Letter writing was clearly important to Reagan. Even as president he kept dashing off letters to friends, pen pals, media people, statesmen, critics, and the kind of people who write to presidents never expecting a...

It’s always seemed odd to me that after a group of terrorists commits a vile and odious deed they rush messages to the public to claim credit for it.

Roosevelt’s declaration that Americans had ‘nothing to fear but fear itself’ was a glorious piece of inspirational rhetoric and just as gloriously wrong.

The American press has the blues. Too many authorities have assured it that its days are numbered, too many good newspapers are in ruins.

One of the many burdens of the person professing Christianity has always been the odium likely to be heaped upon him by fellow Christians quick to smell out, denounce and punish fraud, hypocrisy and general...

Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.

My natural instinct after doing something shameful is not to rush into the street boasting about it but to put on dark glasses and head for the next county, hoping nobody notices I’ve been in...

Objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don’t work, those that break down and those that get lost.

Situation comedy on television has thrived for years on ‘canned’ laughter, grafted by gaglines by technicians using records of guffawing audiences that have been dead for years.

Few expected very much of Franklin Roosevelt on Inauguration Day in 1933. Like Barack Obama seventy-six years later, he was succeeding a failed Republican president, and Americans had voted for change. What that change might...

Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.

In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.

Reporters thrive on the world’s misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.

Feel good about linking hands in human chain for good causes.

When sudden death takes a president, opportunities for new beginnings flourish among the ambitious and the tensions among such people can be dramatic, as they were when President Kennedy was killed.

It’s good for the soul to hear yourself as others hear you, and next time maybe, just maybe, you will not talk so much, so loudly, so brilliantly, so charmingly, so utterly shamelessly foolishly.

Listen once in a while. It’s amazing what you can hear.

Americans like fat books and thin women.

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.

Is fuel efficiency really what we need most desperately? I say that what we really need is a car that can be shot when it breaks down.

A skillful playwright might have a good time with the story of the assassination of President William McKinley, and especially with the three most flamboyant political figures involved: Mark Hanna, Theodore Roosevelt, and Emma Goldman.

What the New Yorker calls home would seem like a couple of closets to most Americans, yet he manages not only to live there but also to grow trees and cockroaches right on the premises.

Those who remember Washington’s cold war culture in the 1980s will recall the shocked reactions to Reagan’s intervention. People interested in foreign policy were astonished when in 1985 he met alone at Geneva – alone,...

The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.

Anything that isn’t opposed by about 40 percent of humanity is either an evil business or so unimportant that it simply doesn’t matter.

Journalism talk is part of the nonstop background noise of American life.

You can always tell folks from nonfolks. Folks like to feel good, like to smile for the camera when there’s a big photo opportunity for a really good cause.

American foreign policy had still not recovered from its victory over communism when George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice took over at the White House in 2001.

The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.

People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure.

It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.

Rereading A.J. Liebling carries me happily back to an age when all good journalists knew they had plenty to be modest about, and were.

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any.

I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.

The best discussion of trouble in boardroom and business office is found in newspapers’ own financial pages and speeches by journalists in management jobs.

It is fitting that yesteryear’s swashbuckling newspaper reporter has turned into today’s solemn young sobersides nursing a glass of watered white wine after a day of toiling over computer databases in a smoke-free, noise-free newsroom.

A day spent praising the earth and lamenting man’s pollutionist history makes you feel like a superior, sensitive soul.

Gerald Boyd was a classic specimen of the self-made man. Born poor, he worked and studied his way up out of poverty under the guidance of his widowed grandmother.

In an age when the fashion is to be in love with yourself, confessing to be in love with somebody else is an admission of unfaithfulness to one’s beloved.

Don’t try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.

Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.

Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who...

Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories; those that don’t work, those that break down and those that get lost.

It was clear soon after his election that Obama, like FDR, wanted to start dealing with the economic crisis immediately after his inauguration.

Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.

Except for politics, no business is scrutinized more exhaustively than journalism.

An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious – just dead wrong.

Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O’Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.

New York is the only city in the world where you can get run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.

When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible – cowards and fools.