Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I had always thought of Egypt as a rather secular country. And I think it is, but people are quite observant of the strictures of Ramadan.
Nancy Pelosi says the angry opposition to health care reform is like the angry opposition to gay rights that led to Harvey Milk being shot.
Never steal anything so small that you'll have to go to an unpleasant city jail for it instead of a minimum-security federal tennis prison.
The Nobel Peace Prize has always been a joke - albeit a grim one. Alfred Bernhard Nobel famously invented dynamite and felt sorry about it.
Liberals have a quaint and touching faith that truth is on their side and an even quainter faith that journalists are on the side of truth.
I have never been to a museum in Hong Kong, or a movie or a play. I've never gone club-hopping. I've never taken the tram to Victoria Peak.
I've always figured that if God wanted us to go to church a lot He'd have given us bigger behinds to sit on and smaller heads to think with.
In the past a man was expected to give his seat on a bus to a woman. Today it would be much more courteous for that man to give her his job.
If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health, slow your mind, make you fat - in other words, turn you into an adult.
Jeans fit the mature male one of two ways, both dirigible in nature. You make a public impression that's either Hindenburg or Goodyear blimp.
I like to take things that are boring-but-important and try to make them interesting. That was definitely what I was after with Eat The Rich.
Politicians will talk strategy and tactics and policies and programs until they're blue in the face, or you strangle them and they turn blue.
I covered the Lebanese civil war. I could see a place that had once been prosperous and now was impoverished. I'm not seeing that in America.
I think the Baby Boom has enjoyed itself, maybe sometimes a little too much, and we're continuing to enjoy ourselves, maybe a little too much.
Maybe a nation that consumes as much booze and dope as we do and has our kind of divorce statistics should pipe down about "character issues."
Wherever there's injustice, oppression, and suffering, America will show up six months late and bomb the country next to where it's happening.
Mistreatment of al Qaeda members and their friends and hangers-on is something I number among my moral concerns. But it's number 1,000,000,001.
When a private entity does not produce the desired results, it is (certain body parts excepted) done away with. But a public entity gets bigger.
It was to be a short visit for the G-shevs. More than four days in the U.S. and Raisa's VISA card bill would shatter the fragile Soviet economy.
Politics should be limited in scope to ware, protection of property, and the occasional precautionary beheading of a member of the ruling class.
Political discourse has become so rotten that it's no longer possible to tell the stench of one presidential candidate from the stink of another.
College professors used to be badly paid and worth it. Colleges used to be modest institutions; they should go back to being modest institutions.
If we do our deficit spending on weapons, at least we get weapons. Then if we need weapons, we have them. If we don't need them, no harm is done.
In the wake of Animal House, all of us at the Lampoon had a lot of Hollywood opportunities. We could definitely get people to return phone calls.
There are lots of levels of fear and complaint about the government getting involved in business. First and foremost, of course, is incompetence.
For decades in America, there has been an effort to ensure that the rights of those who are not sane are the same as the rights of those who are.
People love to be told what they know already. It's not so much that what they say is wrong, though Ann Coulter does seem to be completely crazy.
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.
Lampoon was a very collegial operation, though "collegial" usually means "friendly" and it wasn't that friendly. But we were tight, like a family.
Charles McCarry is the best modern writer on the subject of intrigue - by the breadth of Alan Furst, by the fathom of Eric Ambler, by any measure.
America is the world's policeman, all right -- a big, dumb, mick flatfoot in the middle of the one thing cops dread most, a "domestic disturbance.
Adam Smith is misread as being amoral precisely because people don't read his first book, because they don't read 'The Theory of Moral Sentiments.'
I remember thinking cocaine was subtle until I noticed I'd been awake for three weeks and didn't know any of the naked people passed out around me.
What use is it to endure the Dutch Rubs and Indian Rope Burns that are politics if you can't obtain mastery over people and give them noogies back?
When you're a war correspondent, the reader is for you because the reader is saying, 'Gee, I wouldn't want to be doing that.' They're on your side.
Maybe climate change is a threat, and maybe climate change has been tarted up by climatologists trolling for research grant cash. It doesn't matter.
In Hong Kong there is agglomeration beyond my fondest imaginings. The Kowloon district claims a population density four times that of New York City.
Then there was LSD, which was supposed to make you think you could fly. I remember it made you think you couldn't stand up, and mostly it was right.
Intelligence collection has been given an additional bureaucracy to correct the problems created by too much bureaucracy in intelligence collection.
Watching Republicans in Washington is like watching lemmings, if lemmings jumped into cesspools instead of off cliffs. Splash! There goes Mark Foley!
Most people sort of enjoy going to work because of the socialisation, a chance to flirt with co-workers and so on, but actually hate the job they do.
I had grown up as a feature writer, and basically my career had been in The National Lampoon and as a magazine editor, and I'd never been a reporter.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the archetypal extremely smart person who went into politics anyway instead of doing something worthwhile for his country.
On Michael Moore TV show, when he went to the home of the guy who invented the car alarm and set off all the car alarms on the block... pretty funny.
Teasing and a sense of humor, if you can develop that in your kids, and if you can exercise it with the kids, just makes for a pleasanter atmosphere.
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.
If there are three words that need to be used more in American journalism, commentary, politics, personal life... it's the magic words 'I don't know.'
And, by the way, how come all the people who were so in favor of unilateral nuclear disarmament are so opposed to unilateral protection against nukes?
Then Saturday Night Live spawns... well, everything right down to American Pie 9, where all humor has to be irrelevant, which can get a little tiring.
Michael O'Donoghue was a very close friend of mine - very encouraging with my stuff, and really a great guy - but he was a no-kidding difficult person.