Patriotism is strong nationalistic feeling for a country whose borders and whose legitimacy and whose ethnic composition is taken for granted.

It's good for people to believe in causes larger than themselves.

There are all kinds of different forms of public service, but there's no form of public service that can make more difference for more people than partisan political activity.

There's a financial cost, but the only costs that are ever real are the costs of our soldiers.

The politics of personal destruction, the politics of division, the politics of fear, it's all there. It helps you to define the politics of moderation - the politics of democratic respect, the politics of hope - more clearly.

Cynics who say power is all that counts in politics forget that power without ideas is just improvisation.

Political utopias are a form of nostalgia for an imagined past projected onto the future as a wish.