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.

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.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

There are those, I know, who will reply that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is. It is the American Dream.

Well, after I had the heart attack, it was a very simple choice. What the doctor told me I did and I did it religiously. I ate nothing but lean turkey breast or chicken breast or a piece of fish that was very lean. I mean I stayed away from everything.

My life is so full of surprises, nothing surprises me any more.

Excuses change nothing, but make everyone feel better.

It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.

They haul you up there for, you know, week after week in this kind of star chamber proceeding. Then at the end of it they say, well, we found nothing, but now it's time for special counsel.

Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?

Always, your work is the same: You have to tell a story, you have to make a character. It doesn't matter if there are thousands of dollars, millions behind it, or if there is nothing.

For years the Trio did nothing but play for musicians and other hip people. We practically starved to death.

There's nothing worse than talking about yourself to find out that you're not that interesting.

In the kingdom of heaven it is His work that will be crowned, not yours. Anything in you that He has not wrought Himself will count for nothing.

If nothing is to be done in the given situation, he must invent plausible reasons for doing nothing; and if something must be done, he must suggest the something. The unpardonable sin is to propose nothing, when action is imperative.

There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the Establishment - and nothing more corrupting.

There is sometimes a peculiar confusion in the West that equates progress to whatever is recent or whatever is new, and it is time we understood that progress has nothing to do with the chronology of an idea.

I think I had a more European outlook about the body and sex. The body is in no way dirty, and sex is something beautiful to give to and share with a lover. It has nothing to do with promiscuity, because I only believe in being in love with one man at a time.

Nothing is ever guaranteed, and all that came before doesn't predicate what you might do next.

There ain't nothing from the outside that can lick any of us.