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.

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 big battle at the end of DW isn't drawn from history, but it's influenced by history, certainly.

I didn't know at the time that the energy that I was giving off was like a battle Emcee.

It will always be a battle a day between those who want maximum change and those who want to maintain the status quo.

The legal battle against segregation is won, but the community battle goes on.

That a great battle must soon be fought no one could doubt; but, in the apparent and perhaps real absence of plan on the part of Lee, it was impossible to foretell the precise scene of the encounter.

Our brave soldiers and support personnel are engaged in a battle as important as any the United States has ever before waged, for the success of democracy in Iraq is a crucial test of the ideals this Nation was founded upon.

The anguish of the neurotic individual is the same as that of the saint. The neurotic, the saint are engaged in the same battle. Their blood flows from similar wounds. But the first one gasps and the other one gives.

There is no French town in which the wounds inflicted on the battle-field are not bleeding.

Politics is about winning. If you don't win, you don't get to put your principles into practice. Therefore, find a way to win, or sit the battle out.

A critic is someone who never actually goes to the battle, yet who afterwards comes out shooting the wounded.

Christianity is a battle not a dream.

Our main battle has always been against Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers.

From each one of them rose separate columns of smoke, meeting in a pall overhead, and through the smoke came stabbing flashes of fire as German shells burst with thudding shocks of sound. This was the front line of battle.

As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.

Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed.

No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

During the past few years I have led a sometimes hard battle for German foreign policy.

We don't consider the battle has ended in Afghanistan... The battle has begun and its fires are picking up. These fires will reach the White House, because it is the center of injustice and tyranny.

Usually in a battle sequence when a bomb is going off, you forget you're acting.