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.
Read good, big important things.
I love eulogies. They are the most moving kind of speech because they attempt to pluck meaning from the fog, and on short order, when the emotions are still ragged and raw and susceptible to leaps.
Loyalty consists of many things, including being truthful with our friends. When you really disagree, you have to say so.
Now he is a statesman, when what he really wants is to be what most reporters are, adult delinquents.
In ancient Israel and Rome the judge had appeared as a stand-in for the divine, and corruption was a blinding of the representative of the divine.
Humor is the shock absorber of life; it helps us take the blows.
At some point, don’t voters start to see all of public life as one big polluted river? And if they do, don’t they stop saying things like “That’s a busted tire floating by” and “That’s an old shoe”?
I do not know what the Democratic Party spent, in toto, on the 2004 election, but what they seem to have gotten for it is Barack Obama. Let us savor.
The Democrats often seem like the Not Republican Party, no more and no less.
Wit penetrates; humor envelops. Wit is a function of verbal intelligence; humor is imagination operating on good nature.
Here is an old tradition badly in need of return: You have to earn your way into politics. You should go have a life, build a string of accomplishments, then enter public service...
But one immediate thing can be done right now, and that is: lower the temperature. Any way you can, and everybody. Just lower it.
Abortion is either OK or it’s not.
Morals are concerned with what aids or impedes the fulfillment of basic human needs.
I was sailing from tedium to apathy with a side trip to torpor.
Sincerity and competence is a strong combination. In politics, it is everything.
Hubert Humphrey’s wife is said to have advised him: “Darling, for a speech to be immortal it need not be interminable.
Where you falter, alter.
What do you think of your job as? What service are you performing in society? What’s the point of what you do?
Enjoy life, it’s ungrateful not to,” said Ronald Reagan.