“Here is what she said, ‘I believe the truth is that we have no strong causal link between IRCA and discrimination.”

An educated man is thoroughly inoculated against humbug, thinks for himself and tries to give his thoughts, in speech or on paper, some style.

We have two political parties in this country, the Stupid Party and the Evil Party. I belong to the Stupid Party.

It doesn’t matter is you call it ‘Obama-care’ or ‘Elvis Presley care’ or ‘I-don’t-care care.’ It cannot sustain itself in its present form.

Reagan didn’t put anything off the table, if he felt it was for the good of the American people to tweak the tax system.

In your country club, your church, and business, about fifteen percent of the people are screwballs, lightweights, and boobs, and you would not want those people unrepresented in Congress.

If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don’t have integrity, nothing else matters.

There is no “slippery slope” toward loss of liberty, only a long staircase where each step down must first be tolerated by the American people and their leaders.

Grandchildren now don’t write a thank you for the Christmas presents.

If you torture statistics long enough, they’ll eventually confess the truth

Every time one of us starts talking about more effective immigration controls, somebody else throws up the Statue of Liberty, how we’re a nation of immigrants and all of that.

The debate takes on tinges of racism, emotion.

Any education that matters is liberal. All the saving truths, all the healing graces that distinguish a good education from a bad one or a full education from a half empty one are contained in that word.

A society like ours, which professes no one religion and has allowed all religions to decay, which indulges freedom to the point of license and individualism to the point of anarchy, needs all the support that responsible, cultivated homes can furnish. I hope your generation will provide a firmer shelter for civilized standards.

I consider abortion to be a deeply personal and intimate issue for women and I don’t believe male legislators should even vote on the issue.

I think it is embarrassing to all of us who truly know the mission of the Refugee Act.

There are three days that are really slow for restaurants – Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter.

Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.

For at least the past 65 years, liberalism has been nothing if not an attempt to strike a balance between the needs of the community and the needs of individuals, between the need for freedom and the need for order.

The difference between listening and pretending to listen, I discovered, is enormous. One is fluid, the other is rigid. One is alive, the other is stuffed.

I don’t believe in competitions between artists. This is insane. Who has the authority to say someone is better?

William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour.

We don’t usually see light traveling in darkness of space because we only can see its reflection on substance.

Life is the journey between darkness of the womb and darkness of the grave.

In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.