There is simply no substitute for forceful American leadership. Sometimes the best way to get allies is to be willing to forge ahead alone.

Al Gore's performances could be a case study in abnormal-psychology classes.

Bill Clinton was a liberal who could appeal to conservative-leaning Bubba voters.

Comedians still make fun of Bill's out-of-control appetites, but with Hillary, the mockery is about how she lets nothing be out of control.

There's no wobble in Bush. If anything, the opposite. Right after hello, the next words out of his mouth are: I've never been more convinced that the decisions I made are the right decisions.

In person, George W. Bush is extremely forceful. He has a restless energy when he sits in a chair, and nearly leaps out of it when making certain points.

Almost all political campaigns involve falsity and playacting.

Message to Obama: Fighting the Clinton machine won't be as easy as picking up favorable press clips.

Clinton's fakery was so deft and deeply ingrained that it was impossible to tell where it ended and the real Bill Clinton began. This constituted a kind of political genius.

It is Hillary's lot in life not to be able to fake it well...

Because liberalism typically doesn't sell in American presidential politics, liberal candidates tend to run as culturally conservative centrists.

People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living isn't complicated enough

Stop talking about how you will build an empire, and start building it right at this very moment. Time never waits for anyone to feel perfectly ready.

I feel like I know South Africans. I feel like I know our culture.

He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.

Socialism never took root in America.

The only way to improve a trick is to find a simpler and more direct way of doing it.

Though thou loved her as thyself, As a self of purer clay, Tho' her parting dims the day, Stealing grace from all alive, Heartily know, When half-gods go, The gods arrive.

The noun of self becomes a verb. This flashpoint of creation in the present moment is where work and play merge.

One of the things I really want is for people to feel the civic responsibility, and not just refuse to vote out of protest.

President Barack Obama started by accepting the military's counterinsurgency, but came out of Afghanistan having decided that counterinsurgency actually doesn't work.