“You can’t get rid of poverty by giving people money.”

Liberals are always proposing perfectly insane ideas, laws that will make everybody happy, laws that will make everything right, make us live forever, and all be rich. Conservatives are never that stupid.

We need a government, alas, because of the nature of humans.

I like fiction and the kind of history that gives the grace and flavor of fiction to the past. No bloviation on current events, please. I can write that junk myself.

America has to act. But, when America acts, other nations accuse us of being ‘hegemonistic’, of engaging in ‘unilateralism’, of behaving as if we’re the only nation on earth that counts. We are.

Kuwait City is not gorgeous, actually, but it’s got a kind of Epcot Center thing going for it. It’s not pretty. But it’s striking, I’ll give it that. It’s not as over-the-top as Abu Dhabi or Dubai. But nearly.

People will tell you anything but what they do is always the truth.

Mikhail Gorbachev was the Jimmy Carter of the Communist bloc. The Russians hate him.

Ending wars is very simple if you surrender.

There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.

Will Generation X and the Millennials do a better job running the world than the boomers have? Let’s hope so.

Whatever it is that the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government does it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy.

The real purpose of welfare is to get rid of poor people entirely. Everybody knows welfare has bad effects; that’s the point.

You can’t destroy America by destroying our elite. Think about America’s elite. Think about it down through history. Destroy our elite, and about half the time, you’re doing us a favor.

I was very much in favor of the Iraq invasion.

Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes – the whole bag of tricks.

The divorce rate in 1946 was higher than it ever had been and as high as it ever would be until the ’70s. The reason was that prior relationships had not endured the strain of war.

I discovered is that I have a couple of valves that were leaky and had been giving, gave me a problem then. But I hadn’t noticed anything up until then.

The label’s going great, because we’re not idiots. We’re not trying to sue everyone that downloads everything.

Minnesotans lost their jobs because the credit rating agencies didn’t do the only job they’re supposed to have.

I’ve been given a second chance in life, and I don’t want to let a minute go by without enjoying it.

Ralph Nader is a hero. I know Ralph, and I call him up occasionally. He’s helped me out on a couple of occasions when I’ve given speeches to corporations where he’d have a good… He’d give me some good information.

Today, at Harvard, any student with the currently fashionable color of skin is given rights denied to students of the currently unfashionable color.

It is the power of memory that gives rise to the power of imagination.

So it is fair enough that you are paying me what I ask for, because it is my name you are using to sell the film.