A little known area often defines the fortunes of leaders -- management skills.

Civilizations rise and fall on confidence. America had figured out a way to borrow money to manufacture it.

If you happened to be born on third base, you didn't rub it in the face of the guy who wasn't even born in the stadium. Self-interest was generally checked at the door with your coat and hat.

A sense of messianic purpose makes the national interest almost indistinguishable from the political interests of the president.

The media has become more forceful, has begun to recognize its traditional historic role and act on it, and truth is infectious.

Choose your words meticulously and then let them rumble up from some deep furnace of conviction.

If you write something the White House doesn't like, they take you in and say, 'If you ever write something like you did today, nobody from the White House will ever talk to you again,'

Message matters. Message matters almost as much as actions.

I don't have to deal with the issues of the daily news cycle.

To try to be authentic these days, to ask questions of the people in power -- it's difficult. This administration has evolved new techniques to handle people like me. Their strategy, in a word, is simple: ignore them.

I've been a reporter for 20 years, and I don't ever get things wrong. That's important in terms of my professional status.

Push the needle into some middle range of guarded optimism.

For any thinking person, it (perpetual happiness) is untenable. If you're a thinking person, your upbeat sometimes, said sometimes.

This is not an issue of geography. He IS of two worlds wherever he goes.

Wars tend to be very public things, they are visible. There are correspondents traveling with the troops and you get daily dispatches.

Those two great genies of wishful fulfillment -- messianic fervor and technological power -- have spotted each other. If they come together, the world, as it is now known, will no longer exist.

The idea that our son would be like Raymond Babbitt was a shocking reordering of everything. And something we couldn't quite fathom, really.

If you write something that gets a bad response, or someone commits candor or is off message, there are often consequences almost immediately when it appears in the paper or a magazine, that somebody gets called into the boss's office. And sometimes it can result in a loss of access for the reporter.

Barack Obama says that he thinks America felt better, more confident, because Washington was not simply in a gridlock, in stasis, where nothing was being done. And he talks about that as a positive.

Security is by far the city's predominant business.