Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.

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.

I reckon I am a smart aleck, but it is just a way to pass the time.

A look at the past reminds us of how great is the distance, and how short, over which we have come. The past makes us ask what we have done with us. It makes us ask whether our very achievements are not ironical counterpoint and contrast to our fundamental failures.

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

[A]nd soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.

To be an American is not...a matter of blood; it is a matter of an idea--and history is the image of that idea.