In their zeal for particular kinds of decisions to be made, those with the vision of the anointed seldom consider the nature of the: process: by which decisions are made. Often what they propose amounts to third-party decision making by people who pay no cost for being wrong-surely one of the least promising ways of reaching decisions satisfactory to those who must live with the consequences.

The talkers and writers resent being left on the sidelines by the doers.

One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring.

One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.

I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals' imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.

The grand delusion of contemporary liberals is that they have both the right and the ability to move their fellow creatures around like blocks of wood - and that the end results will be no different than if people had voluntarily chosen the same action

Trade-offs have been with us ever since the late unpleasantness in the Garden of Eden.