Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Fame is worth less than service.
It takes only a few seconds to make history new again.
Anything can be done if you find friends to do it with.
FDR's job results were, to put it politely, disturbing.
Anti-parent music seems to be all the pop-rock market wants.
Everybody should pay some tax, just as everybody should vote.
If expectations of lifetime earnings drop, then so will spending.
I'm not sure Roosevelt was quite a monster, he just did a poor job on the economics.
The lucky biographers find themselves drawn into a sort of friendship with their subject.
Our conscience, our faith, our local community, even our online hobby clubs - all civilize us.
In a way, Calvin Coolidge is better than Reagan. His tax rates were lower, and he cut budgets.
Anyone who experienced World War I close-hand was grossed out by it forever. It just was so awful.
The 1920s are the decade that signaled the arrival of a gift that still means a lot to us: Saturday.
Seems like Americans just want it to be Halloween all year. The holiday just keeps getting more popular.
Coolidge thought budgets were virtuous. He had his econ straight. He didn't just cut taxes, he also cut the budget.
Today we care about budgets more than anything. Our American future hangs on the ability of government to cut budget.
In my view, if you have one in 10 unemployed - something is wrong with the economy whether you call it recession or not.
McCain likes strong defense, and he's viscerally suspicious of big companies. So he's more a Square Deal guy than a New Deal guy.
Laws must be justified by something more than the will of the majority. They must rest on the eternal foundation of righteousness.
The donning of the ear buds marks the beginning of teen life, when children set off on their own for the passage through adolescence.
Prices don't merely reflect what people think things ought to cost today; they also reflect what people expect items to cost tomorrow.
What's wrong with the auto industry isn't that it failed to create jobs. What's wrong is that it emphasizes jobs over general growth itself.
Although unions may be good for a worker, singular, they are not always good for workers, plural. Especially when it comes to finding a job.
The difference between recession and depression is simple. Recession, goes the saying, is when you lose your job; depression is when I lose mine.
Anything can be done if you find friends to do it with. The lucky biographers find themselves drawn into a sort of friendship with their subject.
When you see government leaders really bullying business, you know that government's economic policy is failing. They get angry and they get desperate.
Disillusionment can come as fast as a gust, but building faith that the government won't inflate again is like building a new sailboat, a project of years.
Coolidge's stat was so low; he's ranked in the bottom half of presidents. What I found when I encountered this man was the leader I might like to see today.
The New Deal exists principally on an emotional plane for Obama. To him, the New Deal is something you play like a song, to make you or your constituents feel better.
Coolidge believed that government officials who tell themselves that spending benefits the economy delude themselves and the citizens. Government budgets promote human freedom.
Entitlements seem to grow with prosperity; not only because they are indexed to inflation or GDP, but also because a prosperous country tells itself it can afford more benefits.
Coolidge showed that the best government was the one that got out of the way. When he refrained, the economy grew, the Ku Klux Klan faded, and Americans got Model A's and automobiles.
Coolidge really hated government being in the power business. He thought it was wrong. He saw the potential for growth in the power business. He didn't want the federal government in it.
By playing on people's desire to belong to groups, Facebook creates a new, inclusive society. After all, Facebook is not like Harvard College. Anyone with access to the Internet can sign up.
People value Halloween, like Valentine's Day, because they can tell themselves that it's not merely secularized but actually secular, which is to say, not Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim.
Coolidge was a federalist. You go back and read him and it's almost intimidating to write about him because he writes better himself than anyone. He's one of the best writers as presidents go.
I'm always for lower taxes because lower taxes make people want to do things. Less burden, more fun, and economics is about people wanting to have fun. Growth is fun for people in the marketplace.
Economics are part of our life. We try to treat them separately, like over there is the economy and here is history. Econ affects history and history often doesn't get it right if it doesn't respect econ.
Democrats who see virtue in the estate tax are doing the equivalent of aborting future enterprises. They deprive businesses of oxygen with their support for capital gains taxes and disregard for contracts.
Europe unified its monetary policy through the euro before it unified politically, therefore sustaining member countries' abilities to pursue the kind of independent fiscal policies that can strain a joint currency.
The phrase 'perception is reality' is overused generally. But perception can be reality in monetary policy. The bond market doesn't act merely on what it sees. It acts on what it expects of the Fed or the government.
If you do a serious presidential bio, you want to supply the reader with maximum material because otherwise you're offending the reader. A president for many people is a serious thing and they want to know everything.
In the end, all new schools, public or private, snobby or not, add value to the education market, making it bigger and more efficient, in the same way that Zuckerberg added wealth to the economy even for non-Facebook fans.
There's something unsettling about the education of a child who comfortably enumerates the rules for surviving zombie apocalypse but finds it uncomfortable to enumerate the rules of his grandparents' faith, if he knows them.
Politicians generally act as if there is no cost to reconnecting with voters by building new New Deals. But the whole exercise of writing law out of New Deal nostalgia is a form of national narcissism. Call it New Deal narcissism.
The most remarkable thing about Calvin Coolidge is that he served for 67 months, and when he left office, the budget was lower than he came in. In real terms - in nominal terms with vanilla on top - he cut the budget year over year.
The result of the collaborative culture is that corporations or government institutions focus intensely on internal culture and pour their energy into achieving minuscule policy changes relating to workplace efficiency, gender or race.
Interest groups are not the same as individuals. Through false nostalgia for the New Deal, you are taking the younger generation hostage. They are the ones who are going to have to pay far greater taxes. They are the future's forgotten men.
When you do something moral and upright and wander off by yourself, well, everyone doesn't always follow you, do they, right? You pat yourself on your sanctimonious back but it doesn't mean the crowd rewards you for doing what you think is right.
I think some authors suffer from a need to try to prove that they're clever and educated. I try not to suffer from that. I would rather sacrifice my own narrative in the exercise of writing a biography. So I'm not worried about whether I'm clever.