The neo-hippie-dips, the sentimentality-crazed iguana anthropomorphizers, the Chicken Littles, the three-bong-hit William Blakes- thank God these people don't actually go outdoors much, or the environment would be even worse than it is already.

I'd known the people at Rolling Stone for a while. I'd gone to them with a piece I'd done on Beirut for Vanity Fair that Vanity Fair didn't want to publish, because they said I was making fun of death... This was Tina Brown.But they paid me for it. So I've got this big chunk of a piece, and Rolling Stone liked it, but they thought it was a little dated. But then they called me back and asked me to do a similar piece about the Turks and Caicos Islands, where the whole government had been arrested for dope smuggling. That was fun.

You can learn all about the human condition from covering the crime beat in a big city - you don't need to go to Beirut for that - but a foreign correspondent begins to understand poverty from a different perspective.

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

Adam Smith pointed out that there were three things that make us more prosperous, in a general sort of way: freedom to pursue our own self-interest; specialization, which he called division of labor; and freedom of trade.

[T]he Clinton administration launched an attack on people in Texas because those people were religious nuts with guns. Hell, this country was founded by religious nuts with guns. Who does Bill Clinton think stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock? Peace Corps volunteers? Or maybe the people in Texas were attacked because of child abuse. But, if child abuse was the issue, why didn't Janet Reno tear-gas Woody Allen?

For toddlers I suggest leaving their mittens on year-round, indoors and out. That way they can't get into aspirin bottles, liquor cabinets, or boxes of kitchen matches.