I'm old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now. You've probably never woken up early on a winter morning to the acid stink of coal smoke in the air, which was everywhere when I was a little kid. My grade school was heated with coal. Not only was coal used to generate electricity, it was without any scrubbers in the stacks.

A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them.

The main reason to be opposed to political control of smoking is to keep power -even the smallest and silliest kind of power - out of the hands of ... members of a dangerous class -the class that knows what's good for us better than we do.

We need a government, alas, because of the nature of humans.

Even very young children need to be informed about dying. Explain the concept of death very carefully to your child. This will make threatening him with it much more effective.

Zero-sum thinking is an obsession of mine, but mostly in economics.

Any random group of thirty Vietnamese women will contain a dozen who make Julia Roberts look like Lyle Lovett.