“Wealth brings great benefits to the world. Rich people are heros.”

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.

Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.

Teasing and a sense of humor, if you can develop that in your kids, and if you can exercise it with the kids, just makes for a pleasanter atmosphere.

No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it’s probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.

Each child is biologically required to have a mother. Fatherhood is a well-regarded theory, but motherhood is a fact.

Little islands of human happiness, peace, and prosperity are so exceptional at this point in history that I’m not even sure we can draw lessons from them.

What Alexander Graham Bell thought up occupied less space than a flower vase. Now it’s so small that I have to search all my pockets to discover I’ve received a spam text.

No industry in living memory has collapsed faster than daily print journalism.

Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.

I had always thought of Egypt as a rather secular country. And I think it is, but people are quite observant of the strictures of Ramadan.

All change is bad. But sometimes it has to be done.

If I have a song where I hit some really high notes, I want to try to bring in equivalently low notes somewhere in there.

Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature

They want you to bring out your intestines.

Dressing is a way of life. It brings you joy. It can give you freedom and liberation, help you to find yourself and to move without restraint. Isn’t elegance forgetting what one is wearing?

The prestige you acquire by being able to tell your friends that you know famous men proves only that you are yourself of small account.

How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams.

Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being. Creativity requires passion and commitment. It brings to our awareness what was previously hidden and points to new life. The experience is one of heightened consciousness: ecstasy.

I think about my sons and the legacy I have to leave for them – and it always brings me back to reality.