translations from the German.

The U.S. Bill of Rights is being steadily eroded, with two million telephone calls tapped, 30 million workers under electronic surveillance, and, says the author, countless Americans harassed by a government that wages spurious wars against drugs and terrorism.

You can improve your talent, but your talent is a given, a mysterious constant. You must make it the best of its kind.

The oligarchs think that the people are both dangerous and stupid. Their point is moot. But we do know that the oligarchs are a good deal more dangerous to the polity than the people at large.

On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.