“People are not ants or bees. We do not reason or love or live or die collectively.”

Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum.

Richard Nixon was the best thing that ever happened to journalism. I mean this guy was wonderful. Just when you thought he could get no worse, he got worse.

I look around my house, and everything except the kids and dogs was made in China. And I’m not sure about the kids. They have brown eyes and small noses.

The good news is that, according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for everything. The bad news is that, according to the Obama administration, you’re rich.

Some people have facts; these can be proven. Some people have theories; these can be disproven. But people with opinions are mindless and have their minds made up about it.

The whole idea of our government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.

People think the free market is a philosophy, they think that it is a creed. It is none of those things. Free market is a bathroom scale, it is a measuring tape, it’s simply a measurement.

Woodstock had a tremendous impact on American artistic life.

Think what evil creeps liberals would be if their plans to enfeeble the individual, exhaust the economy, impede the rule of law, and cripple national defense were guided by a coherent ideology instead of smug ignorance.

The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year’s Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you’re married to.

Russians not only vehemently despise blacks, they believe Africa begins at the Ukraine border.

The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.

If we heard that somebody starved to death in Sweden or Switzerland, we would be shocked.

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.

Well, let me tell you, ants are the dominant insects. They make up as much as a quarter of the biomass of all insects in the world. They are the principal predators. They’re the cemetery workers.

Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.

I never want to discontinue giving kids opportunities.

In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.

Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.

Ants are the leading removers of dead creatures on the land. And the rest of life is substantially dependent upon them.

Such is O’Brian’s power to possess the imagination that I found I was living in his world as much as my own, wanting to know what happens next.

…all his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for.