I don't think the West needs to apologize - or pay - for having invented the steam engine.
Ronald Reagan was so self-contained and impenetrable that his official biographer was practically driven mad trying to figure him out.
Every once in a while, the Senate seems to remember that it belongs to a coequal branch.
Trump's relentless public humiliation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions was clearly intended to get him to resign.
Every civilization is founded on sins - every single one. Dispossession, violence, appropriation. What distinguishes civilizations are the ones who rise above it.
In the end, what brings civilizations down is when the elites lose confidence in the rightness of their cause.
There was once a philosopher who said, 'I don't believe in God, but I fear him greatly.' That's about where I am.
Longevity, for a columnist, is a simple proposition: Once you start, you don't stop. You do it until you die or can no longer put a sentence together. It has always been my intention to die at my desk, although my most cherished ambition is to outlive the estate tax.
Fight for what you know to be right. Don't give up.
The way that Trump spoke about the outside world was the most aggressive, most hyper-nationalist, and in some ways most hostile of any inaugural address I think since the Second World War.
If you control one house of Congress, you cannot abolish something like Obamacare, no matter how much pressure you apply.
I would write my editorials using a manual typewriter in pitch-black darkness... I would produce the whole thing without having seen the text.
A drone is a high-tech version of an old army and a musket. It ought to be used in Somalia to hunt bad guys, but not in America. I don't want to see it hovering over anybody's home.
I am grateful to have played a small role in the conversations that have helped guide this extraordinary nation's destiny.
To his credit, Obama didn't just come to Washington to be someone. Like Reagan, he came to Washington to do something - to introduce a powerful social democratic stream into America's deeply and historically individualist polity.
I have a horror of the blank page. I simply cannot write on a blank page or screen. Because once I do, I start to fix it, and I never get past the first sentence.
The joy of losing consists in this: Where there are no expectations, there is no disappointment.
I don't know about you, but I lie awake nights worrying about Canadian uranium. I know these people. I grew up there. You have no idea what they're capable of doing. If Sidney Crosby hadn't scored that goal to win the Olympic gold medal, there's no telling what might have ensued.
When a party is in opposition, it opposes. That's its job. But when it comes to power, it must govern. Easy rhetoric is over, the press of reality becomes irresistible. By necessity, it adopts some of the policies it had once denounced. And a new national consensus is born.
It is an old liberal theme that conservative ideas, being red in tooth and claw, cannot possibly emerge from any notion of the public good.
