Ronald Reagan was so self-contained and impenetrable that his official biographer was practically driven mad trying to figure him out.

I began my journalistic career on the day Ronald Reagan was sworn in. That's the day I showed up for work at 'The New Republic' magazine.

I'm a former Red Sox fan, now fully rehabilitated.

Trump's behavior is deeply disturbing but hardly surprising. His mercurial nature is not the product of a post-inaugural adder sting at Mar-a-Lago. It's been there all along. And the American electorate chose him nonetheless.

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

The joy of losing consists in this: Where there are no expectations, there is no disappointment.

Longevity, for a columnist, is a simple proposition: Once you start, you don't stop. You do it until you die or can no longer put a sentence together. It has always been my intention to die at my desk, although my most cherished ambition is to outlive the estate tax.

Ted Cruz is a patriot. He believes in what he does. He's done marvels in mobilizing conservatives, mobilizing Americans concerned about the direction of the ever-expanding entitlement state under Obama, and particularly the threat it is to freedom. I disagree with his tactics, but I agree entirely with his objectives.

I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix.

As most who have engaged in competitive sports know, there's nothing to match the amplitude of emotion brought by losing.

Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent's life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy.

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.

I am grateful to have played a small role in the conversations that have helped guide this extraordinary nation's destiny.

If you get a call to go to a certain place in the middle of the night to pick up stolen goods, and it turns out the stolen goods don't show up but the cops show up, I think you're going to have a very weak story saying, 'Well, I got swindled here.'

So far as I'm concerned, Ronald Reagan was the best president. Nixon was the worst. Some of his policies were okay, but he disgraced the office.

The international community lies at the center of the Obama foreign policy. Unfortunately, it is a fiction. There is no such thing. Different countries have different histories, geographies, necessities, and interests. There's no natural, inherent, or enduring international community.

Under our constitutional system, the executive executes the laws that Congress has passed. It should not be executing laws that Congress has rejected.

Obama is a man of first-class intellect and first-class temperament. But his character remains highly suspect.

In the liberal remake of 'Casablanca,' the police captain comes upon the scene of the shooting and orders his men to 'round up the usual weapons.' It's always the weapon and never the shooter.

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.

Never leave a crossword unfinished.

If you believe that health care is a public good to be guaranteed by the state, then a single-payer system is the next best alternative. Unfortunately, it is fiscally unsustainable without rationing.

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

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

Fight for what you know to be right. Don't give up.

Every new president flatters himself that he, kinder and gentler, is beginning the world anew. Yet, when Barack Obama in his inaugural address reached out to Muslims by saying, 'To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect,' his formulation was needlessly defensive and apologetic.

I happen to believe that the preemption school is correct, that the risks of allowing Saddam Hussein to acquire his weapons will only grow with time.

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

Fairness through leveling is the essence of Obamaism.

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.

Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible.

The one thing that's always been the center of my political thinking - and it goes back to when I was 19 and editor of my college paper - is an abhorrence of the extreme.

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

Ted Cruz is not the official spokesman for American conservatism. If you want somebody who has been out there, who has offered an alternative - the person who offered an alternative, for example, is... Paul Ryan.

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

The Obama foreign policy, in broad strokes, has been a disaster.

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 liberal vision of America is that it should be less arrogant, less unilateral, more internationalist. In Obama's view, America would subsume itself under a fuzzy internationalism in which the international community, which I think is a fiction, governs itself through the U.N.

The U.N. is worse than disaster. The U.N. creates conflicts. Look at the disgraceful U.N. Human Rights Council: It transmits norms which are harmful, anti-liberty and anti-Semitic, among other things. The world would be better off in its absence.

In the course of his presidency, Obama has gone from an almost magical charismatic figure to an ordinary politician. Ordinary. Average.

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.

Now this is a way to approach our healthcare problems: increase the number of tax collectors and decrease the number of doctors - brilliant!

Clashes of values and the struggle for primacy constitute a constant in human history that accounts for that other constant - conflict and war.

I don't know about you, but I lie awake nights worrying about Canadian uranium. I know these people. I grew up there. You have no idea what they're capable of doing. If Sidney Crosby hadn't scored that goal to win the Olympic gold medal, there's no telling what might have ensued.

Nuclear doctrine consists of thinking the unthinkable. It involves making threats and promising retaliation that is cruel and destructive beyond imagining. But it has its purpose: to prevent war in the first place.

To his credit, Obama didn't just come to Washington to be someone. Like Reagan, he came to Washington to do something - to introduce a powerful social democratic stream into America's deeply and historically individualist polity.

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.

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

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

The way that Trump spoke about the outside world was the most aggressive, most hyper-nationalist, and in some ways most hostile of any inaugural address I think since the Second World War.