“I like making things. I have a wood shop at home. I am a terrible carpenter but I love doing 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.

Think what evil creeps liberals would be if their plans to enfeeble the individual, exhaust the economy, impede the rule of law, and cripple national defense were guided by a coherent ideology instead of smug ignorance.

The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year’s Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you’re married to.

Russians not only vehemently despise blacks, they believe Africa begins at the Ukraine border.

The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.

If we heard that somebody starved to death in Sweden or Switzerland, we would be shocked.

Computers seem a little too adaptively flexible, like the strange natives, odd societies, and head cases we study in the social sciences. There’s more opposable thumb in the digital world than I care for; it’s awfully close to human.

Explosion of positive rights started in 1932 with the election of Roosevelt.

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.

Those who work standing … carpenters, sawyers, carvers, blacksmiths, masons … are liable to varicose veins … [because] the strain on the muscles is such that the circulation of the blood is retarded.

I mean, the services are even held in the home. And there’s not one person in charge, one speaker set above the others. It’s farmers and carpenters, and well, just average folk speaking spontaneously about the message they find in the Bible. […] A message from the heart to the heart.

Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.

I come from an ordinary family – my dad is a carpenter, a roof-maker – and we’ve always loved racing together.

You have to be strong to be a carpenter, maybe, but the director of a film doesn’t need to have muscles.

It’s the ones that deal with the inner fear, the unknown realms and the mysticisms that are scary.

An axe at home saves hiring a carpenter.