“Rich people don’t like to be in the military. The shoes are ugly and the uniforms itch. Rich people don’t go in much for revolution or terrorism, either.”

The minute somebody joins a committee… they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.

The beauty of democracy is that an average, random, unremarkable citizen can lead it.

Once you’ve built the big machinery of political power, remember you won’t always be the one to run it.

A humorist doesn’t really do that much note-taking.

Stupid is a great force in human affairs.

By the end of the 1950s, American cars were so reliable that their reliability went without saying even in car ads. Thousands of them bear testimony to this today, still running on the roads of Cuba though fueled with nationalized Venezuelan gasoline and maintained with spit and haywire.

My dad died when I was young; my mom remarried with more haste than sense to a fellow… he wasn’t evil or anything, but he was worthless.

Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum.

Richard Nixon was the best thing that ever happened to journalism. I mean this guy was wonderful. Just when you thought he could get no worse, he got worse.

I look around my house, and everything except the kids and dogs was made in China. And I’m not sure about the kids. They have brown eyes and small noses.

The good news is that, according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for everything. The bad news is that, according to the Obama administration, you’re rich.

Some people have facts; these can be proven. Some people have theories; these can be disproven. But people with opinions are mindless and have their minds made up about it.

The whole idea of our government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.

People think the free market is a philosophy, they think that it is a creed. It is none of those things. Free market is a bathroom scale, it is a measuring tape, it’s simply a measurement.

Woodstock had a tremendous impact on American artistic life.

People are not ants or bees. We do not reason or love or live or die collectively.

In a militia, the character of the laborer, artificer, or tradesman, predominates over that of the soldier: in a standing army, that of the soldier predominates over every other character.

Up to now, America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a mass movement. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.

If you don’t want gays in the military, make the uniforms ugly.

The U.S. should never get involved where we have no clear national interest. We should not intervene militarily in a country like Syria, where we can’t separate friend from foe and might end up arming the very people who hate us the most.

If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck.

You don’t help a country by supporting a military regime that denies any sign of democracy, and what defeated Pakistan was its military regime.

Force has no place where there is need of skill.

To be a successful soldier, you must know history.