It is very hard now to shock people into thinking about government regulation and the extent of government involvement in life.

When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state ... this violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people.

Southern California is a nice place, if you could cut out the show-business cancer. It just keeps spreading.

The dominant type of humor in the '60s was essentially defensive and self-deprecating, using humor as a shield.

Something that comes to us, some gym shoe that comes to us as a result of child labor from a brutal dictatorship, where people do not have basic freedoms, it wouldn't bug me to tax the living Dickens out of that thing or even to forbid its importation whatsoever. But that's a moral question, not an economic question.

The U.S. tax code was written by A students. Every April 15 we have to pay somebody who got an A in accounting to keep ourselves from being sent to jail.

Humor is, by its nature, more truthful than factual.