Words matter. These are the best Peggy Noonan Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I think miracles exist in part as gifts and in part as clues that there is something beyond the flat world we see.
Abortion is either OK or it’s not.
My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage.
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.
If you commit a big crime then you are crazy, and the more heinous the crime the crazier you must be. Therefore you are not responsible, and nothing is your fault.
Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their natures; there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen.
Candor is a compliment; it implies equality. It’s how true friends talk.
Let’s cause some senators distress.
The president – every president – works for us. We don’t work for him. We sometimes lose track of this, or rather get the balance wrong. Respect is due and must be palpable, but now and then you have to press, to either force them to be forthcoming or force them to reveal that they won’t be.
Don’t fall in love with politicians, they’re all a disappointment. They can’t help it, they just are.
Memo to future presidents: Never stake your entire survival on the painful passing of a bad bill. Never take the country down the road to ‘Demon Pass.’
If you join government, calmly make your contribution and move on. Don’t go along to get along; do your best and when you have to – and you will – leave, and be something else.
All great political families have myths: stories they tell themselves about how history happened.
Part of courage is simple consistency.
Speeches are not magic and there is no great speech without great policy.
TV gives everyone an image, but radio gives birth to a million images in a million brains.
Presidents have a right to certain prerogatives, including the expectation of a certain deference. He’s the president; this is history. But we seem to have come a long way since Ronald Reagan was regularly barked at by Sam Donaldson, almost literally, and the president shrugged it off.
There is nothing wrong with being a declared liberal or conservative and conducting a sympathetic interview with a political figure who shares your views.
