“Catchphrases flourish in contemporary American English.”

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.

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.

Competitive individualism militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contemporaneous anxiety.

Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, ‘Well, so-and-so will like this,’ which you do when you’re younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.

As long as God does not intervene in the contemporary universe in such a way as to violate physical laws, science has no way of knowing whether God exists or not.

For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class – contemporary literature is what’s most useful.

That is the real test. Any contemporary novelist should recognize in Patrick O’Brian a Master of the Art.

I read very little contemporary anything.

Disneyworld… is a historical reconstruction as sanitised as the Kremlin’s, and a future vision as uncognisant of contemporary pointers as Peter Pan’s.

This so-called contemporary art is not a form, but a philosophy of society.