Popularity makes no law invulnerable to invalidation. Americans accept judicial supervision of their democracy - judicial review of popular but possibly unconstitutional statutes - because they know that if the Constitution is truly to constitute the nation, it must trump some majority preferences.
The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.
Voters don't decide issues, they decide who will decide issues.
Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. Not all holes, or games, are created equal.
Since the emergence of the Republican Party, only two Democratic presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, have been followed by Democrats, and both FDR and JFK died in office, so their successors ran as incumbents.
Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.
The future has a way of arriving unannounced.
The pursuit of perfection often impedes improvement.
Political ignorance helps explain Americans' perpetual disappointment with politicians generally, and presidents especially, to whom voters unrealistically attribute abilities to control events.
Well, you know, the definition of second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.
Money is time made tangible - the time invested in the earning of it. Taxation is the confiscation of the earner's time. Although some taxation is necessary, all taxation diminishes freedom.
Political nature abhors a vacuum, which is what often exists for a year or two in a party after it loses a presidential election.
Some parents say it is toy guns that make boys warlike. But give a boy a rubber duck and he will seize its neck like the butt of a pistol and shout 'Bang!'
The 1935 Social Security Act established 65 as the age of eligibility for payouts. But welfare state politics quickly becomes a bidding war, enriching the menu of benefits, so in 1956 Congress entitled women to collect benefits at 62, extending the entitlement to men in 1961.
Barack Obama hopes his famous health care victory will mark him as a transformative president. History, however, may judge it to have been his missed opportunity to be one.
Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose.
A politician's words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.
If you seek Hamilton's monument, look around. You are living in it. We honor Jefferson, but live in Hamilton's country, a mighty industrial nation with a strong central government.
Leadership is, among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it - short-term pain for long-term gain.
The strongest continuous thread in America's political tradition is skepticism about government.
