The political terms 'will' and 'popular will' have a long track record in Western history going back to Rousseau. That record is profoundly anti-democratic, essentially inviting elites to interpret what the common people believe and want. In litigious modern America, that would be a judicial elite telling us how we meant to vote or should have voted.

Expert victimologists estimate that 91.2 percent of people in North America and Europe now qualify as victims, at least in their own minds.

By the mid 1920s the typical American town was in full sexual bloom. The change came with erotic fashions, literature and movies, and an unsuspected sexual aid, the automobile.

In a speech, the columnist Charles Krauthammer.... offered a new version of Socrates' famous saying, "The unexamined life is not worth living." In our age of bottomless self-love and obsession with our own feelings, Krauthammer suggested, "The too-examined life is not worth living either.

Compared with other Americans, journalists are more likely to live in upscale neighborhoods, have maids, own Mercedes and trade stocks, and less likely to go to church, do volunteer work or put down roots in a community. Journalists are over-represented in ZIP code areas where residents are twice as likely as other Americans to rent foreign movies, drink Chablis, own an espresso maker and read magazines such as Architectural Digest and Food & Wine.

You can't run a society or cope with its problems if people are not held accountable for what they do.

The principal advantage of the non-parental lifestyle is that on Christmas Eve you need not be struck dumb by the three most terrifying words that the government allows to be printed on any product: "Some assembly required."