It's always in the second administration when things start to go sour. They circle the wagons.

The first term of the Clinton administration was very jolly. Everybody was running around meeting people and of course, in the second term, everyone went down the black hole, which also happened at the end of the Reagan administration.

I think, certainly in the more civilized societies, women's roles are growing in power all of the time.

Often what we do is open our house for various charity events. I don't seat according to protocol. I don't invite people because of who they are in the administration or their positions of power. The few who do come, are there because I like them.

I first came on the scene during the Johnson years and that crowd was out all the time enjoying themselves. Nixon wasn't particularly social but a lot of the people in his administration were.

Even Colin Powell who was everywhere before he became secretary of state, just stopped going out. I think part of it was he didn't want to be viewed suspiciously by the other people in the White House who rarely go anywhere.

Every poll shows that most journalists are Democrats.

It is only in the fundamentalist religions that women are relegated to second class. Radical Evangelicals, Muslims, and Jews all have the same view of women.

This morning in the Washington Post there was a statistic about how 85% of Americans are Christians.

I had cottage cheese for lunch and a glass of wine when I got home tonight.

I was brought up by an Episcopalian father and Presbyterian mother in nondenominational Army chapels all over the world and never really had much religious experience.

We've been together 32 years and married for 27.

Last week I did a piece for Style on advice to Laura Bush about how to help her husband. This week it's religion. It just depends on what I find interesting at the moment.

It's always in the second administration when things start to go sour. They circle the wagons.

Most of the people who live in Washington come from other places and you can learn something from them.

We're newspaper junkies; I can't imagine life without a newspaper.

Then my mother had several strokes and my father, who was 85, couldn't handle it, so Donna came back and we went through the same thing here. She lives in Mill Valley; her group is organizing this event.

Funny you mention my dinner parties when I have just suggested that inviting close friends over to share a meal with candlelight and wine at your table could be a form of religious experience for some people. To me it's a form of sacrament.

The football season is like pain. You forget how terrible it is until it seizes you again.

I never know what I'm going to do for the Post next. Two weeks ago I had a piece on Homeland Security. This is one of my pig ongoing projects. How unprepared we are for a terrorist attack.

Newspapers don't write enough about serious religious issues.

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.

Constant, gentle pressure is my preferred technique for leadership, guidance, and coaching.

Give until it hurts.

The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.

I accomplished what I set out to do, but I lost my discipline and my career.

The advent of digitally enhancing images - and the fact that actresses weren't protesting against that - created an environment where big corporations felt like they had total ownership over the bodies of actresses.

I've never been in a barroom brawl in my life. I just don't do such things.

If you tell a teammate you're ready to play as tough as you are able to, you'd better go out there and do it. Players will see right through a phony. And they can tell when you're not giving it all you've got.

Without the communist oppression, I am absolutely sure I would now be a local stupid professor of philosophy in Ljubljana.

I am a genius. Then it amused me to keep saying so, but now it does not. I expected to be happy sometime. Now I know I shall never be.

I don't look forward to a time when every politician, every legislator goes to Washington absolutely committed to an extreme point of view. Elected representatives are sent to Washington to compromise, not to never compromise.

Benjamin Netanyahu seems to avoid any initiative.

My faith is very private to me. It plays an important part in my life, but I do not try and throw my beliefs at others. I have tremendous respect for all faiths and beliefs, but have a deep concern that religion and faith are currently a long way apart from each other.

I tend to arrive in the rehearsal process with very strongly developed ideas about what I want to do. But I don't like those ideas to be things that are not subject to change, or subject to development, or subject to challenge.

Success in crime always invites to worse deeds.

In high school, I had a wonderful teacher who, coincidentally also taught Meryl Streep before me. At the same time I had my own rock band, I played bass and sang. I was one of those kids who really enjoyed being with my friends and doing rather insane, but fun, creative things.

I discovered I was passionate about the creative process, the product development, creating a concept around a fragrance or lipstick.

Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up - and I always tell them, 'I hope they're real but I made them up.'

I still feel there are much smarter self-promoters out there than me. I am very methodical about my messaging, and I know how to gain attention very quickly.

Good Firefighters will know their job. Great Firefighters will also know the job of the person above them as well as teach their job to the person below them.

One of the greatest satisfactions one can ever have, comes from the knowledge that he can do some one thing superlatively well.

There's a lady up in heaven who must be very proud of the way the people in Baltimore have treated her boy from the Bronx.

I was not good in school. I could never read very fast or very well. I got tested for learning disabilities, for dyslexia. Then I got put on Ritalin and Dexedrine. I took those starting in the eighth grade. As soon as they pumped that drug into me, it would focus me right in.

Either Jesus had a father, or he didn't. The question is a scientific one, and scientific evidence, if any were available, would be used to settle it.