We live in times of wonderful technology and crappy politics. The task before us now is not to let the latter destroy the former.

And yet, what is bravery but the capacity to reject our fears, ignore and supress them, then go on to do whatever it is we are afraid to do.

What happened in America in the 1860s was a war of secession, a war of independence, no different in principle from what happened in America in the 1770s and 1780s.

We're most likely to lose our rights when we allow ourselves to be persuaded to deprive others of theirs.

I have long argued that we need to reopen Alcatraz to house government criminals, and let tourists on excursion boats in San Francisco Bay pay to chum the water with meat with an expired sell-by date that would otherwise have to be discarded.

To politicians, solved problems represent a dire threat - of unemployment and poverty. That's why no problem ever tackled by the government has ever been solved. What they want is lots of problems they can promise to solve, so that we'll keep electing them - or letting them keep their jobs in a bureaucracy metastasizing like cancer.

the miserable specimens who call themselves ' liberals ' are really conservatives: they're desperately even hysterically defending a welfare-warfare kleptocracy that is now at least four generations old, against growing numbers of us (unlike Republicans , who seem to become more ignorant with every passing year) who have actually managed to learn something from history and are struggling to dismantle said kleptocracy.