The computer revolution has allowed white-collar criminals to do what the Mob would have loved to do - put a pawnshop and a loan shark in every home!

The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't.

What a bummer it is to be a human being.

Do you think Arabs are dumb? They gave us our numbers. Try doing long division with Roman numerals.

The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers.

We were all gun nuts and they were called varmints, crows were, because they ate grain and so did we.

What I would really like to have been, given a perfect world, is a jazz pianist. I mean jazz. I don't mean rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-twice music the American black people gave the world.