Jefferson was the rare leader who stood out from the crowd without intimidating it.

America has long raised political and cultural cognitive dissonance to an art form. We are capable of living with enormous inequality and injustice while convincing ourselves that we are in fact moving toward what Churchill called the "broad, sun-lit uplands."

We often talk too much & listen too little. The surer route to winning a friend isn't to convince them that you're right, but that you care what they think.

One wonders whether the Obama re-election campaign may be on the right track as it seeks to apply the you-break-it-you-own-it rule to Bush and the American economy. Hardly a day goes by without President Obama or his surrogates arguing that it takes longer than four years to recover from an economic crisis so long in the making.

No government can be maintained without the principle of fear as well as duty.

The past always seems somehow more golden, more serious, than the present. We tend to forget the partisanship of yesteryear, preferring to re-imagine our history as a sure and steady march toward greatness.

[T]o argue that something is so because it is in the Bible is more than intellectually bankrupt.