“Never fight an inanimate object.”

Even very young children need to be informed about dying. Explain the concept of death very carefully to your child. This will make threatening him with it much more effective.

Thank you, Occupy Wall Street. With your vivid example of anticapitalist squalor, I’ve been able to convince all three of my children to become investment bankers.

The perpetuation of slavery, the exile and extermination of American Indians, and the passage of Jim Crow laws weren’t carried out at the bidding of a few malefactors of great wealth.

Death is so important that God visited death upon his own son, thereby helping us learn right from wrong well enough that we may escape death forever and live eternally in God’s grace.

Arab-led Islamic fundamentalism destabilizes nations from Algeria to the Philippines.

Just because a subject is serious doesn’t mean it doesn’t have plenty of absurdities.

The young are adept at learning, but even more adept at avoiding it.

Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.

Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the exception of guppies, who like to eat theirs.

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.

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

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.

The innocent on a quest, the pretender, an inanimate object that holds evil – it’s really strange that these themes are there in so many different countries’ folklore.

There are no inanimate objects.

Animate and inanimate they all develop in space and in time such that they optimize the flow of material.