TV gives everyone an image, but radio gives birth to a million images in a million brains.
A speech is poetry: cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweep! A speech reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart.
Candor is a compliment; it implies equality. It’s how true friends talk.
A great speech is literature.
Some of the stupidest brilliant people who ever lived.
When everyone in America knows you’re in a dreadful position, admit you’re in a dreadful position. Don’t lie about it and make them roll their eyes, tell the truth and make them blink.
Speeches are more important in politics than talking points, as a rule, and are better remembered.
The first snow always startles. It covers the tricycle in the driveway, turning its frame into an abstact sculpture that says: See how quickly yesterday turns into today.
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.
I should say here, because some in Washington like to dream up ways to control the Internet, that we don’t need to ‘control’ free speech, we need to control ourselves.
When you forget yourself and your fear, when you get beyond self-consciousness because your mind is thinking about what you are trying to communicate, you become a better communicator.
The Democratic Party is that amazing thing, out of power for six years and yet exhausted. They’re pale, tired, and unready. Too bad, since it’s their job to be an alternative, not an embarrassment.
I guess the second-term team is not quite as adoring as the first.
The Democratic Party will now stick with its guy forever, no matter how harmful he is. Perhaps you call that loyalty, and perhaps there’s something to it, but a bigger part, I believe, is that you have come to think that winning is everything-that victory is the purpose of politics.
This is the Democratic paradox: You want so much to run America and yet you seem not so fond of Americans.
The core of the concept of a bribe is an inducement improperly influencing the performance of a public function meant to be gratuitously exercised.
Let’s cause some senators distress.
The Irish are often nervous about having the appropriate face for the occasion. They have to be happy at weddings, which is a strain, so they get depressed; they have to be sad at funerals, which is easy, so they get happy.
Resentment isn’t a magnetic personal style.
Speeches are not magic and there is no great speech without great policy.