“If you spend 72 hours in a place you’ve never been, talking to people whose language you don’t speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don’t understand, and you come back as the world’s biggest know-it-all, you’re a reporter. Either that or you’re President Obama.”

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.

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.

In economics, when you put together a highly elastic thing and a highly inelastic thing, you create extraordinary potential for turbulence, volatility, and for unstable prices.

This isn’t a stable system.

We’re not where we should be in terms of our national economies.

In finance and economics, ill-designed policy is a more powerful force for harm than individual greed or error.

We need to move beyond the demonisation of overpaid traders

Including the value of natural resources and our social capital in national accounting is a vital step to achieve economic growth that is equitable and sustainable.

There is now more economic comment in the supposedly serious literature than survives from the whole of the thousand years commonly denominated as the Middle Ages …

No matter what’s happening in the Middle East – the Arab Spring, et cetera, the economic challenges, high rates of unemployment – the emotional, critical issue is always the Israeli-Palestinian one.