For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

Politics is a matter of choices, and a man doesn't set up the choices himself. And there is always a price to make a choice. You know that. You've made a choice, and you know how much it cost you. There is always a price.

If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.

The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him.

Everything seems an echo of something else.

And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us. That is what all of us historical researchers believe. And we love truth.

I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.