39 Quotes by Mark Leibovich

Football is the “secret vice” of the civilized, wrote William Phillips in the journal Commentary in 1969. “Much of its popularity is due to the fact that it makes respectable the most primitive feelings about violence, patriotism, manhood.

Brady has compared playing football with “getting into a car crash every Sunday—a scheduled car crash.” I’ve heard players use this image before, and doctors who have treated football injuries.

The worst thing about pro football is that a lot of it has nothing to do with football. It has so much business and hair spray crusted over it: so many sideshows and expert panels “breaking things down for us” and a whole lot of people you don’t want to deal with or watch on TV [...].

Washingtonians love the "So-and-so is spinning in his grave" cliché. Someone is always speculating about how some great dead American would be scandalized over some crime against How It Used to Be. The Founding Fathers are always spinning in their graves over something, as is Ronald Reagan, or FDR. Edward R. Murrow is a perennial grave spinner in the news business (though in fact, Murrow was cremated).

Many of us become walking self-caricatures at a certain point, and politicians can be particularly vulnerable, especially those who have maneuvered their very public lives as conspicuously as McCain. They tell and retell the same stories; things get musty. They engage in a lot of self-mythologizing,

Cynicism is idealism turned inside out. It stems from an expectation unrealized and a promise perverted. That is so much of Washington today in a nutshell.

Politicians, in many cases - their moral code will be dictated by what can get them reelected, what they can get away with. When you're out of office, I guess you're freed from those checks and balances.

I have always been a big meta guy because I think the way journalism is practiced in Washington, and the way everyone sort of cohabitates in the same fishbowl is ultimately a bigger part of the story than people outside of the fishbowl really know.

I have been a print reporter my whole career. It's all I ever wanted to be. I specialize in political profiles. I have probably profiled hundreds of people over the years, people in very powerful positions. People don't always like what I write, but most people still talk to me.