We create our own government. We are responsible for its beauty and for its ugliness. We are responsible for its glories and for its failures and, most important, we are responsible for amending those failures no matter who are their most immediate architects.

There is a barbarism in the American soul, and we must protect some of it by law. To root it out is to endanger our lives on the one hand, and our liberty on the other.

If religion comes into the public square, it is as vulnerable as any other human institution to be pelted with produce. Ignorance does not become wisdom just because you gussy it up with the Gospels.

As a writer, I have to admit, there is something darkly compelling about Alzheimer's because it attacks the two things most central to a writer's craft - language and memory, which together make up an individual's identity. Alzheimer's makes a new character out of a familiar person.

The man is the Piltdown Man of modern politics.

One of the great changes wrought by the increased public awareness of Alzheimers - and thank you, Nancy Reagan, you wonderful tough old dame, you - is that people in the early stages of the disease are now speaking out while they still have the capacity to do so.

In order to get big things done, sometimes, presidents have to be deft at moving the pea around under the shells.