We choose our associations far more wisely than our abstract beliefs. Preferring the former to the latter is ordinary sense, now known as identity politics.

No social system can withstand a horde of vandals hell-bent on doing good.

A writer is a person who has turned the fact that his bark is worse than his bite into a professional qualification.

Dysgenic policy sooner or later becomes dysfunctional policy.

Every modern religion denies, as a matter of theology, that it is a religion.

With elites like these, who needs commoners?

You never get a good piece of music stuck in your head, just an idiotically catchy pop song or advertising jingle; and ideas work the same way.

In honest places the corrupt official does not know his own worth, and comes cheap.

There are no double standards, only invidious criteria.

It's easier to persuade a dozen people to go on a murder spree than to persuade a million to change their brand of toilet paper.

Anonymous, esoteric, or conventional.

School is zero-sum.

Tell me you like Shakespeare or Homer or Tolstoy, I learn nothing about you. Tell me you like Paulo Coelho or Dan Brown or Donna Tartt, now I learn something.

There's too much to hate in the world.

It is an insult to be paid by the word.

There is small reason to believe, outside of a few specialized fields, that a proposition is correct because it can be persuasively argued for.

Only the disloyal opposition is worth having.