What is more comforting to the terrorists around the world: the failure to pass the 9/11 legislation because we lacked 'a majority of the majority ' or putting aside partisan politics to enact tough new legislation with America's security foremost in mind?

In politics what begins in fear usually ends in failure.

Ideology politics and journalism which luxuriate in failure are impotent in the face of hope and joy.

The science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the streams of history like the grains of gold in the sand of a river and the knowledge of the past the record of truths revealed by experience is eminently practical as an instrument of action and a power that goes to making the future.

Love is blind. My politics has been too. I think you can fall in love with ideas and you can fall in love with people. It's a very subjective experience. And I'm loyal to that experience.

I have never found in a long experience of politics that criticism is ever inhibited by ignorance.

Politics is the only field in which the more experience you have the worse you get.

Fracking is doable if there's full disclosure of all chemicals used. Secondly science dictates the policy rather than politics. Third there's collaboration between environmental groups and the natural gas industry.

Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.

One of the things that's great about New York is that it is not a one-industry town. It has education academia the service industry arts publishing theater politics fashion finance as well as movie-making.