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" A fundamental American question is, 'What's the big idea?' "

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" Some taxpayers may object to a print journalism bailout on the grounds that it mostly benefits the liberal elite. And we can't blame taxpayers for being reluctant to subsidize the reportorial careers of J-school twerps who should have joined the Peace Corps and gone to Africa to 'speak truth to power' to Robert Mugabe. "

" The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas - fascism, communism, the atomic bomb. "

" Only a few good leaders have paused to reflect seriously on being leaders. "

" Conservatives really don't believe in politics as the primary instrument of getting along in life and therefore don't tend to put their energy into it a way people left of center do. "

" A person has got to balance work and life and family in order to be a balanced person. "

" Maybe the real secret to America's greatness is that we hate one another. "

" Democrats hate Democrats most of all. "

" You can't destroy America by destroying our elite. Think about America's elite. Think about it down through history. Destroy our elite, and about half the time, you're doing us a favor. "

" In a free country, government is a dull and onerous responsibility. It is a parent-teacher conference. "

" I'm not a tech-savvy parent. I communicate with my children via the old-media format called yelling. "

" Passover is my idea of a perfect holiday. Dear God, when you're handing out plagues of darkness, locusts, hail, boils, flies, lice, frogs, and cattle murrain, and turning the Nile to blood and smiting the firstborn, give me a pass. And tell me when it's over. "

" Love can never be fully explained. "

" The problem, when comparing contemporary television to television in 1974, is that TV has become not just bad but sad. "

" I write because I like to make things and the only things I am good at making things with are words. "

" In Hong Kong there is agglomeration beyond my fondest imaginings. The Kowloon district claims a population density four times that of New York City. "

" Regulation creates a moral hazard. "

" The real purpose of welfare is to get rid of poor people entirely. Everybody knows welfare has bad effects; that's the point. "

" In Henry Adams, I discovered not only the prototype of the modern thinker but also someone who is more interesting: a viper-toothed, puling, supercilious crank, thwarted in ambition, aging gracelessly, mad at the cosmos, and ashamed of his own jejune ideals. He is nevertheless very dear to me. "

" Politics won't allow for the truth. "

" Americans are good at pursuing happiness. And the Americans who pursue happiness most diligently show that we're also good at running it down and killing it. "

" I think every high school student who was alert during the early '60s got very embittered by the slow progress and the violence surrounding the Civil Rights Movement. "

" There are selves too big for one person to contain. You cannot call them selfish. There is nothing -ish about such selves. They are the self, as it were, itself. "

" Even the dumber parts of our government are not run by idiots. These are ordinary people like us, doing a job. By and large, they're trying to do it as well as they can. Or at least as often as people in the private sector try to do as well as they can. "

" A lot of newspaper columns used to be written in a rat-a-tat-tat, fast-paced style - and they tended to be funny. They were a little relief from the grimmer, grayer parts of the newspaper, and one of the best people at doing this was Will Rogers. "

" In thirteen years, every aspect of the universe can change - ask a thirteen-year-old. "

" If government were a product, selling it would be illegal. "

" You don't despair about something like the Middle East, you just do the best you can. "

" Toledo is better than exciting, it's happy. Because nothing is more conducive to unhappiness than taking yourself seriously, and taking yourself seriously is difficult when you're baseball team is the Mud Hens. "

" 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. "

" Democrats hate America being a world power because world power gives power to the nation instead of to Democrats. "