“As a former writer for the ‘National Lampoon,’ I’ve probably contributed to the sea of sarcasm in which we live.”

If you think health care is expensive now, just wait ’til it’s free.

Adam Smith’s huge failure was the fact that he did not foresee the industrial revolution.

Staying married may have long-term benefits. You can elicit much more sympathy from friends over a bad marriage than you ever can from a good divorce.

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

In its worse forms, conservatism is a matter of ‘I hate strangers and anything that’s different.’

Gossip is what you say about the objects of flattery when they aren’t present.

If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health, slow your mind, make you fat – in other words, turn you into an adult.

You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they’re going.

Southern California is a nice place, if you could cut out the show-business cancer. It just keeps spreading.

Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.

No doubt the ridiculous politicians are right to like politics. They have found careers in which success can be achieved by being ridiculous. Imagine Jimmy Carter or George W. Bush rising to the top of any other profession.

Don’t send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals, when their cheery effect is needed.

The problem in Afghanistan is really not so much land as water. It’s a dry country with ample amounts of water running through it, but not to good enough effect.

The most brilliant satire of all time was ‘A Modest Proposal’ by Jonathan Swift. You’ll notice how everything got straightened out in Ireland within days of that coming out.

America wasn’t founded so that we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damned well pleased.

The minute somebody joins a committee… they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.

It’s easier for the former masters to put aside the masks that hid their humanity than for the former slaves to recognise the faces underneath. Or to trust that this is not a new mask these are wearing.

There was discover’d by me a fifth sort, which had near the thickness of the former, but they were almost twice as long. The first time bacteria were observed.

All that seems indispensible in stating the account between the dead and the living, is to see that the debts against the latter do not exceed the advances made by the former.

The Negro was a political football between his former slave master and Northern political adventurers.

As former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano pointed out, if you build a 50-foot wall, you’ll soon be confronted with a 51-foot ladder.

Love transforms us in the best of ways, allowing us only to look back on a memory of our former self.

The main difference between the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution was that the former was mostly the work of Communist party members and others who wanted to bring about ‘socialism with a human face.’

I think we need to make it clear that your growth of the former Soviet Union is over