Barack Obama hopes his famous health care victory will mark him as a transformative president. History, however, may judge it to have been his missed opportunity to be one.

Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.

Just as the common law derives from ancient precedents - judges' decisions - rather than statutes, baseball's codes are the game's distilled mores. Their unchanged purpose is to show respect for opponents and the game. In baseball, as in the remainder of life, the most important rules are unwritten. But not unenforced.

The future has a way of arriving unannounced.

Big government is indeed big, and like another big creature, the sauropod dinosaur, government has a primitive nervous system: The fact of an injury to the tail could take nearly a minute to be communicated to the sauropod brain.

World War II was the last government program that really worked.

Leadership is, among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it - short-term pain for long-term gain.

Well, you know, the definition of second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.

Modern parents want to nurture so skillfully that Mother Nature will gasp in admiration at the marvels their parenting produces from the soft clay of children.

There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.

Voters don't decide issues, they decide who will decide issues.

Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose.

I just got hooked on the radio, the voice of it all. It was my connection to metropolitan America, if you will. Sports, in particularly baseball then 'cause of its rich sediment of numbers, was one of the first things a young person could peg up with adults on - that is, you could know as much about Jimmy Fox as your father did.