If we say that anyone who "moralizes" must be perfect morally then we are in effect saying no one can moralize.

The problem with the United Nations is that while democracy within nations is the best available form of government, democracy among nations can be a moral disaster - especially if some nations are not democracies.

If power made one evil, then God would be the Devil.

If we say that anyone who "moralizes" must be perfect morally then we are in effect saying no one can moralize.

Getting the support of Syria is the moral equivalent of winning the Klan's endorsement - it might be useful but it doesn't necessarily speak well of you.

Our fear of hypocrisy is forcing us to live in a world where gluttons are fine, so long as they champion gluttony.

And it's the President of the United States who said he wasn't going to spike the football and all this, we shouldn't gloat about it, running campaign ads, gloating about it and saying the other guy isn't good enough to do the tough things that I did, which I think is, one reprehensible.

But if the choice is a cool president and 8 or 10 percent unemployment in a declining economy and a country that seems to be going in the wrong direction and structural unemployment for young people at 50 percent, I'd rather have a dorky president who fixed those problems.

But it is one of these sort of mythologies about America and its intellectual history, that the right embraced this thing called social Darwinism, when it never did so.

But you're never taught in schools - we don't teach anyone in public schools that government is the problem. We don't teach anyone in college that government is the problem - except maybe a handful of sort of unique, conservative schools. But mainstream media never talks as if government is the problem.

I think as - all in all, it's better to have a cool president than a not cool president.

I would also say Barack Obama has spent much, much, much, much more money than the Republicans.

If we say that anyone who 'moralizes' must be perfect morally then we are in effect saying no one can moralize.

If you spend any time in Washington you'll find nerds. What happens is most of them sublimate their fixations with comics, or baseball cards, or 1960s British comedies to policy minutiae and political arcana. But, like Christians in ancient Rome, you can still spot them if you know the signals.

Obama did inherit a deficit when he came into office. Why this fact justifies racking up vastly more debt and bigger deficits is a logical mystery.

One of the things that really drove me crazy was the way in which college kids, in particular, are educated to think that ideology is dangerous and bad.

Our country, if you read the 'Federalist Papers,' is about disagreement. It's about pitting faction against faction, divided government, checks and balances. The hero in American political tradition is the man who stands up to the mob - not the mob itself.

Republican politics have been off-kilter for several years now because a large segment of the conservative base does not look back fondly on the Bush presidency.

Social distinctions tend to matter only at your own level and above.

The GOP needs to figure out a way to become more appealing to new constituencies.

The main difference between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives are honest about it. We're kind of dorks about it. We are kind of like Dungeons and Dragons geeks.

The premise of my book is that everyone is a bit ideological to some extent. Everyone comes from a ideological perspective.

There was no intellectual movement in American history called social Darwinism. The people who were supposedly the leaders of the social Darwinist movement never embraced something called social Darwinism. It didn't exist.

We are a species that must try to impose and find systems - systems of thought, ways of organizing and categorizing reality.

You can make a very good argument that society would be much worse off if you let 10 rapists and murderers free rather than put one poor, wrongly accused accountant in prison. And so my only point on that is that it should open up an argument. It should not sort of settle one, because nobody disagrees with it.

You know those Navy SEALs, they weren't Democrats and Republicans. They were just doing what was best for America. Wouldn't that be a great country if all of you Americans were just like that? You followed orders, you marched in step and you followed my agenda.

Cultures grow on the vine of tradition.

Whenever a Republican gets in office all of a sudden progressives realize that federalism and states rights arent necessarily only about defending slavery or Jim Crow. Theyre actually about maximizing freedom.

What truly makes the French Revolution the first fascist revolution was its effort to turn politics into a religion. In this the revolutionaries were inspired by Rousseau whose concept of the general will divinized the people while rendering the person an afterthought.

A rising economic tide is bad for people who live off of the poverty of others.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

Bambi has a profound effect on children because it's about losing your mother.

To believe in a just law of cause and effect, carrying with it a punishment or a reward, is to believe in righteousness.

Our estimates suggest that a tax increase of 1 percent of GDP reduces output over the next three years by nearly 3 percent. The effect is highly significant.

The truth is, it's not a great career move to create a readership and then, in effect, abandon them.

I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation.

Planets are too dim to be detected with existing equipment, far away, except in these very special circumstances where they're seen by their gravitational effect.

Well, in pharmacology, if the effect is local, it's of course absolutely awkward to use it in any other way than as a local treatment.

Writing songs has a therapeutic effect, and it either kills off love or wins the heart of the lover.

The good news was that Enterprise and the newly arrived Yorktown had attacked the Marshall and Gilbert islands. Those attacks had a great effect on morale.

Motherhood has a very humanizing effect. Everything gets reduced to essentials.

The Tax Code today is more complicated than ever, and the very people on the Republican side who denounce the Tax Code's complexity are the ones that put together what they now call a convoluted monstrosity. They put it into effect.

If the many allegations made to this date are true, then the burglars who broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate were, in effect, breaking into the home of every citizen.

It would be great to take one city street and turn it into a pedestrian corridor and see what kind of effect it has on the businesses in that area - It's the future I think.

To enlarge or illustrate this power and effect of love is to set a candle in the sun.

The cause is hidden; the effect is visible to all.

Logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effect when taken in too large quantities.

The Vietnamese have a secret weapon. It's their willingness to die beyond our willingness to kill. In effect, they've been saying, You can kill us, but you'll have to kill a lot of us; you may have to kill all of us. And, thank heaven, we are not yet ready to do that.

The oppression of any people for opinion's sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important.