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

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.

The belief that public health measures are not intended for people like us is widely held by many people like me. Public health, we assume, is for people with less - less education, less-healthy habits, less access to quality health care, less time and money.

I talked to the record company about what I had in mind. They said they wanted something lush. I figured the best thing to do was let them hear what I had in mind.

My father read poetry to me, encouraged me to memorize poems. But the writing of it was quite a different thing.

Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

I many times encountered courage, real courage. Undeniable courage. I've heard it said that that was the highest quality of the human animal. I encountered that many times, in unexpected places. And I have learned to recognize it when I see it.

Many Czech people are very talented. They can do many things, but when they get to a certain level, they are satisfied. I am not like that, thank God.

People choose to read, and it takes effort. It's not one of those hobbies that asks nothing of the person who is doing it. It's more than a hobby.

A fathers disappointment can be a very powerful tool.

Find joy and solace in the simple, and cultivate your utopia by feeling the Tao in every cubic inch of space.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one's own connoisseur.

An organization's reason for being, like that of any organism, is to help the parts that are in relationship to each other, to be able to deal with change in the environment.

The opposite of love is indifference to the genuine needs of others.

A key purpose of journalism is to provide an adversarial check on those who wield the greatest power by shining a light on what they do in the dark, and informing the public about those acts.

The United Kingdom has traditionally been a very small market, and even though you had such a creative group of designers, they represented a risk to department stores.

In a world riven by inequity, medicine could be viewed as social justice work.

Time heals many wounds but this loss becomes the defining sadness of your life.

A pair of brilliantly cut cotton trousers can be more beautiful than a gorgeous silk gown.

When I was ten, I wrote an essay on what I would be when I grew up and said I would be a professional soccer player and a comedian in off season.