Journalist

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

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.

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

I think the editorial page of the Washington Post is the best in the country. I think the editorials - considering it's a liberal town, liberal constituency and from the liberal tradition - I think it's the best editorial page around. It's quite balanced.

Doves oppose war on the grounds that the risks exceed the gains. War with Iraq could be very costly, possibly degenerating into urban warfare.

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

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.

Trump is a systemic stress test.

When under attack, no country is obligated to collect permission slips from allies to strike back.

If Obama has his way, the change that is coming is a new America: 'fair,' leveled and social democratic. Obama didn't get elected to warranty your muffler. He's here to warranty your life.

I have a horror of the blank page. I simply cannot write on a blank page or screen. Because once I do, I start to fix it, and I never get past the first sentence.

The world is a Hobbesian state of nature in which the struggle for domination is the very essence of international life.

If you control one house of Congress, you cannot abolish something like Obamacare, no matter how much pressure you apply.

I would write my editorials using a manual typewriter in pitch-black darkness... I would produce the whole thing without having seen the text.

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.

Americans are not intrinsically imperial, but we ended up dominant by default: Europe disappeared after the Second World War, the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, so here we are.

The conservative idea is not that government has no role. You might have argued that in the thirties when conservatives opposed the New Deal.

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

I think if you're going to master policy, especially world affairs, you've got to know history.

I don't think the West needs to apologize - or pay - for having invented the steam engine.