Peggy Noonan

We dont need to control free speech we need to control ourselves

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.

Speeches are not magic and there is no great speech without great policy.

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.

Sincerity and competence is a strong combination. In politics, it is everything.

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.

Don't fall in love with politicians, they're all a disappointment. They can't help it, they just are.

Abortion is either OK or it's not.

Let's cause some senators distress.

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.

You don't have to be old in America to say of a world you lived in: That world is gone.

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.

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.

Part of courage is simple consistency.

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.

I think miracles exist in part as gifts and in part as clues that there is something beyond the flat world we see.

Candor is a compliment; it implies equality. It's how true friends talk.

There is nothing wrong with being a declared liberal or conservative and conducting a sympathetic interview with a political figure who shares your views.

All great political families have myths: stories they tell themselves about how history happened.

Cynicism is not realistic and tough. Its unrealistic and kind of cowardly because it means you dont have to try. in Good Housekeeping

My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage.

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.

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.'

TV gives everyone an image, but radio gives birth to a million images in a million brains.

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.

Democracy involves that old-fashioned thing called working it out.

Naps are nature's way of reminding you that life is nice “ like a beautiful, softly swinging hammock strung between birth and infinity.