Peggy Noonan Quotes

#1. You don't have to be old in America to say of a world you lived in: That world is gone. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#2. Part of courage is simple consistency. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#3. Some of the stupidest brilliant people who ever lived. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#4. Hubert Humphrey's wife is said to have advised him: Darling, for a speech to be immortal it need not be interminable. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#5. The biggest improvement in the flow of information in America in our lifetimes is that no single group controls the news anymore. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#6. [On President Clinton's address:] It was the worst inaugural address of our lifetime, and I think the only controversy will be between those who say it was completely and utterly banal and those who say, 'Well, not completely and utterly. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#7. If you commit a big crime then you are crazy, and the more heinous the crime the crazier you must be. Therefore you are not responsible, and nothing is your fault. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#8. You can get so well educated in America that your thoughts become detached from common sense. You can get so complicated in your thinking that the obvious isn't real to you anymore. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#9. At some point, don't voters start to see all of public life as one big polluted river? And if they do, don't they stop saying things like "That's a busted tire floating by" and "That's an old shoe"? - Author: Peggy Noonan

#10. Candor is a compliment; it implies equality. It's how true friends talk. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#11. Don't fall in love with politicians, they're all a disappointment. They can't help it, they just are. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#12. I was starting to feel that Washington was a city run by two rival gangs that had a great deal in common with each other, including an essential lack of interest in the well-being of the turf on which they fought. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#13. You don't tell people who disagree with you they'd be better off somewhere else. And you don't reduce them to stereotypes; you address them as fully formed people worthy of respect. You try to persuade them. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#14. We must try again to be alive to what the people of our country really long for in our national life: forgiveness and grace, maturity and wisdom.
... Our political leaders will know our priorities only if we tell them, again and again, and if those priorities begin to show up in the polls. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#15. Politicians, please, think of yourselves! Move to help Terri Schiavo, and no one will be mad at you, and you'll keep a human being alive. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#16. But one immediate thing can be done right now, and that is: lower the temperature. Any way you can, and everybody. Just lower it. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#17. All great political families have myths: stories they tell themselves about how history happened. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#18. In the 1950s and '60s the [democrat] party included many obviously earnest and thoughtful liberals who supported goals that were in line with and expressions of serious beliefs. They believed that America was an exceptional country. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#19. As we have become more open minded (tolerant) in society we have become more closed hearted. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#20. When men in politics are together, testosterone poisoning makes them insane. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#21. Sincerity and competence is a strong combination. In politics, it is everything. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#22. Boundaries aren't all bad. That's why there are walls around mental institutions. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#23. Speeches are not magic and there is no great speech without great policy. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#24. A speech is poetry: cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweep! A speech reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#25. Ted Sorrenson, JFK's presidential speech writer, when asked how it came about that he wrote the "ask not what you can do ... " speech, he would answer 'ask not.' - Author: Peggy Noonan

#26. I love eulogies. They are the most moving kind of speech because they attempt to pluck meaning from the fog, and on short order, when the emotions are still ragged and raw and susceptible to leaps. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#27. I do not know what the Democratic Party spent, in toto, on the 2004 election, but what they seem to have gotten for it is Barack Obama. Let us savor. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#28. Let's cause some senators distress. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#29. Loyalty consists of many things, including being truthful with our friends. When you really disagree, you have to say so. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#30. Morals are concerned with what aids or impedes the fulfillment of basic human needs. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#31. A sermon expands to fill the time allotted to complete. it - Author: Peggy Noonan

#32. Most people aren't appreciated enough, and the bravest things we do in our lives are usually known only to ourselves. No one throws ticker tape on the man who chose to be faithful to his wife, on the lawyer who didn't take the drug money ... - Author: Peggy Noonan

#33. My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage - Author: Peggy Noonan

#34. Naps are nature's way of reminding you that life is nice, like a beautiful swinging hammock strung between birth and infinity. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#35. Speeches are more important in politics than talking points, as a rule, and are better remembered. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#36. What is in the air there in Washington, what is in the water? What is wrong with them? This is not a rhetorical question. I think it is unspoken question No.1 as Americans look at so many of the individuals in our government. What is wrong with them? - Author: Peggy Noonan

#37. Enjoy life, it's ungrateful not to, said Ronald Reagan. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#38. If you join government, calmly make your contribution and move on. Don't go along to get along; do your best and when you have to - and you will - leave, and be something else. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#39. I ought to pray as much as God's on my mind, because then I'd pray a lot. All I can tell you is God is real, and so that infuses everything. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#40. The core of the concept of a bribe is an inducement improperly influencing the performance of a public function meant to be gratuitously exercised. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#41. Word of the day- kakistocracy. From the Greek meaning government by the worst persons, least qualified or most unprincipled. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#42. I was sailing from tedium to apathy with a side trip to torpor. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#43. Cynicism is not realistic and tough. It's unrealistic and kind of cowardly because it means you don't have to try.
in Good Housekeeping - Author: Peggy Noonan

