One of the things I learned, the easiest of lessons, was that the better you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less popular you are likely to be.

Rowing, particularly sculling, inflicts on the individual in every race a level of pain associated with few other sports. There was certainly pain in football during a head-on collision, pain in other sports on the occasion of a serious injury. That was more the threat of pain; in rowing there was the absolute guarantee of it every time.

These days there's all too much coverage of pesudo-events about extraordinarily inauthentic people doing inauthentic things.

If youre a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring.

If there is anything that is important to America, it is that you are not a prisoner of the past.

I have a great faith in the strength and the resilience in the American people.

A staff can be no better than the man it serves.