Columnists From The United States

"Without the foundation of law, this vast country could never have survived as one, could never have absorbed streams of immigrants from myriad cultures. With one terrible exception, the Civil War, law and the Constitution have kept America whole and free."

"I am an optimist about America. But how can I maintain that optimism after Vietnam, after the murder of so many who fought for civil rights, after the Red scare and after the abusive tactics planned by government today? I can because we have regretted our mistakes in the past, relearning every time that no ruler can be trusted with arbitrary power. And I believe we will again.… But after all, this has always been a country of unbounded optimism, a country that struggles with itself and conquers corrupting habit.… In the end I believe that faith in reason will prevail. But it will not happen automatically. Freedom under law is hard work. If rulers cannot be trusted with arbitrary power, it is up to citizens to raise their voices at injustice."

"The consensus is that no more than five to ten people in a hundred who die by gunfire in Los Angeles are any loss to society. These people fight small wars amongst themselves. It would seem a valid social service to keep them well-supplied with ammunition."

"One bleeding-heart type asked me in a recent interview if I did not agree that ‘violence begets violence.’ I told him that it is my earnest endeavor to see that it does. I would like very much to ensure—and in some cases I have—that any man who offers violence to his fellow citizen begets a whole lot more in return than he can enjoy."

"The Germans gathered together ethnic divisions from all over Europe in which men of the same linguistic and cultural background could serve together. The Georgian SS division conducted itself with distinction in normal military action, but a good many people seem to think that anybody who was ever a member of the SS was automatically a war criminal."

"The 1911 pistol remains the service pistol of choice in the eyes of those who understand the problem. Back when we audited the FBI academy in 1947, I was told that I ought not to use my pistol in their training program because it was not fair. Maybe the first thing one should demand of his sidearm is that it be unfair."

"We remember the refrain from the Philippines: ‘Underneath the starry flag/Civilize him with a Krag /And then get underway for home sweet home.’ But you have to civilize him first, and how you do that with the ragheads is the problem."

"The decay of the late, great country of South Africa is beginning to become apparent. The name of the Transvaal has been officially changed to ‘Gauteng.’ (One of our friends has suggested that in view of this its inhabitants in the future should be referred to as Oranggautengs.) … And now there is a move afoot to wreck the Kruger National Park, one of the wonders of the world, on the notion that a good bit of its land was ‘taken from the blacks.’ This idea is somewhat akin to giving Yellowstone Park back to the Blackfeet."

"The conclusions seem inescapable that in certain circles a tendency has arisen to fear people who fear government. Government, as the Father of Our Country put it so well, is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. People who understand history, especially the history of government, do well to fear it. For a people to express openly their fear of those of us who are afraid of tyranny is alarming. Fear of the state is in no sense subversive. It is, to the contrary, the healthiest political philosophy for a free people."

"Hoplophobia is a mental disturbance characterized by irrational aversion to weapons, as opposed to justified apprehension about those who may wield them."

"The media insist that crime is the major concern of the American public today. In this connection they generally push the point that a disarmed society would be a crime-free society. They will not accept the truth that if you take all the guns off the street you still will have a crime problem, whereas if you take the criminals off the street you cannot have a gun problem."

"Spare me a lecture from somebody in parliament to somebody who started out delivering flowers for 25c a shot."

"I started delivering flowers for 25 cents a shot so don't tell me about the shop floor."

"Well, I think there are people who are getting work that they wouldn't otherwise have. For many of them apparently, it fits in with their lifestyles, so that they can make their own schedules. I think you've got a company that is expanding and delivers, what? A hundred million parcels a year. So somebody's happy with the service, and somebody's happy doing the job."

"Well it seems to me absolutely scandalous to try to set wage levels which wipe out jobs. I mean these are people who are not on the dole. They want to work and if you price them out of the market its gonna be a lot worse for them and for the economy."

"Britain still thinks it's 1999."

"Myths are not the stuff of which sensible policy is made."

"[B]elief in multiculturalism by the elites suits many Muslims just fine. Unlike immigrants who come to America in pursuit of the American dream, many Muslims come to Britain and other European countries determined not to assimilate into cultures they despise. They insist that neither British food is served, nor traditional British tolerance practiced, in the schools their children attend, demands the authorities find reasonable. Many of those children, unlike first-generation Americans, hold to their traditional ways with greater tenacity than their parents. This is especially true of young Muslim men eager to maintain their traditional dominance over women, a role threatened by the fact that Muslim girls are outperforming boys in school and in the workplace."

"Blair likes to say that his party is best when it is bold. So is he--and when he has an unconflicted view of the right and wrong of an issue."

"Blair is not at his best when his vision of what is right is blurred."

"I'm not a gambling person, but I've been around long enough and I know how to play it."