#44. Humor is the shock absorber of life; it helps us take the blows. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#45. The Democratic Party will now stick with its guy forever, no matter how harmful he is. Perhaps you call that loyalty, and perhaps there's something to it, but a bigger part, I believe, is that you have come to think that winning is everything-that victory is the purpose of politics. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#46. In ancient Israel and Rome the judge had appeared as a stand-in for the divine, and corruption was a blinding of the representative of the divine. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#47. A great speech is literature. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#48. What Andrew Cuomo said is, truly, a scandal. It's a scandal if he actually thinks it - that those who hold conservative views on abortion, gun rights and marriage are extreme, anathema and have no place in the state. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#49. George W. Bush, 43rd president of the United States, became the first incumbent president to increase his majority in both the Senate and the House and to increase his own vote (by over 3.5 million) since Franklin D. Roosevelt, political genius of the 20th century, in 1936. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#50. Now he is a statesman, when what he really wants is to be what most reporters are, adult delinquents. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#51. TV gives everyone an image, but radio gives birth to a million images in a million brains. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#52. By trying to do too much, you risk not doing enough. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#53. Here is an old tradition badly in need of return: You have to earn your way into politics. You should go have a life, build a string of accomplishments, then enter public service ... - Author: Peggy Noonan

#54. I now know that God has a plan for each of us. The thing is to find out what it is. How? Through prayer, through keeping your mind open, and trough the circumstances of daily life and the people you meet. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#55. What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them. What President Bush is doing, and has been doing for some time, is sundering a great political coalition. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#56. Memo to future presidents: Never stake your entire survival on the painful passing of a bad bill. Never take the country down the road to 'Demon Pass.' - Author: Peggy Noonan

#57. One senses with so many Democrats who support the Clintons an unspoken sentence: "They're all we have." They're the only big national winners the party has left. I always want to say to them: That's not true, you've got better than that, you've got good people, go look and you will find them. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#58. Democracy involves that old-fashioned thing called working it out. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#59. When everyone in America knows you're in a dreadful position, admit you're in a dreadful position. Don't lie about it and make them roll their eyes, tell the truth and make them blink. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#60. The Democrats often seem like the Not Republican Party, no more and no less. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#61. Presidents have a right to certain prerogatives, including the expectation of a certain deference. He's the president; this is history. But we seem to have come a long way since Ronald Reagan was regularly barked at by Sam Donaldson, almost literally, and the president shrugged it off. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#62. The battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I: never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#63. The first snow always startles. It covers the tricycle in the driveway, turning its frame into an abstact sculpture that says: See how quickly yesterday turns into today. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#64. I further know that if God has something special for you, you have a knowledge of it inside you, which causes you not to be satisfied with anything that isn't this thing. You're "restless" until you find it. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#65. Remember the waterfront shack with the sign FRESH FISH SOLD HERE. Of course it's fresh, we're on the ocean. Of course it's for sale, we're not giving it away. Of course it's here, otherwise the sign would be someplace else. The final sign: FISH. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#66. When you forget yourself and your fear, when you get beyond self-consciousness because your mind is thinking about what you are trying to communicate, you become a better communicator - Author: Peggy Noonan

#67. Abortion is either OK or it's not. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#68. The biggest political change in my lifetime is that Americans no longer assume that their children will have it better than they did. This is a huge break with the past, with assumptions and traditions that shaped us. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#69. I think miracles exist in part as gifts and in part as clues that there is something beyond the flat world we see. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#70. Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their natures; there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#71. The president - every president - works for us. We don't work for him. We sometimes lose track of this, or rather get the balance wrong. Respect is due and must be palpable, but now and then you have to press, to either force them to be forthcoming or force them to reveal that they won't be. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#72. I guess the second-term team is not quite as adoring as the first. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#73. The Irish are often nervous about having the appropriate face for the occasion. They have to be happy at weddings, which is a strain, so they get depressed; they have to be sad at funerals, which is easy, so they get happy. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#74. We are all afraid. That's the thing that unites all truly successful people: fear, fear of failing, fear of criticism, fear of letting down the team in some way. That why they try so hard, that's why they pay attention to detail and try to get every possible duck in a row. It's fear - Author: Peggy Noonan

#75. The 2008 election settled nothing, not even for a while. Our national politics are reflecting what appears to be going on geologically, on the bottom of the oceans and beneath the crust of the Earth: the tectonic plates are moving. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#76. I should say here, because some in Washington like to dream up ways to control the Internet, that we don't need to 'control' free speech, we need to control ourselves. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#77. He [Pope Benedict XVI] spoke of the distilled message of John Paul's reign: Be not afraid - Author: Peggy Noonan

#78. Wit penetrates; humor envelops. Wit is a function of verbal intelligence; humor is imagination operating on good nature. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#79. The Democratic Party is that amazing thing, out of power for six years and yet exhausted. They're pale, tired, and unready. Too bad, since it's their job to be an alternative, not an embarrassment. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#80. [democrats] have become the party of snobs. You have become the party of Americans who think they're better than other Americans. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#81. The Democratic Party's complete obeisance to [the abortion] lobby makes Democrats look bought, frightened and craven. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#82. Our work is a vocation to which we have been called from the beginning of time. When we work we are partaking in and joining with God's ongoing creation of the world. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#83. This is the Democratic paradox: You want so much to run America and yet you seem not so fond of Americans. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#84. There is nothing wrong with being a declared liberal or conservative and conducting a sympathetic interview with a political figure who shares your views. - Author: Peggy Noonan

#85. Things change. Time changes them. Great nations, and institutions, rethink. But only if they're great. - Author: Peggy Noonan