Shapiro: "Leisure time is only leisure time when it is earned; otherwise, leisure time devolves into soul-killing lassitude. There's a reason so many new retirees, freed from the treadmill of work, promptly keel over on the golf course: Work fulfills us. It keeps us going."

Shapiro: "The vast majority of murdered whites are murdered by other whites. That's why there's no national outrage when a white person is killed by a black person: it's not evidence of some underlying black violence problem directed against white people."

Shapiro: "Every time we rock our babies in the night, we bring order back to a disordered world. Every time we look down at our children and cry, we make the world one shade brighter. That's what children do to us - and for us."

Shapiro: "Having children truly ends adolescence. We are all either parents or children: responsibility-takers or those who demand from others."

Shapiro: "Distrust of government isn't baseless cynicism. It's realism."

Shapiro: "Freedom of speech and thought matters, especially when it is speech and thought with which we disagree. The moment the majority decides to destroy people for engaging in thought it dislikes, thought crime becomes a reality."

Shapiro: "During the Great Depression, levels of crime actually dropped. During the 1920s, when life was free and easy, so was crime. During the 1930s, when the entire American economy fell into a government-owned alligator moat, crime was nearly non-existent. During the 1950s and 1960s, when the economy was excellent, crime rose again."

Shapiro: "Kids are fat because of lack of parenting."

Shapiro: "The story of Detroit's bankruptcy was simple enough: Allow capitalism to grow the city, campaign against income inequality, tax the job creators until they flee, increase government spending in order to boost employment, promise generous pension plans to keep people voting for failure. Rinse, wash and repeat."

Shapiro: "Never before in our country's history has a generation been so empowered, so wealthy, so privileged - and yet so empty."

Shapiro: "Capitalism requires individual responsibility and accountability. People are seen as atomized units in a capitalist system - they are either useful, or they are not. They are not seen racially or ethnically or religiously. They consume and they produce, and those are their only relevant characteristics."

Shapiro: "Liberals in Hollywood can't stand when Americans resonate to conservatives on television."

Shapiro: "The European style of living is seductive: fewer hours worked, more hours at the cafe, less concern over self-betterment. But that style of living does not produce a purposeful life."

Shapiro: "Google has long been a leftist company."

Shapiro: "During the Cold War, America undertook serious military cuts only once: after the election of Richard Nixon, during the Vietnam War. The result: Vietnam fell to the Communists, the Russians moved into Afghanistan, and American influence around the globe waned dramatically."

Shapiro: "Historically, defense spending cuts have preceded increased international turmoil as America's global enemies sense a failure of will."

Shapiro: "When I was a kid, I'd wake up extraordinarily early every morning and turn on the television, scanning for episodes of 'The Jetsons.' For some reason, I loved the notion of a future where there would be flying cars, supercomputers, and most of all, robot maids to take care of the chores."

Shapiro: "Every so often, we all gaze into the abyss. It's a depressing fact of life that eventually the clock expires; eventually the sand in the hourglass runs out. It's the leaving behind of everything that matters to us that hurts the most."

Shapiro: "Vaccinations absolutely work, and have dramatically decreased rates of childhood diseases."

Shapiro: "Socialism states that you owe me something simply because I exist. Capitalism, by contrast, results in a sort of reality-forced altruism: I may not want to help you, I may dislike you, but if I don't give you a product or service you want, I will starve. Voluntary exchange is more moral than forced redistribution."

Shapiro: "Wishful thinking won't make the Palestinians an Israeli peace partner, no matter how much President Barack Obama pressures Israel to make concessions; caustically mocking Putin's worldview won't make it any less real or mitigate the Russian threat."

Shapiro: "The separation of church and state was meant to protect church from state; a state that declares religion off limits in public life is a state that declares itself supreme over all religious values."

Shapiro: "It took capitalism half a century to come back from the Great Depression."

Shapiro: "Wait, Wikipedia isn't working? Why hasn't someone invented a paper version of it? A set of books organized alphabetically by topic?"

Shapiro: "In short, I don't root against President Obama because I hate America. I root against President Obama because I hate his vision for America."

Shapiro: "America's liberal arts universities have long been safe zones for leftist thinking, protected ivory towers for the pseudo-elite who earn their livings writing papers nobody reads about gender roles in the poetry of Maya Angelou."

Shapiro: "Same-sex marriage is not the final nail in the coffin for traditional marriage. It is just another road sign toward the substitution of government for God. Every moral discussion now pits the wisest moral arbiters among us - the Supreme Court, President Obama - against traditional religion."

Shapiro: "Look, I'm a conservative, I'm a very conservative guy, and - and the Trump campaign is making your job over at NBC really, really, really easy in terms of going after conservatives and Republicans if he's the standard bearer for conservatism."

Shapiro: "It is possible to take the story of Noah figuratively, although virtually every Near East ancient civilization has its own version of the flood story (including the amoral epic of Gilgamesh)."

Shapiro: "The argument that gay marriage doesn't affect straight marriages is a ridiculous red herring: Gay marriage affects society and law in dramatic ways. Religious groups will come under direct assault as federal and state governments move to strip them of their non-profit statuses if they refuse to perform gay marriages."

Shapiro: "Musicians are, by and large, not the most politically savvy crew."

Shapiro: "Technically, web browsers can control what users see, and sites using Javascript can overwrite anything coming from the original authors. Browsers heavily utilize Javascript to create an interactive Internet; sites like YouTube, Facebook, and Gmail could be crippled without it."

Shapiro: "Putin himself is a character out of fiction, an uber-macho former Soviet thug running a massive, expansionist kleptocracy. The man stages photographs riding horses barechested and hunting tigers. His enemies find themselves on the wrong end of radioactive poisoning."

Shapiro: "Americans take justifiable pride in the freedoms given to them by nature or God and enshrined in the Constitution's Bill of Rights."