In the American political system, you're only allowed to have real ideas if it's absolutely guaranteed that you can't win an election

Detroits industrial ruins are picturesque, like crumbling Rome in an 18th-century etching.

The Vietnamese Hoa were merchants and manufacturers. They were very successful and thus, according to the logic of Marxism, responsible for society's failures. The Hoa suffered the same fate as the pizza parlour in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing except at the hands of the world's fourth largest army instead of a small, petulant movie director.

I bought my first house because of Animal House.

The key ingredient of politics is the idea that all of society's ills can be cured politically. It's like a cookbook where the recipe for everything is to fry it. The fruit cocktail is fried.

The question nowadays is not what makes government work. The question is how do we make it stop.

A world government run by the UN will be like getting an old, purblind, half-deaf substitute teacher.