If the newspapers of a country are filled with good news, the jails of that country will be filled with good people.

...there is simply nothing so important to a people and its government as how many of them there are, whether their number is growing or declining, how they are distributed as between different ages, sexes, and different social classes and racial and ethnic groups, and again, which way these numbers are moving.

The American Constitution was designed to make it hard to have too much government.

At 14 you are still in most respects a dependent youth, in some respects a child. At 24 you are an adult. In between, extraordinary turbulences take place.

What the press never does say is who the leaker is and why he wants the story leaked. Yet, more often than not, this is the more important story: What policy wins if the one being disclosed loses?

The work of democratic government is routinely concerned with matters defined as troubles. In "The Presidency and the Press" I make the point, familiar to anyone who has flown about the world much, that the best quick test of the political nature of a regime is to read the local papers on arrival. If they are filled with bad news, you have landed in a libertarian society of some sort. If, on the other hand, the press is filled with good news, it is a fair bet that the jails will be filled with good men.

To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.