"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."

"Seriousness is stupidity sent to college."

"It could be that all awful dictators are frustrated artists - Mao with his poetry and Mussolini with his monuments. Stalin was once a journalistic hack, and I can personally testify to how frustrated they are. Pol Pot left a very edgy photo collection behind. And Osama seems quite interested in video."

"The young are adept at learning, but even more adept at avoiding it."

"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."

"On inspection, Gaudi's architecture isn't whimsical at all."

"The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it."

"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."

"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."

"Fish is the only food that is considered spoiled once it smells like what it is."

"By the end of the 1950s, American cars were so reliable that their reliability went without saying even in car ads. Thousands of them bear testimony to this today, still running on the roads of Cuba though fueled with nationalized Venezuelan gasoline and maintained with spit and haywire."

"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."

"Libertarianism is a way of measuring how the government and other kinds of systems respect the individual. At the core of libertarianism is the idea that the individual is sacrosanct and that anything that's done contrary to the well-being of the individual needs some pretty serious justification."

"The Nobel Peace Prize has always been a joke - albeit a grim one. Alfred Bernhard Nobel famously invented dynamite and felt sorry about it."

"Earnestness is stupidity sent to college."

"If you think health care is expensive now, just wait 'til it's free."

"There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 380 SL convertible."

"More modern poetry is written than read."

"A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them."

"Whatever it is that the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government do it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"America wasn't founded so that we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damned well pleased."

"Even I realized that money was to politicians what the eucalyptus tree is to koala bears: food, water, shelter, and something to crap on."

"Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope."

"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."

"If we heard that somebody starved to death in Sweden or Switzerland, we would be shocked."

"Horses and horsepower alike are about status and being cool."

"If government were a product, selling it would be illegal."

"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."

"I come from Toledo, Ohio, a town that has been hurt badly by the shift of the automobile business towards Japan. And yet I remember how the car workers lived in the neighborhood that I grew up in. My father was a car salesman, and I remember how we lived. I remember how modestly we lived."

"The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it."

"You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money."

"There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences."

"Let's reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools - and use it on the teachers."

"Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it."

"Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us."

"The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop."

"Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum."

"Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely."

"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."

"Staying married may have long-term benefits. You can elicit much more sympathy from friends over a bad marriage than you ever can from a good divorce."

"Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us."

"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."

"They are just really stupid people in Hollywood. You write them a script, and they say they love it, they absolutely love it. Then they say, 'But doesn't it need a small dog, and an Eskimo, and shouldn't it be set in New Guinea?' And you say, 'But it is a sophisticated romantic comedy set in Paris.'"

"It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money."

"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."

"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."

"Because of their size, parents may be difficult to discipline properly."