“You can't really know God if you ignore his laws, especially the ones that regulate the most intimate spheres of life. You may be responsible and healthy, but you will also be shallow and inconsequential.”

“Bobos are uncomfortable with universal moral laws that purport to regulate pleasure. Bobos prefer more prosaic self-controlled regimes. The things that are forbidden are unhealthy or unsafe. The things that are encouraged are enriching or calorie burning. In other words, we regulate our carnal desires with health codes instead of moral codes.”

“You should start your life with the illusion that you are completely in control of what you do. You should finish life with the recognition that, all in all, you got better than you deserved.”

“The first thing you see, covering yards and yards of one wall, is an object that looks like a nickel-plated nuclear reactor, but is really the stove.”

“In times of crisis, you get a public reaction that is incoherence on stilts. On the one hand, most people know that the government is not in the oil business. They don't want it in the oil business. They know there is nothing a man in Washington can do to plug a hole a mile down in the gulf.On the other hand, they demand that the president 'take control.' They demand that he hold press conferences, show leadership, announce that the buck stops here and do something. They want him to emote and perform the proper theatrical gestures so they can see their emotions enacted on the public stage.They want to hold him responsible for things they know he doesn't control. Their reaction is a mixture of disgust, anger, longing and need. It may not make sense. But it doesn't make sense that the country wants spending cuts and doesn't want cuts, wants change and doesn't want change.”

“It is especially painful when narcissists suffer memory loss because they are losing parts of the person they love most. ”

“The main job of radicals in the Noam Chomsky or G. Gordon Liddy mode is to go around from one scruffy lecture hall to another reminding audiences while they may be disdained or ignored by the mainstream culture, they are actually right about everything.”