Indeed, one modern President abjured God altogether, ending speeches with a chaste 'Thank you very much.' This was Jimmy Carter, the most genuinely devout President of the postwar period.

In science we kill our hypothesis instead of each other.

Parties and political systems used to be about excluding renegades who would never play well with others in government. Now it's actually systematically screening them in.

Compromise is what it's got to be all about when you're governing, because no one is ever going to have a big enough majority to just do what they want to do all the time.

We started tearing down the seniority system on Capitol Hill. All of that begins in the '70s. It accelerates and continues in the '90s, and it's going on to this day.

To get people to compromise, you have to give them stuff.

People think that politics just somehow magically organizes itself. It doesn't work that way. You need to assemble these huge coalitions of 535 politicians on Capitol Hill, and tens of thousands of interest groups, and tens of millions of voters, and assemble all those in government to get stuff done.