Whenever you're faced with an explanation of what's going on in Washington, the choice between incompetence and conspiracy, always choose incompetence.

You're betraying your whole life if you don't say what you think - and you don't say it honestly and bluntly.

I believe that the pursuit of truth and right ideas through honest debate and rigorous argument is a noble undertaking.

The normalization of Trump is one indicator that there may be less to the populist insurrection than imagined.

I leave this life with no regrets. It was a wonderful life - full and complete with the great loves and great endeavors that make it worth living.

Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country - and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.

For every moment of triumph, there is an unequal and opposite feeling of despair. Take that iconic photograph of Muhammad Ali standing triumphantly over the prostrate, semiconscious wreckage of Sonny Liston. Great photo. Now think of Liston. Do the pleasure/pain calculus.

Sometimes it's easy to go where the wind blows, but those that stand firmly planted are forces to be reckoned with.

I was a Great Society liberal on domestic issues. People ask me, 'How do you go from Walter Mondale to Fox News?' The answer is, 'I was young once.' End of answer.

Ideas matter. Legislative proposals matter. Slick campaigns and dazzling speeches can work for a while, but the magic always wears off.

There used to be a cruel joke that said Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be; Obama is the Brazil of today's politicians. He has obviously achieved nothing.

Baseball is a slow, boring, complex, cerebral game that doesn't lend itself to histrionics. You 'take in' a baseball game, something odd to say about a football or basketball game, with the clock running and the bodies flying.

The Internet is a cauldron of anger every day, every year, election year or not, with unemployment at 10 percent or at two percent. It isn't exactly a good index of what's happening.

Trump's relentless public humiliation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions was clearly intended to get him to resign.

This is a formidable enemy. To dismiss it as a bunch of 'cowards' perpetuating 'senseless acts of violence' is complacent nonsense. People willing to kill thousands of innocents while they kill themselves are not cowards. They are deadly vicious warriors and need to be treated as such.

When the Cleveland Cavaliers lost the 2015 NBA Finals to Golden State, LeBron James sat motionless in the locker room, staring straight ahead, still wearing his game jersey, for 45 minutes after the final buzzer. Here was a guy immensely wealthy, widely admired, at the peak of his powers - yet stricken, inconsolable.

A drone is a high-tech version of an old army and a musket. It ought to be used in Somalia to hunt bad guys, but not in America. I don't want to see it hovering over anybody's home.

There was once a philosopher who said, 'I don't believe in God, but I fear him greatly.' That's about where I am.

I envy people who write easily. I enjoy the process, but it's not easeful for me.

There is a mystique about psychiatry that people think that you have some kind of a magical lens, you know, Superman's X-ray vision into the soul. One of the reasons I left psychiatry is that I didn't believe that.

It is an old liberal theme that conservative ideas, being red in tooth and claw, cannot possibly emerge from any notion of the public good.

I don't mind going into a liberal lion's den. That's where you test yourself.

Life and consciousness are the two great mysteries. Actually, their substrates are the inanimate. And how do you get from neurons shooting around in the brain to the thought that pops up in your head and mine? There's something deeply mysterious about that. And if you're not struck by the mystery, I think you haven't thought about it.

Every civilization is founded on sins - every single one. Dispossession, violence, appropriation. What distinguishes civilizations are the ones who rise above it.

When a party is in opposition, it opposes. That's its job. But when it comes to power, it must govern. Easy rhetoric is over, the press of reality becomes irresistible. By necessity, it adopts some of the policies it had once denounced. And a new national consensus is born.

Obama is a leveler. He has come to narrow the divide between rich and poor. For him the ultimate social value is fairness. Imposing it upon the American social order is his mission.

I believe in what I believe, and I think after all these years I've heard a lot of arguments, and I'm convinced by the superiority of the arguments that are made on the conservative side. I think that's a better way to run a society.

Trump is a systemic stress test.

Chess: It's like alcohol. It's a drug. I have to control it, or it could overwhelm me. I have a regular Monday night game at my home, and I do play a little online.

I would say I see myself as a psychiatrist in remission.

Ronald Reagan was so self-contained and impenetrable that his official biographer was practically driven mad trying to figure him out.

I began my journalistic career on the day Ronald Reagan was sworn in. That's the day I showed up for work at 'The New Republic' magazine.

I'm a former Red Sox fan, now fully rehabilitated.

Trump's behavior is deeply disturbing but hardly surprising. His mercurial nature is not the product of a post-inaugural adder sting at Mar-a-Lago. It's been there all along. And the American electorate chose him nonetheless.

Ron Paul is not going to be president, so we don't have to worry about who's going to be in his cabinet.

The joy of losing consists in this: Where there are no expectations, there is no disappointment.

Longevity, for a columnist, is a simple proposition: Once you start, you don't stop. You do it until you die or can no longer put a sentence together. It has always been my intention to die at my desk, although my most cherished ambition is to outlive the estate tax.

Ted Cruz is a patriot. He believes in what he does. He's done marvels in mobilizing conservatives, mobilizing Americans concerned about the direction of the ever-expanding entitlement state under Obama, and particularly the threat it is to freedom. I disagree with his tactics, but I agree entirely with his objectives.

I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix.

As most who have engaged in competitive sports know, there's nothing to match the amplitude of emotion brought by losing.

Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent's life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy.

Obama and the Democrats were so critical of what Bush did, the interrogations, the secret prisons, Guantanamo and all of that, and even the war on terror. Obama won't use the word. He's made war on the war on terror.

I am grateful to have played a small role in the conversations that have helped guide this extraordinary nation's destiny.

If you get a call to go to a certain place in the middle of the night to pick up stolen goods, and it turns out the stolen goods don't show up but the cops show up, I think you're going to have a very weak story saying, 'Well, I got swindled here.'

So far as I'm concerned, Ronald Reagan was the best president. Nixon was the worst. Some of his policies were okay, but he disgraced the office.

The international community lies at the center of the Obama foreign policy. Unfortunately, it is a fiction. There is no such thing. Different countries have different histories, geographies, necessities, and interests. There's no natural, inherent, or enduring international community.

Under our constitutional system, the executive executes the laws that Congress has passed. It should not be executing laws that Congress has rejected.

Obama is a man of first-class intellect and first-class temperament. But his character remains highly suspect.

In the liberal remake of 'Casablanca,' the police captain comes upon the scene of the shooting and orders his men to 'round up the usual weapons.' It's always the weapon and never the shooter.

Newt Gingrich had to work hard - getting Republican candidates to sign the Contract with America - to nationalize the election that swept Republicans to victory in 1994. A Democratic anti-Tea Party campaign would do that for the Republicans - nationalize the election, gratis - in 2010.