My family helped start [this country], we've been in political life ... since the 1690s, and I have a very possessive sense about this country.

Perfect love sometimes does not come until the first grandchild.

In a society like ours, politics is improvisation. To the artful dodger rather than the true believer goes the prize.

If Henry Miller often sounded like a village idiot, it is because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well.

One's neighbor is always the enemy. That is the nature of things.

I'd say that Holland, Sweden, and Denmark are all better countries politically than the United States. The average person is far better off in one of those countries than he is in the United States and poverty of the sort that we have is absolutely unknown in Northern Europe.

It is natural for men to want power. But to seek power actively takes a temperament baffling to both the simple and the wise. The simple cannot fathom how any man would dare presume to prevail, while the wise are amazed that any reasonable man would want the world, assuming he could get it.