Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.

When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.

It was Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin, who coined the phrase Survival of the Fittest.

Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.

There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.

Decision has greater virtue and force if taken after there has been eloquent dissent.

[Franklin Delano] Roosevelt was the central world figure in the two great disasters of this century - the Great Depression and World War II. By contrast, JFK came in relatively peaceful, agreeable times.