"The format of the nightly newscasts is still very much 1981 — "Tremble, onlookers! I am the anchorman and now here is a miracle: a report by satellite from many thousands of miles away. I will return to introduce another one in due course.""

"The world bursts at the seams with people ready to tell you you're not good enough. On occasion, some may be correct. But do not do their work for them. Seek any job; ask anyone out; pursue any goal. Don't take it personally when they say 'no' — they may not be smart enough to say "yes.""

"Without humor, a sports fan is a religious fanatic. Without humor, a newscast is a terrible, depressing, unpalatable thing."

"I just think if you're 44 years old and you're not smarter than you were when you were 35 years old or 25 years old, just stay in your room."

"If you make a decision in your life, even one as eminently logical and self-improving as "Why'd you start washing your hair every day?" and you start getting questioned hourly about it, you're going to start second-guessing yourself."

"This is the exact definition of my ego. When Fox had my head 40 feet high at Shea Stadium they said to me, "We're going to give out 100,000 temporary tattoos of your face at the Super Bowl." And I just swallowed and said, "No. God. Don't. You're not going to, you can't possibly — what do you mean, temporary?""

"I'm not trying to win a popularity contest. If you're in a public media setting and you're not expressing something of yourself, turn it over to someone who will. Just get out. Just go away and put somebody on who has a point of view, because the most dangerous thing about TV is its equalizing factor, its lowest common denominator factor. And that's what I fight against all the time."

"It's such a simple thing, really. It's an awareness that the other people in the world are other people, and that you are one of them. That every time you have a chance to help somebody out, to do what's right instead of what you think you're supposed to do, you should do it."

"The Manatee (coined by John Cleese)"

"The political whorehouse that is Fox News."

"Clusterfox"

"Fixed News"

"Pirate Annie"

"Coultergeist"

"Bozell The Clown"

"Redbeard the Pirate"

"John of Orange"

"Elmer Gantbeck"

"Televangelist"

"Harold Hill"

"Lonesome Rhodes"

"Bye Felicia"

"(Name of player) From way downtown...BANG!"

"Good night and good luck."

"You are a liar."

"You, sir . . ."

"As promised."

"I can read his lips, and he is not praying."

"There has been a [name of player] sighting."

"Lugnuts...nothing but lugnuts."

"Mister Dictionary has failed us yet again."

"A good craftsman doesn't blame his tools."

"Full extension!"

"He gacked on it."

"Un-believable."

"(Emulating Tony Bruno) Houston, hello! (or any other city)"

"Brought to you by..."

"When this quality sports product..."

"NEEEEEEXT."

"He's frozen pizza."

"He will drool the drool of regret into the pillow of remorse."

"He beats him like a rented goalie!"

"He hits the ball, real hard."

"The force de frappe was little more than symbolism; it relieved neither France nor Europe from strategic dependence on the United States..."

"Americans officials have found it hard to believe, but leading officials and politicians in Europe really have worried more about how the United States might handle or mishandle the problem on Iraq — by undertaking unilateral and extralegal military action — than they have ever worried about Iraq itself and Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction."

"The United States was losing interest in preserving European security, but at the same time it was hostile to European aspirations to take on the task themselves. Europeans complained about American perfidy, and Americans complained about European weakness and ingratitude."

"Anti-liberals these days complain about wokeness, therefore, but it is the liberal system of government bequeathed by the Founders, and the accompanying egalitarian spirit, that they are really objecting to, just as anti-liberals have since the founding of the nation. Many of Trump's core supporters insist they are patriots, but whether they realize it or not, their allegiance is not to the Founders' America but to an ethnoreligious definition of the nation that the Founders explicitly rejected."

"Many people responded to my last essay [dated November 30, cited above] by insisting that a majority of Americans oppose Trump, and they are right. But the way our system works today, that popular majority is prevented from coalescing. Many blame the electoral college or the two-party prejudice built into our system, and they might well be right. But, folks, are we going to fix these problems before November? The question is how best to bring this majority together in a coalition of Democrats and Constitutional Republicans to prevent a dictatorship this coming year. Afterward, we can look at reforming the system. First, the system has to survive."