The columnist gives these words to the longings of an 11-year-old he meets with Tourette’s syndrome: “Wisdom is encoded in our common language. We all have, to some extent, a complex, sometimes adversarial, relationship with...

The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.

In this snug, over-safe corner of the world… we may realize that our comfortable routine is no eternal necessity of things, but merely a little space of calm in the midst of the tempestuous, untamed...

Nothing is so irretrievably lost to a society as the sense of fear it felt about a grave danger that was subsequently coped with.

Matthew Arnold was a fastidious social critic and hence an accomplished complainer. When he died, an acquaintance said: “Poor Matt, he’s going to Heaven, no doubt – but he won’t like God.

Because of demagogues, rhetoric has a tainted reputation in our time. However, rhetoric is central to democratic governance. It can fuse passion and persuasion, moving free people to freely choose what is noble.

Football combines two of the worst things in American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.

Good actors, including political actors, do not deal in unrealities. Rather, they create realities that matter – perceptions, aspirations, allegiances.

It is hard to remain iconoclastic when standing waist-deep in the shards of smashed icons.

Institutions are lengthening shadows of strong individuals.

Get evangelical Christian made them receptive to the possibility of redemption in the here and now.

Gifted teachers master the patience required for the unending business of transmitting civilization down the generations, transforming biological facts – children – into social artifacts called citizens. It is wearying work and it is a...

Civilization depends on, and civility often requires, the willingness to say, “What you are doing is none of my business” and “What I am doing is none of your business.

Author complains about “the further submergence of irrecoverable history into a perpetually churned present.

National Review’s premise was that conformity was especially egregious among the intellectuals, that herd of independent minds.

if we could tax Americans’ cognitive dissonance we could balance the budget. The American people want all kinds of incompatible things, they’re human beings, and they want high services, low taxes, and an omnipresent, omniprominent...

Government could avoid having opinions about so many things if it would quit subsidizing so many things.

The most capricious modern entitlement is not just Social Security but to self-esteem.