Peggy Noonan
Candor is a compliment; it implies equality. It's how true friends talk.Collection: Equality
Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their natures; there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen.Collection: Politics
Part of courage is simple consistency.Collection: Courage
The battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I: never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain.Collection: War
My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage.
Don't fall in love with politicians, they're all a disappointment. They can't help it, they just are.
What Andrew Cuomo said is, truly, a scandal. It's a scandal if he actually thinks it - that those who hold conservative views on abortion, gun rights and marriage are extreme, anathema and have no place in the state.
Sincerity and competence is a strong combination. In politics, it is everything.
Let's cause some senators distress.
You don't tell people who disagree with you they'd be better off somewhere else. And you don't reduce them to stereotypes; you address them as fully formed people worthy of respect. You try to persuade them.
Abortion is either OK or it's not.
TV gives everyone an image, but radio gives birth to a million images in a million brains.
I think miracles exist in part as gifts and in part as clues that there is something beyond the flat world we see.
If you join government, calmly make your contribution and move on. Don't go along to get along; do your best and when you have to - and you will - leave, and be something else.
You don't have to be old in America to say of a world you lived in: That world is gone.
If you commit a big crime then you are crazy, and the more heinous the crime the crazier you must be. Therefore you are not responsible, and nothing is your fault.
I love eulogies. They are the most moving kind of speech because they attempt to pluck meaning from the fog, and on short order, when the emotions are still ragged and raw and susceptible to leaps.
A great speech is literature.
Speeches are not magic and there is no great speech without great policy.
The 2008 election settled nothing, not even for a while. Our national politics are reflecting what appears to be going on geologically, on the bottom of the oceans and beneath the crust of the Earth: the tectonic plates are moving.
I ought to pray as much as God's on my mind, because then I'd pray a lot. All I can tell you is God is real, and so that infuses everything.
The president - every president - works for us. We don't work for him. We sometimes lose track of this, or rather get the balance wrong. Respect is due and must be palpable, but now and then you have to press, to either force them to be forthcoming or force them to reveal that they won't be.
Memo to future presidents: Never stake your entire survival on the painful passing of a bad bill. Never take the country down the road to 'Demon Pass.'
Presidents have a right to certain prerogatives, including the expectation of a certain deference. He's the president; this is history. But we seem to have come a long way since Ronald Reagan was regularly barked at by Sam Donaldson, almost literally, and the president shrugged it off.
All great political families have myths: stories they tell themselves about how history happened.
There is nothing wrong with being a declared liberal or conservative and conducting a sympathetic interview with a political figure who shares your views.
Democracy involves that old-fashioned thing called working it out.
In a president, character is everything. A president doesn't have to be brilliant... He doesn't have to be clever; you can hire clever... You can hire pragmatic, and you can buy and bring in policy wonks. But you cant buy courage and decency, you cant rent a strong moral sense. A president must bring those things with him. He needs to have, in that much maligned word, but a good one nonetheless, a vision of the future he wishes to create.. But a vision is worth little if a president doesn't have the character - the courage and heart - to see it through.Collection: Courage
You can get so well educated in America that your thoughts become detached from common sense. You can get so complicated in your thinking that the obvious isn't real to you anymore.Collection: Real
Humor is the shock absorber of life; it helps us take the blows.Collection: Humor
We are all afraid. That's the thing that unites all truly successful people: fear, fear of failing, fear of criticism, fear of letting down the team in some way. That why they try so hard, that's why they pay attention to detail and try to get every possible duck in a row. It's fearCollection: Team
What we need most right now, at this moment, is a kind of patriotic grace - a grace that takes the long view, apprehends the moment we're in, comes up with ways of dealing with it, and eschews the politically cheap and manipulative. That admits affection and respect. That encourages them. That acknowledges that the small things that divide us are not worthy of the moment; that agrees that the things that can be done to ease the stresses we feel as a nation should be encouraged, while those that encourage our cohesion as a nation should be supported.Collection: Stress
A speech is poetry: cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweep! A speech reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart.Collection: Children
Our patriotic fervor was the result of the old and widespread belief in the idea of American exceptionalism, the idea that America was a new thing in history, different from other countries. Other nations had evolved one way or another, evolved from tribes from a gathering of clans, from inevitabilities of language and tradition and geography. But America was born, and born of ideas: that all men are created equal, that they have been given by God certain rights that can be taken from them by no man, and that those rights combine to create a thing called freedom.Collection: Country
Naps are nature's way of reminding you that life is nice, like a beautiful swinging hammock strung between birth and infinity.Collection: Beautiful
This is the Democratic paradox: You want so much to run America and yet you seem not so fond of Americans.Collection: Running
You don't have to be old in America to say of a world you lived in: 'that world is gone.'Collection: America
Remember the waterfront shack with the sign FRESH FISH SOLD HERE. Of course it's fresh, we're on the ocean. Of course it's for sale, we're not giving it away. Of course it's here, otherwise the sign would be someplace else. The final sign: FISH.Collection: Ocean
The biggest political change in my lifetime is that Americans no longer assume that their children will have it better than they did. This is a huge break with the past, with assumptions and traditions that shaped us.Collection: Children
By trying to do too much, you risk not doing enough.Collection: Risk
Most people aren't appreciated enough, and the bravest things we do in our lives are usually known only to ourselves. No one throws ticker tape on the man who chose to be faithful to his wife, on the lawyer who didn't take the drug money.Collection: Humor
When you forget yourself and your fear, when you get beyond self-consciousness because your mind is thinking about what you are trying to communicate, you become a better communicatorCollection: Communication
Morals are concerned with what aids or impedes the fulfillment of basic human needs.Collection: Needs
Loyalty consists of many things, including being truthful with our friends. When you really disagree, you have to say so.Collection: Loyalty
The biggest improvement in the flow of information in America in our lifetimes is that no single group controls the news anymore.Collection: America
We must try again to be alive to what the people of our country really long for in our national life: forgiveness and grace, maturity and wisdom. ...Our political leaders will know our priorities only if we tell them, again and again, and if those priorities begin to show up in the polls.Collection: Country
Cynicism is not realistic and tough. It's unrealistic and kind of cowardly because it means you don't have to try. ---in Good HousekeepingCollection: Wisdom
Boundaries aren't all bad. That's why there are walls around mental institutions.Collection: Wall
Great speeches have always had great soundbites. The problem now is that the young technicians who put together speeches are paying attention only to the soundbite, not to the text as a whole, not realizing that all great soundbites happen by accident, which is to say, all great soundbites are yielded up inevitably, as part of the natural expression of the text. They are part of the tapestry, they aren't a little flower somebody sewed on.Collection: Flower
The Democrats had long labeled the impeachment debate a distraction from the urgent business of a great nation. But the Republicans argued that the pursuit of justice is the business of a great nation. In winning this point, they caught the falling flag, producing a triumph for the rule of law, a reassertion of the belief that no man is above it, and a rebuke for an arrogance that had grown imperial.Collection: Fall