New York is the only city in the world where you can get run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.

Americans like fat books and thin women.

Roosevelt's declaration that Americans had 'nothing to fear but fear itself' was a glorious piece of inspirational rhetoric and just as gloriously wrong.

It is fitting that yesteryear's swashbuckling newspaper reporter has turned into today's solemn young sobersides nursing a glass of watered white wine after a day of toiling over computer databases in a smoke-free, noise-free newsroom.

I am sitting here 93 million miles from the sun on a rounded rock which is spinning at the rate of 1000 miles an hour... and my head pointing down into space with nothing between me and infinity but something called gravity which I can't even understand, and which you can't even buy any place so as to have some stored away for a gravityless day.

There are good reasons why everybody should heed politicians' advise not to believe the media. One of the best is that the media report what politicians say.

It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.