If you write something the White House doesn't like, they take you in and say, 'If you ever write something like you did today, nobody from the White House will ever talk to you again

The fact is that in a way, journalists become a kind of default in the system when you don't have substantive two-party back-and-forth inside of the government.

The fact is, most journalists I know are not particularly political. They move around a lot.

[Barack Obama] says at one point, "[Jimmy] Carter, [Bill] Clinton and I suffer from," what he called, "the policy wonk's disease."

Rapid change, accommodating it can be one of the great human capacities. But living through it can be the stuff of stress and often suffering.

I think that there's a lot of anxiety out there in people wanting their children to be part of the mainstream, to achieve based on the well-worn yardsticks.

Civilizations rise and fall on confidence. America had figured out a way to borrow money to manufacture it.