What's missing is leadership in the White House. And the story that Barack Obama does tell forever shifting blame to the last administration is getting old. The man assumed office almost four years ago - isn't it about time he assumed responsibility?

Religious speech is extreme emotional and motivational. It is anti-literal relying on metaphor allusion and other rhetorical devices and it assumes knowledge within a community of believers.

One of the great intellectual failures of the American intelligence community and especially the counterterrorism community is to assume if someone hasn't attacked us it's because he can't or because we've defeated him.

Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.

I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.

M*A*S*H offered real characters and everybody identified with them because they had such soul. The humor was intelligent and it always assumed that you had an intellect.

Recently I have come to assume that any call to my landline is from a telemarketer or an automated call from Terminex letting me know that our regularly scheduled pest-extermination service will occur on its regular schedule. So I usually ignore my home phone.

I think that we have a number of different health care challenges in our country and certainly addressing the uninsured is one and the second is making sure that those with health insurance actually get the care that they assume they'll have available to them if they get sick.

All the evidence that we have indicates that it is reasonable to assume in practically every human being and certainly in almost every newborn baby that there is an active will toward health an impulse towards growth or towards the actualization.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.