If you're in the penaut business you learn to think small.

There is a long-standing tradition in America of scoffing at poets, especially if they show any interest in politics.

The only thing that saves us from bureaucracy is its inefficiency.

There are two ways that you can gain territory from another group. One is by conquest. That's essentially the way we took California from Mexico and... Texas as well. But what's going on now may end up being a kind of recolonization of the Southwest, because the other way you can regain territory is by population infiltration and demographic dominance.... The United States will be faced with the problem that Canada has been faced with... and which our system is not prepared to accommodate.

Whatever is morally necessary must be made politically possible.

I can still smell the tear gas in the Hilton Hotel.

I may have been prejudiced against lawyer members of Congress, having run against one or two and having been threatened politically by a few others, and also because my own professional background was academic, principally in the liberal arts. Good lawyers, I asserted in campaigns, can be found in the yellow pages of the telephone books. Good historians, or political and social philosophers, are not so easily found or classified.