“Once you’ve built the big machinery of political power, remember you won’t always be the one to run it.”

Term limits aren’t enough. We need jail.

You’re stupid,’ is not something even his most severe critics usually say to President Barack Obama.

In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, impeached one and hounded another out of office. And when all else fails, we hold an election and assassinate their character.

Regulation creates a moral hazard.

Catchphrases flourish in contemporary American English.

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

Global warming is a fact. Now it’s up to liberals to make it a reality. Hence there is crucial importance in preventing powerful, greedy free market forces from getting in the way of worsening storms and rising sea levels. The Kyoto Accord is a good first step.

I know quite a few fellow members of the news analysis and commentary business, and I have it from the highest-placed sources, on the record, that each and every one of our children is a genius.

Because of their size, parents may be difficult to discipline properly.

To mistrust science and deny the validity of scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You’d better go look for work as a plant or wild animal.

The weirder you’re going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.

A fundamental American question is, ‘What’s the big idea?’

I’ve got a 1990 Porsche 911. It’s just a Carrera, a very simple, straightforward little thing that goes like stink. I love it.

Every vote should carry a serial number, so that responsibility for harmful or careless use of the vote can be traced. Concealed voting should be outlawed.

The body is forever teaching us lessons. There are all sorts of things that we can’t do, shouldn’t do, had better not do very often or do for too long as we get older. The body makes its presence known.

The baby boomers’ politics have covered a wide band of silliness, from the Weather Underground to the Timothy McVeigh types. The great majority of us are well in the middle of that spectrum, but still, there’s been both leftie silliness and right-wing silliness.

Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man.

Through machinery, man can exert tremendous powers almost as fantastic as if he were the hero of a fairy tale. Through machinery, man can travel with an ever increasing velocity; he can fly through the air and go beneath the surface of the ocean.

There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.

If you don’t understand how to run an efficient operation, new machinery will just give you new problems of operation and maintenance.

Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it’s supposed to do.

Why, we have invented the whole machinery of the supernatural, with its unseen spirits and powers, good and bad, to account for things, because we found the universal everyday nature too cheap, too common, too vulgar.

I think I’m a little more daunted by when the machinery of the play is really huge.

The intricate machinery of its blood and prayers and muscles for a gestation period much longer than nine months or even nine years.