In Washington it is an honor to be disgraced. you have to have been somebody to fall.

If you were starting from scratch to invent an instrument that could impose fiscal discipline, the last one on earth you would come up with is the United States government.

Thin skin is the only kind of skin human beings come with.

Ninety percent of politics is deciding whom to blame.

Washington, under Democrats and Republicans, has a profoundly neurotic attitude toward 'the people.' It is built on equal parts of suspicion, loathing, fear, respect and dependence.

If a politician murders his mother, the first response of the press or of his opponents will likely be not that it was a terrible thing to do, but rather that in a statement made six years before he had gone on record as being opposed to matricide.

Everybody's for democracy in principle. It's only in practice that the thing gives rise to stiff objections.