You have this all the way through this cabinet so that I think there are a lot of other things to worry about [Donald] Trump. But in conventional political terms, this is a cabinet that I think is going to have a very hard time delivering to the base that Trump courted in this election.

Hope is different from optimism. Hope is a tough virtue, not a psychological predisposition. Hope insists on taking facts and reason into account and still insisting that improvement ... is always a real possibility.

The madman theory can work, but it only works if it's strategic. And I think one of the problems that President Trump faces is people don't really know how much strategy is here and how much is he just sort of talking off the top of his head. And I think North Korea is a really classic case of a potentially insoluble problem, a problem that you have to manage.

.. the publication of Friedrich A. von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom in 1944 is rightly seen as the first shot in the intellectual battle that was to turn the tide in favor of conservatism i.e. non-statist liberalism .

Politically, Donald Trump doesn't seem to care much about what he says. He gauges the effect. Sometimes, in the middle of a speech, he will change his direction if the audience doesn't like him.

What's really striking here is that a candidate who ran as the Paladin of the working class who'd deliver them picks a guy who heads a fast-food company, [Donald] Trump says he wants to bring back manufacturing.

Nowhere else in the world do the laws on firearms become the playthings of politicians and lobbyists intent on manufacturing cultural conflict. Nowhere else do elected officials turn the matter of taking a gun to church into a searing ideological question. But then, guns are not a religion in most countries.