“I come from Toledo, Ohio, a town that has been hurt badly by the shift of the automobile business towards Japan. And yet I remember how the car workers lived in the neighborhood that I grew up in. My father was a car salesman, and I remember how we lived. I remember how modestly we lived.”

The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.

Wealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino’s box.

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.

Sometimes the right response to evil is an appeal to powerful and effective social organization – an appeal to civilization itself.

Some people think that welfare reform should have hurt Bill Clinton with black voters.

The 1960s was an era of big thoughts. And yet, amazingly, each of these thoughts could fit on a T-shirt.

Why do elites hate the poor? It’s xenophobia. They don’t know any poor people – except their off-the-books Brazilian nanny and illegal immigrant cleaning lady from Upper Revolta who don’t speak English.

Maybe climate change is a threat, and maybe climate change has been tarted up by climatologists trolling for research grant cash. It doesn’t matter.

Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe. When you quit looking on the bright side, the catastrophe is still there.

The importance of local governance may not be obvious to an America accustomed to treating city and state downfalls with doses of federal comeuppance. Sometimes there’s a reason for that – the Civil War. More often, all reasoning seems absent – No Child Left Behind.

I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a ‘learning experience.’ Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I’ve done as a ‘learning experience.’ It makes me feel less stupid.

The world is being run by irresponsible spoiled brats.

New Hampshire polling data are unreliable because, when you call the Granite State’s registered Republicans and independents in the middle of dinner and ask them who they’re going to vote for, they have a mouth full of mashed potatoes and you can’t understand what they say.

The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas – fascism, communism, the atomic bomb.

Call a man ‘ignorant,’ and you have license to show the world your vast fund of knowledge and wise him up.

There isn’t much room for an outsider point of view in print any more.

You cannot buy a bad automobile any more from any producer. We have to do more products not because we’re looking at a particular segment, but because it’s a great vehicle.

Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.

Of the two hundred bones in the human body, more than a quarter are in the foot. It is a more complicated instrument than an automobile transmission, and it is treated with far less consideration.

Many of us take better care of our automobiles than we do our own bodies… yet the auto has replaceable parts.

Wisdom cannot come by railroad or automobile or aeroplane, or be hurried up by telegraph or telephone.

A man who has owned nothing but a bicycle all of his life feels suddenly wealthy the moment he buys an automobile…But this happy sensation wears off.

An automobile has about 10,000 moving parts, right?

And now we have all this access to public transportation, automobiles and jets and the Internet