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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.'

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

There is no diplomacy like candor.

It is always well to accept your own shortcomings with candor but to regard those of your friends with polite incredulity.

In requiring this candor and simplicity of mind in those who would investigate the truth of our religion, Christianity demands nothing more than is readily conceded to every branch of human science.

I want to make it clear publicly that I expect more candor from this Administration during the next four years, particularly with members on the Foreign Relations Committee so that we can maintain a bipartisan foreign policy.

Candor is a proof of both a just frame of mind, and of a good tone of breeding. It is a quality that belongs equally to the honest man and to the gentleman.

Innocence in genius, and candor in power, are both noble qualities.

Candor and generosity, unless tempered by due moderation, leads to ruin.

All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor.

In all candor, the Court fails to perceive any reason for suspending the power of courts to get evidence and rule on questions of privilege in criminal matters simply because it is the president of the United States who holds the evidence.

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

There should be a readiness, on our part, to investigate with candor to follow the truth wherever it may lead us, and to submit, without reserve or objection, to all the teachings of this religion, if it be found to be of divine origin.

Your candor is worth everything to your cause. It is refreshing to find a person with a new theory who frankly confesses that he finds difficulties, insurmountable, at least for the present.

In all my public and private acts as your president, I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candor with full confidence that honesty is always the best policy in the end.

Entire generations of Americans have come of age since the ancient time when the president's power was constrained by a duty of candor to the American people.

If modesty and candor are necessary to an author in his judgment of his own works, no less are they in his reader.

We expect candor and transparency from the president, from the administration.

The best compliment to a child or a friend is the feeling you give him that he has been set free to make his own inquiries, to come to conclusions that are right for him, whether or not they coincide with your own.

To be hated cordially, is only a left-handed compliment.

Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way.