Kill the body and the head will die.

Any kind of political campaign that taps the kind of energy that nothing else can reach would generate a tremendous high for everybody involved in it.

Any candidate who'd offered a real possibility of an alternative to Nixon - someone with a different concept of the presidency - could have challenged him and come very close to beating him.

Richard Nixon has never been one of my favorite people anyway. For years I've regarded his existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad. The Nixon I remembered was absolutely humorless; I couldn't imagine him laughing at anything except maybe a paraplegic who wanted to vote Democratic but couldn't quite reach the lever on the voting machine.

There's no point in getting into politics at all unless you plan to lash things around.

No one HAS to do something he doesn’t want to do for the rest of his life. But then again, if that’s what you wind up doing, by all means convince yourself that you HAD to do it. You’ll have lots of company.

I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it.