"In 1948 John Archibald Wheeler, in a telephone conversation with his student Richard Feynman, proposed the delightful hypothesis that there is just one electron in the universe."

"The absence of a golden rule for mattress flipping is a disappointment, but it does not pertend the demise of civilization. We can adapt; we can learn to live with it."

"I'm not a mathematician, but I've been hanging around with some of them long enough to know how the game is played."

"The whirling gears of progress have put the gear makers out of work."

"By the way, the = notation was invented by Robert Recorde (1510-1558). He choose two parallel lines as a symbol of equality " because noe 2 thynges can be moare equalle.""

"The integers, the rationals, and the irrationals, taken together, make up the continuum of real numbers. It's called a continuum because the numbers are packed together along the real number line with no empty spaces between them."

"I am reminded of those prodigies who spent years of their lives calculating digits of the decimal expansion of pi - a task that is now a mere warm-up exercise for computer software. I cannot help wandering which of my labors will appear equally quaint and pathetic to some future reader who ransacks libraries for old volumes like this one."

"A big advantage of the serial-number approach to identity is that things stay the same even as they change."

"How can we measure the effects if we can't even count the dead to the nearest million?"

"The condensation of all property in the hands of one individual is an economic catastrophe-something like the formation of a black hole in astrophysics. It's obviously bad news for the majority of the people, who are left penniless. But even if you happen to be the big winner, your victory may prove hollow. Although you have all the riches in the world, you can't buy a thing, because no one else has goods to sell."

"After a few more centuries, perhaps the poorest billion will even be able to afford the $10.00 buffet."

"Compared with the elegant inventions of the theorists, nature's code seemed a bit of a kludge."

"The fact that randomness requires a physical rather than a mathematical source is noted by almost everyone who writes on the subject, and yet the oddity of this situation is not much remarked."

"It's all done with gears. Also pinions, snails, arbors; pawls and ratchets; and cam followers; cables, levers, bell cranks, and pivots."

"The fact is, winding and dusting and fixing somebody else's clock is boring."

"If saving human lives is the great desideratum, then there is more to be gained by the prevention of drowning, and auto wrecks than by the abolition of war."

"Fretting about a dearth of randomness seems like worrying that humanity might use up its last reserves of ignorance."

"A retired physicist reading the Encyclopedia Britannica can do just so much toward securing world peace."

"I discovered that the computer is not like the violin; it doesn't take inborn genius or a lifetime of practice to get sweet music out of it."

"Empires come and go; so do ideologies and even religions, but war marches on through it all."

"Certain individuals continue to perpetuate negative stereotypes about Republicans. Especially Republican women. Who do I feel is the biggest culprit? Ann Coulter. I straight up don’t understand this woman or her popularity. I find her offensive, radical, insulting, and confusing all at the same time. But no matter how much you or I disagree with her, the cult that follows Coulter cannot be denied. She is a New York Times best-selling author and one of the most notable female members of the Republican Party. She was one of the headliners at the recent CPAC conference (but when your competition is a teenager who has a dream about the Republican Party and Stephen Baldwin, it’s not really saying that much). Coulter could be the poster woman for the most extreme side of the Republican Party. And in some ways I could be the poster woman for the opposite. I consider myself a progressive Republican, but here is what I don’t get about Coulter: Is she for real or not? Are some of her statements just gimmicks to gain publicity for her books or does she actually believe the things she says? Does she really believe all Jewish people should be “perfected” and become Christians? And what was she thinking when she said Hillary Clinton was more conservative than my father during the last election? If you truly have the GOP’s best interests at heart, how can you possibly justify telling an audience of millions that a Democrat would be a better leader than the Republican presidential candidate? (I asked Ann for comment on this column, including many of the above questions, but she did not answer my request.)"

"McCain has earned herself a remarkable bit of controversy in the relatively short period of time that she's emerged as a pundit, picking fights with the likes of Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove and...well, a huge chunk of the Republican Party."

"A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students."

"Life is incredibly short, yet we're always told that change takes time. For a race of mortals, dicking around just isn't acceptable."

"TV—a clever contraction, derived from the words Terrible Vaudeville. We call it a medium, because nothing's well done."

"Late that last night, as I sat alone watching the interviews and the speeches and the what-not, she shouted to turn that thing off and come to bed. Once again politics had made estranged bedfellows."

"If you find yourself despairing about the state of our great country, just think about how unlikely it would have seemed, back in the malaise days of 1979, that Jimmy Carter would one day return to Washington via Reagan Airport."

"Adding insult to injury, the National Enquirer reports that Rielle Hunter (née Lisa Druck) has dumped [[w:John Edwards|[John] Edwards]]. So he's lost two elections, two women, his dignity and maybe soon his freedom and his law license. He may have a career ahead of him in country music."

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