I'm just a Bolshevik with a laptop.

One does not hold a conversation with him. One holds a symposium. – Elizabeth Drew.

Scranton describing Sen. Robert A. Taft’s conservatism as compared to Goldwater’s said Taft was “a conservative in the truest sense of the word. He sought to conserve all the human values that have been carried down to us on a long stream of American history. He saw history as the foundation on which a better future might be built, not a Technicolor fantasy behind which the problems of the present might be concealed.

In politics, if you’re explaining, you’re loosing.

Americans prefer to isolate villains who despoil a preexisting innocence, rather than admit that there might not have been any innocence there in the first place.

Ideas” in politics are often intuition fancy dress.

When the people who felt like losers united around their shared psychological sense of grievance, their enemies felt somehow more overwhelming, not less;.

In these difficult years, America has suffered from a fever of words: from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric that postures instead of persuading.

Ive summarized dozens of books in my literary career; its become rather second nature.

Imagine a senator running for president whose positions included halving the military budget, socializing the medical system, re-regulating the communications and electrical industries, establishing a guaranteed minimum income for all Americans, and equalizing funding for all schools regardless of property valuations - and who promised to fire Alan Greenspan, counseled withdrawal from the World Trade Organization, and, for good measure, spoke warmly of adolescent sexual experimentation. That was Barry Goldwater, conservative.