There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 380 SL convertible.
Teasing and a sense of humor, if you can develop that in your kids, and if you can exercise it with the kids, just makes for a pleasanter atmosphere.
I think that humor has become a principle means of communication among Americans about politics.
Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.
The idea of capitalism is not just success but also the failure that allows success to happen.
Adam Smith’s huge failure was the fact that he did not foresee the industrial revolution.
Horses and horsepower alike are about status and being cool.
There are a few things that people all around the world need to admit to themselves. Trade restraints slow economic growth, the euro is not a reserve currency, and scoreless sports ties are boring.
When I was fifteen, I dreamed of living in the big city, as many a young person does if he is artistic and sensitive. By ‘artistic and sensitive’ I mean short, skinny, unkissed, bad at sports, and carrying a C average in high school.
The purpose of sports – even foreign sports – is not to bore people.
What Alexander Graham Bell thought up occupied less space than a flower vase. Now it’s so small that I have to search all my pockets to discover I’ve received a spam text.
A ‘farm’ today means 100,000 chickens in a space the size of a Motel 6 shower stall.
The words ‘Space Age’ have a quaint, nostalgic tone – sitting on midcentury modern furniture watching ‘The Jetsons.’
Obama’s space policy doesn’t differ much from George W. Bush’s.
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.
Don’t send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals, when their cheery effect is needed.
A very quiet and tasteful way to be famous is to have a famous relative. Then you can not only be nothing, you can do nothing too.
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.
Let’s reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools – and use it on the teachers.
The problem with public school is not overcrowding in the classroom. The problem is not teacher unions. The problem is not underfunding or lack of computer equipment. The problem is your damn kids.
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.
If death weren’t around to ‘finalize’ the Darwinian process, we’d all still be amoebas.
If we heard that somebody starved to death in Sweden or Switzerland, we would be shocked.
I blame feminism and Facebook for the death of the American automobile. I’m a Republican, so I blame everything on feminism – or commies.
Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
Little islands of human happiness, peace, and prosperity are so exceptional at this point in history that I’m not even sure we can draw lessons from them.
On inspection, Gaudi’s architecture isn’t whimsical at all.
Tel Aviv is new, built on the sand dunes north of Jaffa in the 1890s, about the same time Miami was founded. The cities bear a resemblance in size, site, climate, and architecture, which ranges from the bland to the fancifully bland.
I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a ‘learning experience.’ Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I’ve done as a ‘learning experience.’ It makes me feel less stupid.
I grew up going to public school, and they were huge public schools. I went to a school that had 3,200 kids, and I had grade school classes with 40-some kids. Discipline was rigid. Most of the learning was rote. It worked.
The young are adept at learning, but even more adept at avoiding it.
The First Amendment only says ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.’ It can disrespect all it wants.
If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health, slow your mind, make you fat – in other words, turn you into an adult.
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we’re looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
Most people sort of enjoy going to work because of the socialisation, a chance to flirt with co-workers and so on, but actually hate the job they do.
The library, with its Daedalian labyrinth, mysterious hush, and faintly ominous aroma of knowledge, has been replaced by the computer’s cheap glow, pesky chirp, and data spillage.
Call a man ‘ignorant,’ and you have license to show the world your vast fund of knowledge and wise him up.
Public schools helped create the idea of America and inculcate Americans with a few rudiments of knowledge. To judge by that very American item, the Internet, a few rudiments is all anyone cares to have.
Californians are people who insist on growing their own vegetables, but they won’t dig up the pretty lawn, won’t plant anything for fear of getting dirty, and they use fragrant bath salts from The Body Shop instead of smelly compost.
Tom DeLay may or may not have broken campaign finance laws, but he did his best to look like he was breaking them.
If you think health care is expensive now, just wait ’til it’s free.
Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.
Nobody likes insurance companies, especially health insurance companies.
No Americans wants to see somebody lose their house because of health bills. Their boat? Maybe. Maybe the boat. But not the house.
The car provided Americans with an enviable standard of living. You could not get a steady job with high wages and health and retirement benefits working on the General Livestock Corporation assembly line putting udders on cows.
Health care’s not about insurance! Health care’s about getting treatment.
Nancy Pelosi says the angry opposition to health care reform is like the angry opposition to gay rights that led to Harvey Milk being shot.
I do have to travel a lot for speaking engagements.
Agriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the first Thanksgiving dinner kickback to the Indians for subsidizing Pilgrim maize production with fish head fertilizer grants.
Explosion of positive rights started in 1932 with the election of Roosevelt.
All religions must be made child-proof. Our teachers’ unions have done good work in this field, K through 12. Delaying first communions and bar mitzvahs until age 21 would be another positive step.
There is the love and marriage and family kind of happiness, which is exceedingly boring to describe but nonetheless is important to have and dreadful not to have.
Gay marriage acceptance is happening in the blink of an eye.
Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.
Being a humorist is not a voluntary thing. You can tell this because in a situation where saying a funny thing will cause a lot of trouble, a humorist will still say the funny thing. No matter how inappropriate.
Because of their size, parents may be difficult to discipline properly.
Politics is the attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit.
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.
People say, ‘Oh, politics is so polarized today,’ and I’m thinking… ‘1861, that was polarized.’
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
The best and brightest don’t go into politics. The best and brightest are at Goldman Sachs.
Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum.
The more aspects of life that can be moved from private reign to public realm, the better it is for politics.
The problem, when comparing contemporary television to television in 1974, is that TV has become not just bad but sad.
I understand Twitter has become popular among politicians. This technology allows them to stay in perpetual contact with their constituents. The electorate now has instant information about what politicians have been up to.
My dad died when I was young; my mom remarried with more haste than sense to a fellow… he wasn’t evil or anything, but he was worthless.
I’m too tough and sensitive to have to have some pubescent twerp with his mom’s earring in his tongue, who combs his hair with Redi-Whip and has an Ani DiFranco tattoo on his shin, come show me how a computer works.
I just wasn’t cut out to be a Chinese Tiger Mom. I’m more of an Irish Setter Dad.
If it were not for government regulation of big corporations, executives at companies like Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, they could have cheated investors out of millions.
Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe. When you quit looking on the bright side, the catastrophe is still there.
Something that confirms all fears and many conspiracy theories about government is finding out what our elected representatives would put into law if they could.
I’m a member of the 1960s generation. We didn’t have any wisdom.
We loved cars until the ’70s or so. Then they became appliances. They turned into motorized cup holders. Most of it has to do with urban sprawl. What began as pleasure ends up in necessity, as so many things do.
Some day you will be wheeled in for a heart bypass operation, and a surgeon will be the person who is now behind the counter when you renew your car registration at the department of motor vehicles.
I spent a lot of time behind the Iron Curtain, and their cars were abysmal.
I like Michael Moore, but I think of him more as a rabble-rouser. On his TV show, when he went to the home of the guy who invented the car alarm and set off all the car alarms on the block… pretty funny.
When I’m in the car, I want the only one shouting to be me.
Cars let us out of the barn and, while they were at it, destroyed the American nuclear family. As anyone who has had an American nuclear family can tell you, this was a relief to all concerned.
My whole family can talk. They are all car salesmen. They are all funny.
The killjoys initiated automobile crash standards so rigorous that we can’t buy a car that hasn’t been dropped from the top of a phone pole with our whole family strapped inside.
The Nobel Peace Prize has always been a joke – albeit a grim one. Alfred Bernhard Nobel famously invented dynamite and felt sorry about it.
There’s a love of rhetorical skill in the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden doesn’t just go on tape cassettes and say, ‘America sucks.’ He recites poetry; he finds things that ‘America sucks’ rhymes with.
People are always angry at America. They’re absolutely certain that America either caused their problems or is deliberately not fixing their problems. But the anger is always directed at America and never at Americans.
Abstract anger is great for rhetorical carrying on. You can go on endlessly about the post office, but it doesn’t mean you’re mad at your mailman.
In Israel, waves of anger and fear circulate all the time, but so do jokes and gossip and silky evening breezes. So, too, in America.
There are plenty of problems in the world, and doubtless climate change – or whatever the currently voguish phrase for it all is – certainly is one of them. But it’s low on my list.
Infant mortality and life expectancy are reasonable indicators of general well-being in a society.
Children must be considered in a divorce considered valuable pawns in the nasty legal and financial contest that is about to ensue.
The only advantage to being a middle-aged man is that when you put on a jacket and tie, you’re the Scary Dad. Never mind that no one has had an actually scary dad since 1966. The visceral fear remains.