The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful.

You'll forget it when you're dead, and so will I. When I'm dead, I'm going to forget everything–and I advise you to do the same.

We were German-Americans in a British colony, so we were outsiders.

I could go on to speak of sanity as compared with insanity, decency as compared with vandalism, friendship as compared with rabies.

Vietnam was an exercise in mistaken idealism Iraq in cynical money-making. And there's no optimism or idealism now -- Americans are tired of knowledge. Our leaders, the C-students from Yale, know this. We're proud of being ignorant that leaves virtue at our core. We aren't frazzled by knowledge like foreigners, so we can be trusted.

And we all vied, in saving face, to be the greatest student of human nature, the person with the quickest sense of humor.

We are never as modern, as far ahead of the past as we like to think we are.