War has all the characteristics of socialism most conservatives hate: Centralized power, state planning, false rationalism, restricted liberties, foolish optimism about intended results, and blindness to unintended secondary results.

The chances of your being harmed by terrorists are mathematically minute. The chance of your being robbed by your own government? That's easy: 100 per cent.

Liberalism's fatal flaw,... is that it has no permanent norms, only a succession of enthusiasms espoused by minor prophets. Each of these seems like a hot new idea to liberals, but soon goes to irksome and destructive extremes.

A belief in moral absolutes should always make us more, not less, critical of both sides in any conflict. This doesn't mean that both sides are equally wrong; it means that since we all fall short of moral perfection, even the side whose cause is truly righteous may commit terrible acts of violence in defense of that cause -- and, worse, may feel quite justified in committing them. That is the difference between being righteous and being self-righteous. Moral standards are absolute; but human fidelity to them is always relative.

The words of Jesus, including those Jefferson and the Jesus Seminar have blue-pencilled, have a unique permanence. They don't merely survive as aphoristic wisdom; they have an authority in our hearts, even when we try to deny them. They command. We can obey or rebel. That is why Jesus is still not only loved but hated - and why those who hate him feel they have to profess to love him.

The hypocrite recognizes the honest man as his deadly enemy.

If one person in America had starved over the last 20 years, you, reader, would know his name. The media would see to that. It would be the most thoroughly documented death since John Kennedy's.