American politics can produce great men and women, but it is profoundly insular.

This is what Newt Gingrich has wrought - is a politics in which it's very easy to destroy and very hard to build.

We focus on that really repulsive minority of racists. But then there's a continuum that goes all the way to, you know, what used to be called the white backlash or to, you know, the feelings of some white people that they're losing out and that the jobs and power and sort of the culture is drifting away from them and toward people who don't look like them, who don't - who they don't know very well. And that's not necessarily - I don't equate that with the hardcore ideological hatred of self-identified racists.

I really do put it on Bill Clinton's presidency as the time when the Democrats became the party of the college degree as the key to success in life.

I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir "Goodbye to All That," and a civilian memoir "Testament of Youth" by Vera Brittain .

You don`t have to be foreign policy expert to succeed as president, but you have to have ice water for blood.

We will have a more just society as soon as we want one.