Actually, there is only one first question of government, and it is How should we live? or What kind of people do we want our citizens to be?

What is really shocking in America isn't what's done in and by Washington that is illegal by that what is done in and by Washington that's legal.

We have far more to fear from swift than from torpid government.

Barack Obama, who might be mercifully closing the Clinton parenthesis in presidential history, is refreshingly cerebral amid this recrudescence of the paranoid style in American politics. He is the un-Edwards and un-Huckabee - an adult aiming to reform the real world rather than an adolescent fantasizing mock-heroic 'fights' against fictitious villains in a left-wing cartoon version of this country.

There is an aura of changelessness to sport. There is the flux of competition, but it occurs within the ordering confinement of clear rules.

Leadership is, among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it - short-term pain for long-term gain.

The pursuit of perfection prevents achievement of the satisfactory.