Distracting a politician from governing is like distracting a bear from eating your baby.

Wealth is, for most people, the only honest and likely path to liberty. With money comes power over the world. Men are freed from drudgery, women from exploitation. Businesses can be started, homes built, communities formed, religions practiced, educations pursued. But liberals aren't very interested in such real and material freedoms. They have a more innocent - not to say toddlerlike - idea of freedom. Liberals want the freedom to put anything into their mouths, to say bad words and to expose their private parts in art museums.

I don't see evidence of America being a poorer country than it was 20 years ago. I've seen impoverished devastation. I've seen places where things had been good and now they were very bad.

A fruit is a vegetable with looks and money. Plus, if you let fruit rot, it turns into wine, something brussel sprouts never do.

To really enjoy drugs you've got to want to get out of where you are. But there are some wheres that are harder to get out of than others. This is the drug-taking problem for adults. Teenage Weltscbmerz is easy to escape. But what drug will get a grown-up out of, for instance, debt?

In the wake of Animal House, all of us at the Lampoon had a lot of Hollywood opportunities. We could definitely get people to return phone calls.

If I do, I say so. That's the only way out of that. If there are three words that need to be used more in American journalism, commentary, politics, personal life... it's the magic words "I don't know." I mean, there are certain basic principles, like the dignity of the individual and the individual's responsibility, and certain basic economic principles, like how when something costs less, more of it will be consumed... There are certain things that I feel pretty confident about.