Now a great debate has been born. The thesis is Democratic Socialism. The antithesis is free-market capitalism. The Obama Democrats have posed the challenge. It is now up to the Republicans to pick it up and fight along these lines.

Democrats are not about to nominate anyone who backs the tax cut, and Americans are not going to elect anyone who favors a tax increase.

I like Bill Clinton.

'Yes' is a far more potent word than 'no' in American politics. By adopting the positions which animate the political agenda for the other side, one can disarm them and leave them sputtering with nothing to say.

Public-opinion polls show that Americans split about evenly on civil unions. But when the words "gay marriage" are presented, they break 3-to-1 against it.

No candidate can win a presidential race advocating gay marriage and opposing the military action in Iraq.

Bill and Hillary Clinton have one central idea in their uncluttered, ambitious minds: Hillary in 2008. Let Bush get re-elected, use the '04 primaries and general election to clean out the underbrush of competing Democratic candidates, and proceed unimpeded to the '08 nomination.

Anybody who thinks that getting a communication from a voter in your district is spam - that guy is pork. Roast pork unless he changes his point of view.

The Iraq War marked the beginning of the end of network news coverage. Viewers saw the juxtaposition of the embedded correspondents reporting the war as it was actually unfolding and the jaundiced, biased, negative coverage of these same events in the network newsrooms.

Now a great debate has been born. The thesis is Democratic Socialism. The antithesis is free-market capitalism. The Obama Democrats have posed the challenge. It is now up to the Republicans to pick it up and fight along these lines.

Spontaneous combustion of grassroots politics is the future.

As Bob Dole found out, you can't keep a positive image while being your party's mouthpiece in Congress. That's why no legislative leader since James Madison has ever been elected president.

I love Karl Rove. He elected Bush.

We need to stop spending money on death, the war in Iraq and on enhancing the lives of the people in our own country.

Idealism that makes no distinction between areas where our national interest lies and those from which it is remote does no good for America. The weariness of the post-Versailles, post-Korea, post-Vietnam eras is never far from the national mood.

Washington is a mean town where human sacrifice has been raised to an art form.

I didn't do what they said I did. I may have done enough so that I don't know if I can prove my innocence.

The old rules and the old methods of winning are gone.

The Democratic Party opposes tax cuts but it cannot say so publicly. Thus, it is forced to support the idea of lowering the tax burden but using class warfare rhetoric to dispute the allocation of the relief.

The stronger Hillary is, the weaker she is. The more she seems like a likely presidential winner, the more difficult the senate race becomes in New York. It's perfect.

Franklin Roosevelt didn't poll, because he had great political instincts. Now we have polls; we don't need instincts. But is that a change in principle? Is it a change in principle that we use a Xerox instead of carbon paper? It's of the same order of magnitude.

I felt that what you should do is really take the best from each party's agenda and come to a solution somewhere above the positions of each party. So from the Left, take the idea that we need day care and food supplements for people on welfare. From the Right, take the idea that they have to work for a living and that there are time limits.

I think that the reason Clinton chose Gore was that he was an example of what Clinton was like. He was kind of almost like the yellow magic marker that you use to highlight the text so that you can really remember what are the most salient features of it.

I will not subject my wife, family or friends to the sadistic vitriol of yellow journalism. I will not dignify such journalism with a reply or an answer. I never will.

Lincoln and Clinton had a lot in common in the way they were elected: In both cases, they were dark horses. In both cases, they were from small states. In both cases, they were not the favorite for their parties' nomination.

Public-opinion polls show that Americans split about evenly on civil unions. But when the words 'gay marriage' are presented, they break 3-to-1 against it.

Sometimes nationalism can be jingoistic - even fascistic - but it can also be a constructive impetus that helps to unify a nation. Those whose nationalist critique of parties finds resonance with masses of voters can acquire vast power. We can only hope that they know what to do with it.

There is a no-man's land in our politics: on the one hand, bounded by what we know to be true, and on the other hand, bounded by what the media says is politically correct. And that's where Donald Trump lives. And it's our failure to admit what we all know to be true in the guise of political correctness that fuels the Trump candidacy.

There is no substitute for a clear vision and a decisive direction.

Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it.

Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell.

Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about.

I don't think that left to its own devices, capitalism moves along smoothly and everyone gets treated fairly in the process. Capitalism is like a child: if you want the child to grow up free and productive, somebody's got to look over the shoulder of that child.

I am convinced that the path to a new, better and possible world is not capitalism, the path is socialism.

I was just very interested in the American frontier and the growth of capitalism - those enormous fortunes that were being made, more often than not, on the blood of poor people, black people, Indian people. They were the ones who paid very dearly for those great fortunes.

Whether we look at capitalism, taxes, business, or government, the data show a clear and consistent pattern: 70 percent of Americans support the free enterprise system and are unsupportive of big government.

We're not short of movements proclaiming that a different world is possible, but unless we can coordinate them into an international movement, capitalism just laughs at all these little organisations.

Capitalism is using its money; we socialists throw it away.

Capitalism is war; socialism is peace.

I'm afraid for all those who'll have the bread snatched from their mouths by these machines. What business has science and capitalism got, bringing all these new inventions into the works, before society has produced a generation educated up to using them!

Chicago is the product of modern capitalism, and, like other great commercial centers, is unfit for human habitation.

The market is not an invention of capitalism. It has existed for centuries. It is an invention of civilization.

Capitalism is a stupid system, a backward system.

History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.

Liberal capitalism is not at all the Good of humanity. Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle of savage, destructive nihilism.

America traditionally represents the greatest possibility of someone's going from nothing to something. Why? In theory, if not practice, the government stays out of the way and lets individuals take risks and reap rewards or accept the consequences of failure. We call this capitalism - or, at least, we used to.

There are a few people, but a diminishing number, who still believe that Marxism, as an economic system, off era a coherent alternative to capitalism, and socialism has, indeed, triumphed in one country.

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.

The way the credit cards were made in the '80s to be a people's form of capitalism and be able to make it so that you could get a loan that you would have been denied previous, now that's the way stocks are.