Listen once in a while. It's amazing what you can hear.

Few expected very much of Franklin Roosevelt on Inauguration Day in 1933. Like Barack Obama seventy-six years later, he was succeeding a failed Republican president, and Americans had voted for change. What that change might be Roosevelt never clearly said, probably because he himself didn't know.

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.

Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.

The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.

It was clear soon after his election that Obama, like FDR, wanted to start dealing with the economic crisis immediately after his inauguration.

Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.