The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.

Sex education in the modern manner has been well-described as plumbing for hedonists.

Talk about presidents "taking" the country hither and yon is part of the foam of presidential elections.

There may be arrogance – and the laziness of someone who is indefatigable when doing what he enjoys, but only when doing that.

People who have nothing much in mind for next week speak instead about the next century or millennium.

Time was when much of lawyering consisted (according to turn-of-the-century lawyer and statesman Elihu Root) in "telling would-be clients that they are damned fool's, and should stop.

In times of change and danger, when there is a quicksand of fear under one's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present. John Dos Passos

In this age of 'whatever,' Americans are becoming slaves to the new tyranny of nonchalance. " James Morris

When a workman is unceasingly and exclusively engaged in the fabrication of one thing, he ultimately does his work with singular dexterity; but, at the same time, he loses the general faculty of applying his mind to the direction of the work. His every day becomes more of adroit and less industrious; so that it may be said of him, that, in proportion as the workman improves, the man is degraded. Alexis de Tocqueville

He was one of the fortunate few for whom there simply was no discernible line between work and play, between creation and recreation.

The most capricious modern entitlement is not just Social Security but to self-esteem.

Liberalism is not fond of fun, or at least of many forms of fun that many people like.

In Gladstone's mature years he lost faith not in God but in the ability of any government or state to act as the agent of God.

Enough anecdotes make a pattern.

Politics is always driven by competing worries.

A cardinal tenet of conservatism is that social inertia is – and ought to be – strong. It discourages and, if necessary, defeats the political grandiosity of those who would attempt to engineer the future by rupturing connections with the past.

From visible habits we make inferences as to the invisible attributes of the soul. Therefore, statecraft is soulcraft.

Gifted teachers master the patience required for the unending business of transmitting civilization down the generations, transforming biological facts – children – into social artifacts called citizens. It is wearying work and it is a wonder teachers can summon the stamina for it.

Institutions are lengthening shadows of strong individuals.

Author complains about "the further submergence of irrecoverable history into a perpetually churned present.

The columnist gives these words to the longings of an 11-year-old he meets with Tourette's syndrome: "Wisdom is encoded in our common language. We all have, to some extent, a complex, sometimes adversarial, relationship with our physical selves. And I more than most people know that it is correct to say,'I have a body.' There is my body, and then there is ME, trying to make it behave.

In war the moral is to the material as three to one. Napoleon

if we could tax Americans' cognitive dissonance we could balance the budget. The American people want all kinds of incompatible things, they're human beings, and they want high services, low taxes, and an omnipresent, omniprominent welfare state.

Government could avoid having opinions about so many things if it would quit subsidizing so many things.

Economics has accurately been called the science of the single instance.

The United States is a successful nation that is constantly susceptible to melancholy because things are not perfect.

There is no hatred as corrupting as intellectual hatred.

There is nothing quite like a dose of unvarnished history for inoculating people against the tendency to indict the present for failing to measure up to a sentimental notion of the past.

Lacking an articulable defense of the cultural values under siege, he became a vessel of smoldering animosities.

Americans would prefer that immigrants do their jobs and then disappear at the end of the day.

Who teaches young people to be so exquisitely sensitive to perceived slights, so ready to read affronts into routine events in everyday life? Their teachers no doubt.

Get evangelical Christian made them receptive to the possibility of redemption in the here and now.

Our hatred of government is not caused mainly by government's goals, whatever their wisdom, but by government's techniques." Philip Howard

Law, rather than harnessing the passions, is increasingly pressed into their service.

Washington DC is happiest when in indignation overdrive.

Civilization depends on, and civility often requires, the willingness to say, "What you are doing is none of my business" and "What I am doing is none of your business.

Matthew Arnold was a fastidious social critic and hence an accomplished complainer. When he died, an acquaintance said: "Poor Matt, he's going to Heaven, no doubt – but he won't like God.

Behavior was better when cinemas were opulent.

Television news is akin to audible wallpaper.

Coarseness occurs in a land where platitude inflames this sense of entitlement to more of almost everything, but less of manners and taste, with their irritating intimations of authority and hierarchy.

National Review's premise was that conformity was especially egregious among the intellectuals, that herd of independent minds.

In this snug, over-safe corner of the world… we may realize that our comfortable routine is no eternal necessity of things, but merely a little space of calm in the midst of the tempestuous, untamed and streaming world.

Football combines the two worst features of American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.