The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven't seen them since.

The family in the West is finished... its origin was economic, not biological... the odd group of strangers that make up every family no longer have any reason to live together, to suffer from one another's jagged edges.

It is curious how often one prefers his enemies to his friends.

As Brooks Adams put it, the sole problem of our ruling class is whether to coerce or to bribe the powerless majority.

When Ronald Reagan's career in show business came to an end, he was hired to impersonate, first, a California governor and then an American president who would reduce taxes for his employers, the Southern and Western New Rich, much of whose money came from the defence industries. There is nothing unusual about this arrangement. All recent presidents have had their price-tags.

When you come from a family that has been political, and I was brought up by my grandfather in the Senate, my father was in Roosevelt's Cabinet, this is not the class that produces writers or reflective people.

Populists have never had a good press in Freedom's land.