It was like walking through a field playing a brass tuba the day it rained gold. Everything was sitting around waiting to be reported. |
Politics in America is the binding secular religion. |
The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting." |
The best time to listen to a politician is when he's on a stump on a street corner in the rain late at night when he's exhausted. Then he doesn't lie. |
The flood of money that gushes into politics today is a pollution of democracy. |
The gusto of one, the indignation of the other; the challenge of the one party, the response of the other; the eloquence and the comedy, the passion and the issues were ours-no other country can provide them. |
The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch somebody else do it wrong without comment. |
The world is beautiful if you are beautiful. |
There is no excitement anywhere in the world, short of war, to match the excitement of an American presidential campaign. |
Those 40 or 50 national correspondents who had followed Kennedy since the beginning of his electoral exertions into the November days had become more than a press corps-they had become his friends and, some of them, his most devoted admirers. |
To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform. |
To know everything there is to know about one subject is the secret of happiness. |
When a reporter sits down at the typewriter, he's nobody's friend. |
When that book came out, it was like Columbus telling about America at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella. |
When the bus or the plane rolled or flew through the night, they sang songs of their own composition about Mr Nixon and the Republicans in chorus with the Kennedy staff and felt that they, too, were marching like soldiers of the Lord to the New Frontier. |