You know rock stardom... I have a hard time discussing that because I don't really accept it. It's not really that tangible. What's really bizarre is how it's used as a thing - you know 'He's the rock star of politics ' 'He's the rock star of quarterbacks' - like it's the greatest thing in the world.

Public life is regarded as the crown of a career and to young men it is the worthiest ambition. Politics is still the greatest and the most honorable adventure.

The precise point at which a tax deduction becomes a 'loophole' or a tax incentive becomes a 'subsidy for special interests' is one of the great mysteries of politics.

Whether one believes or not religion is as real a force in the life of the world as economics or politics and it demands fair-minded attention. Even if you think the entire religious enterprise is at best misguided and at worst counterproductive it remains vital inspiring great good and sometimes great evil.

It would be great if politics were fact-based but it is not and it is surely not nuance-based. What works in a classroom or a think tank does not work on Capitol Hill or in the White House. Obama sometimes seems to be running the Brookings Institution not the country.

War is not the continuation of politics with different means it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man.

Politics I conceive to be nothing more than the science of the ordered progress of society along the lines of greatest usefulness and convenience to itself.

We have I fear confused power with greatness.

Justice sir is the great interest of man on earth. It is the ligament which holds civilized beings and civilized nations together.

A war for a great principle ennobles a nation.