“Seriousness is stupidity sent to college.”

Global warming is a fact. Now it’s up to liberals to make it a reality. Hence there is crucial importance in preventing powerful, greedy free market forces from getting in the way of worsening storms and rising sea levels. The Kyoto Accord is a good first step.

I know quite a few fellow members of the news analysis and commentary business, and I have it from the highest-placed sources, on the record, that each and every one of our children is a genius.

Because of their size, parents may be difficult to discipline properly.

To mistrust science and deny the validity of scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You’d better go look for work as a plant or wild animal.

The weirder you’re going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.

A fundamental American question is, ‘What’s the big idea?’

I’ve got a 1990 Porsche 911. It’s just a Carrera, a very simple, straightforward little thing that goes like stink. I love it.

Every vote should carry a serial number, so that responsibility for harmful or careless use of the vote can be traced. Concealed voting should be outlawed.

The body is forever teaching us lessons. There are all sorts of things that we can’t do, shouldn’t do, had better not do very often or do for too long as we get older. The body makes its presence known.

The baby boomers’ politics have covered a wide band of silliness, from the Weather Underground to the Timothy McVeigh types. The great majority of us are well in the middle of that spectrum, but still, there’s been both leftie silliness and right-wing silliness.

Never fight an inanimate object.

Finland is a rich country. What have they got? They got Nokia phones and plywood. How’d they get so rich? Because they’re free.

Political leaders are expert at saying nothing.

They are just really stupid people in Hollywood. You write them a script, and they say they love it, they absolutely love it. Then they say, ‘But doesn’t it need a small dog, and an Eskimo, and shouldn’t it be set in New Guinea?’ And you say, ‘But it is a sophisticated romantic comedy set in Paris.’

Political systems are run by self-selecting politicians. We don’t draft people; it’s not jury duty.

Everybody is xenophobic to an extent.

If you are not serious, people will sense it.

What I find interesting is how close you can run the laughter along the seam of seriousness, and occasionally cross it, so that half the house genuinely doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Humor and seriousness are not in opposition to each other.

Just as we are often moved to merriment for no other reason than that the occasion calls for seriousness, so we are correspondingly serious when invited too freely to be amused.

Fast Food Nation is witness to the rigour and seriousness of the best American journalism, readable, reliable and extremely carefully done.

What I intend to do is uphold a standard of intellectual seriousness on the right.

The seriousness of my situation started to sink in, and again I fought panic. I pushed it down, but it was harder this time, like my insides were an open can of shaken soda and I was trying to keep it from bubbling up out of the top.