On freedom: "As unlikely a character as the crackpot Nietzsche has something to say: 'Liberal institutions straightway cease from being liberal the moment they are soundly established: once this is attained no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions.'"
"The important Richard Dawkins has written a book, The God Delusion, in which he uses predestinarian atheism to argue that Richard Dawkins is the closest thing to a superior being in the known universe."
On our reason for voting: "If it's any comfort, we should remind ourselves of the purpose of voting. We don't vote to elect great persons to office. They're not that great. We vote to throw the bastards out."
On Baby Boomers: "A gigantic global 'Not My Fault' project has been undertaken with heroic amounts of time, effort, and money devoted to psychology, psychotherapy, sociology, sociopaths, social work, social sciences, Scientology, science, chemistry, the brain, brain chemistry, serotonin reuptake inhibitors, inhibitions, sex, sex therapy, talk therapy, talk radio, talk radio personalities, personality disorders, drugs, drug-free school zones, Internet addiction, economics, the Fed, PMS, SATs, IQ, DNA, evolution, abortion, divorce, no-fault care insurance, the Democratic Party, diagnosis of attention deficit disorder in small boys...The list goes on...Neither freedom nor power is what I should have been obsessed with for all these years. But it's too late now. I'm a child of my era. And speaking of that era, here are three slogans from 1960s posters that never existed: 'Black Responsibility;' 'Sisterhood is Responsible;' 'Responsibility to the People.'"
On "The Pursuit of Happiness:" "The United States is the first -- and so far only --among happy nations. 'Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books,' wrote Thomas Carlyle. Just ask Americans a question about American history, watch them draw a blank, and you'll see that we are the happy people indeed...Happiness is hard to attain, harder to maintain, and hardest of all to recognize...The fact that we don't know when we are happy raises the disturbing posibility that you and I are wildly happy right now...'Pursuit of Happiness' replaced 'Property' in the Declaration of Independence not to denigrate material wealth but to expand the idea of materialism. America was established as a way for Americans to make and do things...Whether these things lead to great riches, pious satisfaction, or transitory pleasures is nobody's business by our own...We Americans are very, very busy, and we owe it all to three little words in our Declaration of Independence."
On the free market: "The free market tells us what people are willing to pay for a given thing at a given moment. That's all the free market does. The free market is a bathroom scale. We may not like what we see when we step on the bathroom scale, but we can't pass a law making ourselves weigh 165 pounds. Liberals and leftists think we can."
On class warfare: "Then there are the supposed unconscious, involuntary, or authomatic conspiracies that history engages us in, such as the Marxist class struggle. It's over. The social class know as assholes won."
On the US trade imbalance: There is no such thing as a trade deficit. It doesn't matter if the US imports all its goods from China and exports nothing but pieces of paper. The Americans want the iPad and the Chinese want the handsome portraits of Benjamin Franklin. This is free trade.
On gun ownership: Gun ownership is crucial to the preservation of American freedoms. We may have to shoot Democrats. It happened in 1861 and it could happen again.
On the "economic stimulus:" Assuming the American economy need a stimulus, there was an alternate way to provide it [other than the $787 billion bill passed by Congress]. For only a couple of hundred billion more than the cost of the Recovery and Reinvestment Act...all federal personal income taxes could have been eliminated for a year...The advantage of a tax abatement over a stimulus plan is that, instead of idiots in Washington spending your and my money, us idiots get to spend our own. Our spending may be foolish, but not as foolish as government spending for the simple reason of Committee Brain -- individuals aren't as stupid as a group.
On committee dynamics: Committes are ancient and ubiquitous in our civiliation. Moses goes to a business conference with God and the next thing you know, Exodus 32:1, 'the people gathered themselves together.' And someone says, 'All in favor of worshipping a golden calf...'
On politics: I'm sick of politics. We're all sick of politics. We live in a democracy, rule by the people. Fifty percent of people are below average intelligence. This explains everything about politics...Whether we think politics is a bother or whether we are full of great expectations about all the good things politics tries to do, we have to scale back the scope of politics. Otherwise no good things will be accomplished. We can't treat the American government like mom, expecting her to get us off to kindergarten in the morning, fix our meals, wash our dishes, fold the laundry, keep our house clean and our grandparents happy, do the shopping and the gardening, and still somehow make herself interesting to dad. That's why mom snapped and started drinking and got in that car wreck.
On power: We've all heard Lord Acton's observation that "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Few know that this observation was made in a letter from Acton to Anglican Bishop Mandell Creighton on the subject of papal infallibility (something Acton, a devout Catholic, nevertheless didn't subscribe to). O'Rourke observes, "If power can do the likes of that [corrupt] to the Holy Father in Rome, just think what it's done to Harry Reid."
On the "conservative media:" Back in the day, Bill Buckley was the lonely voice of conservatism in the media. "...[W]ith little but his vox clamantis in deserto to guide it, public opinion went from the 1964 defeat of Barry Goldwater with 38.5% of the popular vote to the 1980 victory of Ronald Reagan with 50.7% of the popular vote. After Reagan was elected conservative media grew enormously in popularity and range. The result, as far as I could figure it, was nil."
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