Speech writers are more vulnerable to vanity than any other group of people in Washington.

The habit of going to your congressman's town hall and asking questions, that's powerful in a way that shouting slogans or getting arrested is not, that is completely counterproductive.

[democrats] hated Richard Nixon, and no wonder. It was Nixon who sent Alger Hiss to jail, and Nixon who waged the Vietnam War after the Democrats gave up.

That is the way successful countries, and Canada has been one of the most successful countries over the past quarter century, they operate. That when you win, you win within limits, when you lose, you accept the outcome.

One of the things you can learn from a figure like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is that if you take all the resources of the state for yourself, you don't build much of a constituency and you have to rely on repression, and repression is difficult in the modern world.

The great power the president has is that he is the most prominent person in the biggest media event on the planet. He has the attention of the nation and the world. When he speaks, everybody listens.

No one is murdered in Hungary and there are no illegal arrests, but people have begun again, when they talk to you in a public place looking around to see who's listening. You see that in Slovakia, you're beginning to see that in Poland.