It is a law of governance that democracies have to spend themselves dizzy. Citizens of democracies can, after all, tell their government to give them things.

Journalists aren't supposed to praise things. It's a violation of work rules almost as serious as buying drinks with our own money or absolving the CIA of something.

The old woman was not only ugly with the ugliness age brings us all but showed signs of formidable ugliness by birth - pickle-jar chin, mainsail ears and a nose like a trigonometry problem. What's more, she had the deep frown and snit wrinkles that come from a lifetime of bad character.

That happy sense of purpose people have when standing up for a principle they haven't really been knocked down for yet.

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.

The sport of skiing consists of wearing three thousand dollars worth of clothes and equipment and driving two hundred miles in the snow in order to stand around at a bar and get drunk.

The French are sawed-off sissies who eat snails and slugs and cheese that smells like people's feet. Utter cowards who force their own children to drink wine, they gibber like baboons even when you try to speak to them in their own wimpy language.