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The old woman was not only ugly with the ugliness age brings us all but showed signs of formidable ugliness by birth - pickle-jar chin, mainsail ears and a nose like a trigonometry problem. What's more, she had the deep frown and snit wrinkles that come from a lifetime of bad character.
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America gives every appearance of being a nation besotted with trashiness - divorce, illegitimacy, casual Fridays.
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Whatever the occasion, do not neglect alcohol. No other refreshment will do. Yes, alcohol kills brain cells, but it's very selective. It only kills the brain cells that contain good sense, shame, embarrassment, and restraint.
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TV ushered in the age of postliteracy. And we have gone so far beyond that. I mean, what with the Internet and Google and Wikipedia. We have entered the age of post-intelligence.
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Hubris is one of the great renewable resources.
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Never wear anything that panics the cat.
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As murderous industrial magnates go, Alfred Nobel is right up there with Ray Kroc, franchiser of McDonald's.
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I like Michael Moore, but I think of him more as a rabble-rouser. On his 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.
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Mikhail Gorbachev was the Jimmy Carter of the Communist bloc. The Russians hate him.
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Only a few good leaders have paused to reflect seriously on being leaders.
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There is one thing women can never take away from men. We die sooner.
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Taxi drivers all over the world, by the way, are under Newspaper Guild contract to give easy quotes to foreign correspondents.
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Greatest generation came through some stuff that we can't even imagine - the Depression, World War I - and all they wanted after that was a breather and a calm and a quiet life, and they get us.
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You're not a baby boomer if you don't have a visceral recollection of a Kennedy and a King assassination, a Beatles breakup, a U.S. defeat in Vietnam, and a Watergate.
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The number of American presidential candidates varies with the sunspot cycle and the phases of the moon.
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The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.
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How did an allegedly free people spawn a vast, rampant cuttlefish of dominion with its tentacles in every orifice of the body politic?
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In its worse forms, conservatism is a matter of 'I hate strangers and anything that's different.'
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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.
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Actually, there is no way of making vomiting courteous. You have to do the next best thing, which is to vomit in such a way that the story you tell about it later will be amusing.
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I am a student of stupidity. I am a political reporter.
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Disney's Tomorrowland is deeply, thoroughly, almost furiously unimaginative.
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People love to be told what they know already.
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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.