A person whose job is deep thinking about atomic war would no more call a 'megadeath' a 'million corpses' than an embalmer would refer to a 'loved one' as a 'stiff.'

Notice, for example, that people who talk about "the joys of childhood" are always adults. Only an adult, utterly remote from the reality of childhood, could suppose it is time of joys.

There are no liberals behind steering wheels.

A railroad station? That was sort of a primitive airport, only you didn't have to take a cab 20 miles out of town to reach it.

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.

Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product.

Those who remember Washington's cold war culture in the 1980s will recall the shocked reactions to Reagan's intervention. People interested in foreign policy were astonished when in 1985 he met alone at Geneva - alone, not a single strategic thinker at his elbow! - with the Soviet Communist master Gorbachev.