Journalists From The United States

"Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he's buying."

"Children do not really need money. After all, they don't have to pay rent or send mailgrams."

"Do not elicit your child's political opinions. He doesn't know any more than you do."

"The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting."

"The conversational overachiever is someone whose grasp exceeds his reach. This is possible but not attractive."

"Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not have possibly met."

"Radio news is bearable. This is due to the fact that while the news is being broadcast the disc jockey is not allowed to talk."

"Being a woman is of special interest only to aspiring male transsexuals. To actual women it is simply a good excuse not to play football."

"If your sexual fantasies were truly of interest to others, they would no longer be fantasies."

"Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publication."

"Women who insist on having the same options as men would do well to consider the option of being the strong, silent type."

"Bread that must be sliced with an ax is bread that is too nourishing."

"Life is something to do when you can't get to sleep."

"I love sleep because it is both pleasant and safe to use. Pleasant because one is in the best possible company and safe because sleep is the consummate protection against the unseemliness that is the invariable consequence of being awake. What you don't know won't hurt you. Sleep is death without the responsibility."

"Any child who cannot do long division by himself does not deserve to smoke."

"Rome is a very loony city in every respect. One needs but spend an hour or two there to realize that Fellini makes documentaries."

"All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable. The most common error made in matters of appearance is the belief that one should disdain the superficial and let the true beauty of one's soul shine through. If there are places on your body where this is a possibility, you are not attractive — you are leaking."

"The terrible state of public education has paid huge dividends in ignorance. Huge. We now have a country that can be told blatant lies — easily checkable, blatant lies — and I’m not talking about the covert workings of the CIA. When we have a terrorist attack, on September 11, 2001 with 19 men — 15 of them are Saudis — and five minutes later the whole country thinks they’re from Iraq — how can you have faith in the public? This is an easily checkable fact. The whole country is like the O.J. Simpson jurors."

"Take away a man’s actual sense of manhood — which is conventionally based on the ability to work, to earn money, to be self-sufficient, to provide for children — and you’ve got to give them something else. And they did.This hideous religion that’s all over the country — these huge church-malls — that’s what substitutes for these lost towns. But that’s not a town. That’s a cult. A town is diverse, in a real way, not in this fake way we have now. A community is a butcher and a doctor, a minister, a town troublemaker. A "community" is not a bunch of people united by some grievance. That’s just self-righteousness — incredibly dangerous and antidemocratic. People have become so rigid; their opinions seem to them like themselves. When that happens (and it has happened) people can’t change their minds. If you are identified by your opinions — if that is the very basis of yourself — how can you change your mind?"

"Most of my news, I get from the radio news stations. One of the stations' advertising lines is "Give us 22 minutes, we’ll give you the world." In 22 minutes, they just have time for the headlines, so they can only really tell you what happened — which, by the way, is the news. They tell you how many people were killed in Iraq today, but they don’t then bring on some Republican senator to explain to you how that’s good. Or, on the contrary, they don’t bring in a bunch of Democrats to tell you why it’s bad. They just tell you what happened. That’s the news. I am capable of analyzing my own news. What makes these people qualified to analyze my news for me? No matter what side they’re on, I never agree with them."

"I doubt there’s ever been a true thing said on Fox. Maybe the weather report, maybe not."

"Should novels generally be 600 pages? No, they should not. Half of writing, maybe 3/4 of writing, is editing. This seems to be a thing that has not gotten through to them. It’s my impression that you could get rid of half of most of these books. These people are not good enough to be this long, but they’re apparently also not good enough to be shorter."

"There's no such thing as advice to the lovelorn. If they took advice, they wouldn't be lovelorn. You see, advice and lovelorn don't go together. Because advice makes love sound like some sort of cognitive activity, but we know that it isn't. We all know that it's some sort of horrible chemical reaction over which we have absolutely no control. And that's why advice doesn't work."

"I never met anyone who didn't have a very smart child. What happens to these children, you wonder, when they reach adulthood?"

"Chapter 27: I Endorse Hillary Clinton"

"Chapter Four: A Huck So Unlike Finn: July 26, 2015"

"Chapter Three: The Horror! The Horror!"

"Chapter Two: The Abominable Showman: June 16, 2015"

"Chapter One: The Campaign Begins: Ready, Set, Go to Hell"

"Author's Note"

"When Adam Smith was being incomprehensible, he didn't have the luxury of brief, snappy technical terms as a shorthand for incoherence."

"There is parody, when you make fun of people who are smarter than you; satire, when you make fun of people who are richer than you; and burlesque, when you make fun of both while taking your clothes off."

"Wherever there's injustice, oppression, and suffering, America will show up six months late and bomb the country next to where it's happening."

"The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around."

"When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state ... This violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people."

"Your money does not cause my poverty. Refusal to believe this is at the bottom of most bad economic thinking."

"I wonder how many of the people who profess to believe in the leveling ideas of collectivism and egalitarianism really just believe that they themselves are good for nothing. I mean, how many leftists are animated by a quite reasonable self-loathing? In their hearts they know that they are not going to become scholars or inventors or industrialists or even ordinary good kind people. So they need a way to achieve that smugness for which the left is so justifiably famous. They need a way to achieve self-esteem without merit. Well, there is politics. In an egalitarian world everything will be controlled by politics, and politics requires no merit."

"There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as caring and sensitive because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he is willing to do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he will do good with his own money — if a gun is held to his head."

"We’re told cars are dangerous. It’s safer to drive through South Central Los Angeles than to walk there. We’re told cars are wasteful. Wasteful of what? Oil did a lot of good sitting in the ground for millions of years. We’re told cars should be replaced with mass transportation. But it’s hard to reach the drive-through window at McDonald’s from a speeding train. And we’re told cars cause pollution. A hundred years ago city streets were ankle deep in horse excrement. What kind of pollution do you want? Would you rather die of cancer at eighty or typhoid fever at nine?"

"Distracting a politician from governing is like distracting a bear from eating your baby."

"Worshiping the earth is more fun than going to church. It's also closer. We can just step off the sidewalk. And sometimes we can get impressionable members of the opposite sex to perform sacramental rites with us. "Every drop of water wasted is a drop less of a wild and scenic river, Jennifer. We'd better double up in the shower.""

"When government does, occasionally, work, it works in an elitist fashion. That is, government is most easily manipulated by people who have money and power already. This is why government benefits usually go to people who don't need benefits from government. Government may make some environmental improvements, but these will be improvements for rich bird-watchers. And no one in government will remember that when poor people go bird-watching they do it at Kentucky Fried Chicken."

"When a thing defies physical law, there's usually politics involved."

"When a private entity does not produce the desired results, it is (certain body parts excepted) done away with. But a public entity gets bigger."

"We tried to find the mayor. His secretary said he was at home. His wife said he was at the office. In Italy or France this would mean His Honor was having an affair. In Chabarovice it probably meant he'd run off to be a busboy in Stuttgart."

"War is a great asshole magnet."

"Violence is interesting. This is a great obstacle to world peace and also to more thoughtful television programming."

"Two key rules of Third World travel: 1. Never run out of whiskey. 2. Never run out of whiskey."

"Traffic was like a bad dog. It wasn't important to look both ways when crossing the street; it was important to not show fear."

"There is a fine line in the Third World between half a dozen customs officials waiting for you to offer them a bribe and half a dozen customs officials waiting for you to offer them a bribe so they can throw you in jail."