“You’re never going to read ‘The Wealth of Nations,’ and you shouldn’t, really. It’s 900 pages.”

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.

The budget doesn’t have much control over the government. Then again, the government doesn’t have much control over the budget.

Like most sensible people, you probably lost interest in modern art about the time that Julian Schnabel was painting broken pieces of the crockery that his wife had thrown at him for painting broken pieces of crockery instead of painting the bathroom and hall.

I think the pearls – one is a necklace, and another you have five hundred pounds of pearls, which may be one million pearls in a bowl – really show a kind of [society] condition.

Even if I have hundreds of things to do, the disconnected feeling is still there because it is very hard to find a real purpose of life.

Pashtun nationalism is reasserting itself. Its political history spans several hundred years.

There was no escape from the letter-writer who, a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five years ago, captured a coveted correspondent. It would have been as easy to shake off an octopus or a boa-constrictor.

And when they don’t get what they want, say, “Okay, sweetheart, yours is coming. Let’s help you get it.” Be there 100% for them.

I acknowledge my beauty and my flaws, I do my best to keep it one hundred with the woman in the mirror so making friends is actually easy.

100 percent, my whole life. I went to school, I did music theory,

If we could have had in ’44, ah, let’s say three hundred operational