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

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.

Boredom is... a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

People react to fear, not love; they don't teach that in Sunday School, but it's true.

Luck is everything... My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I'm fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn't make a good suspense film.

In fact I have nightmares about having children. I want to carry a baby and feel the life within me and in my dream, I do. But every time after it's born, there's this incredible fear, this pounding pulse of fear. It's a real bad nightmare.

Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.

Democracy is stronger than terrorism, and we will not cower to the terrorists' campaign of fear.

Fear is the lengthened shadow of ignorance.

I don't fear death because I don't fear anything I don't understand. When I start to think about it, I order a massage and it goes away.

Right out of high school I never had the fear of getting beat, which is how most people lose.

Who sows fear, reaps weapons.

For any new technology there is always controversy and there always some fear associated with it. I think that's just the price of being first sometimes.

Knight without fear and without reproach.

Peace, if it ever exists, will not be based on the fear of war but on the love of peace.

What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it.

My greatest fear is to be misunderstood.

I'll think, If this is his first punch, how are the others gonna feel? That's the only fear I have for myself.

We need to teach the next generation of children from day one that they are responsible for their lives. Mankind's greatest gift, also its greatest curse, is that we have free choice. We can make our choices built from love or from fear.

Laughter kills fear, and without fear there can be no faith. For without fear of the devil there is no need for God.

That was my fear, which is why when I was took over a book, I was always trying to tweak it a little bit so that it looked like I was trying to add something instead of keeping the status quo.