With the parties at virtual parity and the ideological gulf between them never greater, the stakes of majority control of Congress are extremely high.

Presidents are elected not by direct popular vote but by 538 members of the Electoral College.

In addition to the decline in competition, American politics today is characterized by a growing ideological polarization between the two major political parties.

But presidential approval also became a surrogate measure of national unity and patriotism.

Knowledge of the soul would unfailingly make us melancholy if the pleasures of expression did not keep us alert and of good cheer.

We are not separate and independent entities, but like links in a chain, and we could not by any means be what we are without those who went before us and showed us the way.

Responsibility for overseeing the implementation of election law typically resides with partisan officials, many with public stakes in the election outcome.

A healthy degree of party unity among Democrats and Republicans has deteriorated into bitter partisan warfare.

Congress requires states to draw single-member districts.

While Republican voters have remained universally supportive of their President, Democrats and Independents are returning to a more naturally critical stance.

Votes in federal elections are cast and counted in a highly decentralized and variable fashion, with no uniform ballots and few national standards.

If you wait for the perfect moment when all is safe and assured it may never arrive. Mountains will not be climbed races won or lasting happiness achieved.

We were promised a simpler life, and technology has only complicated our lives.

Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22-out-of-30 top al-Qaida leaders who've been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement. Or whoever is left out there, ask them about that.

it is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists

No other form of violence is legitimate. It is never acceptable to use violence to solve a problem. Whether personal or political.

Come, ye cold winds, at January's call, On whistling wings, and with white flakes bestrew The earth.

St. Joseph was an ordinary sort of man on whom God relied to do great things. He did exactly what the Lord wanted him to do, in each and every event that went to make up his life.

All painting - the painting of the past as well as of the present - shows us that its essential plastic means were only line and color.

It's the admirer and the watcher who provoke us to all the inanities we commit.

Through teaching myself how to be happy and get through things, I hope I can also do that for other people.