Jacob Weisberg Quotes
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If you want to go around saying that giving women the vote wrecked the country and still be taken seriously, it helps to be handing out $100 bills.
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Blacks as a group have voted Democratic since the 1930s. The GOP has not courted them in any real way since the 1960s, focusing instead on attracting white constituencies hostile to civil rights and African-Americans in general.
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For the grifter, ripping people off is seldom the point. The grifter is an artiste who invests in the long con.
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Donald Trump is an archetypal grifter. Using the presidency to promote your golf courses, hotels, and real estate business is grifting. So is getting people to pay a premium for buildings with your name in big, gold letters. Licensing your name is what every grifter dreams about.
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Sexual signals can be received without being consciously sent.
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Being editor of 'Slate' is the best job I've ever had because of the freedom and support given to me by Don Graham and the Post Co. and because of the opportunity to work with colleagues I admire and adore.
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In George W. Bush's case, the public paid far too little attention to the role of religion in his thinking. Many voters failed to appreciate that while Bush's religious beliefs may be moderate Methodist ones, he was someone who relied on his faith immoderately, as an alternative to rational understanding of complex issues.
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Obama is the rare Democrat who talks easily about faith and values and who does so without upsetting those offended by the mixture of religion and politics.
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To Trump, being a billionaire means plating everything in gold and slapping his name everywhere in huge block letters. It means that he gets to say whatever pops into his head and never has to say he is sorry.
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Nearly everyone who chooses to work for Donald Trump is disreputable in one way or another; Ali Baba didn't find 40 wise men in the cave. But to label everyone in Trumpworld a grifter misses important subtleties. It conflates grifters and grafters, and it ignores the crucial distinction between the two.
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We're quick to describe politicians whose views we find extreme or whose behavior seems odd as 'crazy,' and perhaps anyone who runs for president in some sense is. But I've long wondered whether Newt Gingrich merits that designation in a more clinical sense.
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Whether couched in terms of envy, admiration, or derision, celebrity fascination begins as an exercise in imagining what it would be like to lead a more carefree and pleasurable life.
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While 'The Wire' feels startlingly lifelike, it is not, in fact, a naturalistic depiction of ghetto life. That kind of realism better describes an earlier miniseries of Simon's, 'The Corner,' which was based on the book of the same title that he and Ed Burns wrote, set in the same Baltimore ghetto.
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By 2003, if you didn't understand that the United States was inflicting torture on those deemed enemy combatants, you weren't paying much attention.
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If the creators of cartoons are intentionally or unintentionally giving children the idea that gay people are part of the big, happy human family, that's a good thing, not a bad one.
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The invasion of Iraq was, in ways that have since become hard to dispute, a terrible mistake.
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The conservative position that all spending is evil obliterates any distinction between investment and consumption, between the long-term and the short-term.
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Objecting to someone because of his religious beliefs is not the same thing as prejudice based on religious heritage, race, or gender.
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As a political party, the Libertarians have always been more party than political.
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Academic Marxists were never going to be convinced that anything that happened in the real world could invalidate their belief system. Utopians of the Right, libertarians are just as convinced that their ideas have yet to be tried and that they would work beautifully if we could only just have a do-over of human history.
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Where the grifter is shameless, the grafter shrinks from exposure, which could only endanger the racket. He is greedy but not creatively ambitious. He toils in mundane self-dealing, insider trading, bribe taking, witness tampering, and other forms of workaday corruption.
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Book collectors are thrill-seekers. It is a vegetarian hunt to be sure, without much exertion or risk, but the endorphin rush of the chase and the adrenaline high of the capture are much the same with first editions as I imagine they must be in the pursuit of 10-point stags, largemouth bass, or 20-foot waves at Maverick's.
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People who live in hermit states like North Korea, Burma, and Cuba already suffer from global isolation. Fed on a diet of propaganda, they don't know what's happening inside their borders or outside of them. By increasing their seclusion, sanctions make it easier for dictators to blame external enemies for a country's suffering.
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Despite all the Internet has done to make prices transparent and bibliographic information universal, you can still find - at book sales and thrift shops, auctions and even fancy dealers - unrecognized or underpriced rarities. Getting something valuable for cheap is the basic, greedy thrill of book collecting.