“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.”

If you ask the government to solve all of your problems, it’s a bit like asking your wife to cook and clean, to raise the children, to hold down a second job to help with the family finances, to keep her parents happy and well and keep your parents happy and well, and to also – to do the lawn and clean the gutters.

As a former writer for the ‘National Lampoon,’ I’ve probably contributed to the sea of sarcasm in which we live.

Politics are for foreigners with their endless wrongs and paltry rights. Politics are a lousy way to get things done. Politics are, like God’s infinite mercy, a last resort.

The idea of a stag hunt evokes chivalry – knights in jerkins and hose, ladies on sidesaddles with wimples and billowing dresses, a white stag symbolizing something-or-other, and Robin Hood getting in the way. An actual stag hunt is more like a horseback meeting of a county planning commission.

Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.

The Afghans themselves say that if you put two Afghans in a room, you get three factions.

Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.

Politics is the attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit.

I believe in God. God created the world.

The problem with public school is not overcrowding in the classroom. The problem is not teacher unions. The problem is not underfunding or lack of computer equipment. The problem is your damn kids.

We will win an election when all the seats in the House and Senate and the chair behind the desk in the Oval Office and the whole bench of the Supreme Court are filled with people who wish they weren’t there.

When elites see a homeless person in the gutter, they assume he’s saving a parking place.

Head lice have their own animal-rights group, or may as well. The National Pediculosis Association doesn’t exactly advocate letting lice live with dignity, but it does oppose pediculicidal treatments.

Never be unfaithful to a lover, except with your wife.

Nobody is making Americans buy Chinese goods.

Gay marriage acceptance is happening in the blink of an eye.

What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe.

In the final analysis, photography… is ever a hireling, ever the hired gun.

Most executives, many scientists, and almost all business school graduates believe that if you analyze data, this will give you new ideas. Unfortunately, this belief is totally wrong. The mind can only see what it is prepared to see.

You can analyse the past, but you have to design the future.

The purpose of science is not to analyze or describe but to make useful models of the world. A model is useful if it allows us to get use out of it.

To deal with future we have to deal with possibilities. Analysis will only tell us what is.

The analysis of data will not by itself produce new ideas.

Western traditions of education have emphasized knowledge analysis, description and debate. They all have a part to play, but today there is a whole vast aspect of doing that has just been left out. Operacy is what keeps society going.