Quotes by Political Commentators - Page 2

The premise that America’s power and influence was rooted in its wealth was wrong to begin with. To the contrary, our strength comes from America’s magical stuff. It is something intangible, something invulnerable, something no measure of evil, no amount of violence or bloodshed can destroy.

Mathematicians call it “the arithmetic of congruences.” You can think of it as clock arithmetic. Temporarily replace the 12 on a clock face with 0. The 12 hours of the clock now read 0, 1, 2, 3, … up to 11. If the time is eight o’clock, and you add 9 hours, what do you get? Well, you get five o’clock. So in this arithmetic, 8 + 9 = 5; or, as mathematicians say, 8 + 9 ≡ 5 (mod 12), pronounced “eight plus nine is congruent to five, modulo twelve.

A good river is nature's life work in song.

The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b. who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.

At the end of a century that has seenthe evils of communism, Nazism and other modern tyrannies,the impulse to centralize power remains amazingly persistent.

You know what happens when windmills collapse into the sea? A splash.

America is the greatest, freest and most decent society in existence. It is an oasis of goodness in a desert of cynicism and barbarism. This country, once an experiment unique in the world, is now the last best hope for the world.

There's nothing wrong with being shallow as long as you're insightful about it.

The real triumph of the state occurs when its subjects refer to it as “we,” like football fans talking about the home team.

In America, Fredericka, they don't really have trains for people. The trains here are used mainly to transport pigs, television sets, and fruit.

...the most important thing you must remember when dealing with a politically biased professor is to be friendly.

Every day in America is a day with a shooting.

Where there's smoke around a conservative, there are journalists furiously rubbing two sticks together.