I think of Texas as the laboratory for bad government.

So keep fighting for freedom and justice, beloveds.

I'm sorry that government involves filling out a lot of forms. ... I'm sorry myself that we're not still on the frontier, where we could all tote guns, shoot anything that moved and spit to our hearts' content. But we live in a diverse and crowded country, and with civilization comes regulation.

The impulse to make ourselves safer by making ourselves less free is an old one ... When we are badly frightened, we think we can make ourselves safer by sacrificing some of our liberties. We did it during the McCarthy era out of fear of communism. Less liberty is regularly proposed as a solution to crime, to pornography, to illegal immigration, to abortion, to all kinds of threats.

Bad policies, stupid policies, gutless policies have real consequences.

Even I felt sorry for Richard Nixon when he left; there's nothing you can do about being born liberal - fish gotta swim and hearts gotta bleed.

the more a body tries to explode all the foolish myths that have grown up about Texas by telling the truth, the more a body will wind up adding to the mythology.