“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.”

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.

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.

To be most effective, flattery is always best applied with a trowel.

I had long ago discovered that when a word or formula refused to come to mind the best thing for it was to think of something else: tigers for instance or oatmeal.

This is also, I believe, what America is at its best—a whole greater than the sum of it’s parts.

I’m an actor. My life as an actor depends on who sends me what. I’m just taking the best stuff that I can find that’s sent my way, regardless of how big or little the paycheck is.

I try to tell the best story, and the story that has some heart and some genuine terror and some social commentary and some comedy and some romance and some sex and some violence.

Every physicist knows that things connect with each other. To isolate things is not the way the universe works – winning best actor is arbitrary.

The worst story I know is my heart. The best story I know is my heart. Both these truths know how to exist together in ways I never thought I will learn. This is the quietest of victories.

The best cure for a hangover is something one straight man can’t do for another straight man.