"The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person."

"The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop."

"Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope."

"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."

"Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us."

"I don’t accept the view that we can just condemn the NLF terror, period, because it was so horrible. I think we really have to ask questions of comparative costs, ugly as that may sound. And if we are going to take a moral position on this – and I think we should – we have to ask both what the consequences were of using terror and not using terror. If it were true that the consequences of not using terror would be that the peasantry in Vietnam would continue to live in the state of the peasantry of the Philippines, then I think the use of terror would be justified."

"There ain't no rules here, we're trying to accomplish something...All this talk about rules...When the deal goes down...we make 'em up as we go along."
- Congressman Alcee Hastings (D - FL)

"If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy."  (1802 to Thomas Cooper)

The great tragedy of my life is that in my search for the Holy Grail everyone calls True Love, I see myself as Zorro, a romantic and mysterious highwayman — and the women I desire see me as Porky Pig.

"A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary."