Peggy Noonan quotes
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“Don't fall in love with politicians, they're all a disappointment. They can't help it, they just are.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“The biggest improvement in the flow of information in America in our lifetimes is that no single group controls the news anymore.”
-- Peggy NoonanSource : "MSM Requiem" by Peggy Noonan, www.wsj.com. January 13, 2005.
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“In a president, character is everything. A president doesn't have to be brilliant... He doesn't have to be clever; you can hire clever... You can hire pragmatic, and you can buy and bring in policy wonks. But you cant buy courage and decency, you cant rent a strong moral sense. A president must bring those things with him. He needs to have, in that much maligned word, but a good one nonetheless, a vision of the future he wishes to create.. But a vision is worth little if a president doesn't have the character - the courage and heart - to see it through.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“I think miracles exist in part as gifts and in part as clues that there is something beyond the flat world we see.”
-- Peggy NoonanSource : Peggy Noonan (1990). “What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era”, Random House (NY)
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“Part of courage is simple consistency.”
-- Peggy NoonanSource : "SC chair: Conservatism thrives" by Katon Dawson, www.politico.com. November 28, 2008.
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“By trying to do too much, you risk not doing enough.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“TV gives everyone an image, but radio gives birth to a million images in a million brains.”
-- Peggy NoonanSource : Peggy Noonan (1990). “What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era”, Random House (NY)
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“A speech is poetry: cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweep! A speech reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart.”
-- Peggy NoonanSource : Peggy Noonan, Steven Emerson, Brian Duffy, Thomas J. Watson, Peter Petre (1990). “Today's Best Nonfiction”
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“Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their natures; there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“Candor is a compliment; it implies equality. It's how true friends talk.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“The thing political figures fear most is a terror event that will ruin their careers. The biggest thing they fear is that a bomb goes off and it can be traced to something they did or didn't do, an action they did or didn't support. They all fear being accused of not doing enough to keep the citizenry safe.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
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“What I got was not so much gifts and whishes come trues but a feeling of peace. I got peace itself, actually. And when you have peace, you can be strong; and when you are strong, you can get through what you have to get through, and not with exhaustion and frown marks and slumped shoulders but with relative happiness, and humor, and sometimes even gaiety.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“But one immediate thing can be done right now, and that is: lower the temperature. Any way you can, and everybody. Just lower it.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“We don't need to 'control' free speech, we need to control ourselves.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“In the 1950s and '60s the [democrat] party included many obviously earnest and thoughtful liberals who supported goals that were in line with and expressions of serious beliefs. They believed that America was an exceptional country.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
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“You don't have to be old in America to say of a world you lived in: 'that world is gone.'”
-- Peggy NoonanSource : Peggy Noonan (1990). “What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era”, Random House (NY)
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“The Democrats often seem like the Not Republican Party, no more and no less.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“[democrats] have become the party of snobs. You have become the party of Americans who think they're better than other Americans.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“The Democratic Party's complete obeisance to [the abortion] lobby makes Democrats look bought, frightened and craven.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
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“I was sailing from tedium to apathy with a side trip to torpor.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“one way to keep people close to you is by not giving them enough. ... with people who give a lot of themselves, you sometimes lean back - but with people who give little you often lean forward, as if they're a spigot in the desert and you're the empty cup. It is the tropism of deprivation: We lean toward those who do not give.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“Humor is the shock absorber of life; it helps us take the blows.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“when men in politics are together, testosterone poisoning makes them insane.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
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“[On President Clinton's address:] It was the worst inaugural address of our lifetime, and I think the only controversy will be between those who say it was completely and utterly banal and those who say, 'Well, not completely and utterly.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“The tea party saved the Republican Party. In a broad sense, the tea party rescued it from being the fat, unhappy, querulous creature it had become, a party that didn't remember anymore why it existed, or what its historical purpose was. The tea party, with its energy and earnestness, restored the GOP to itself.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“The biggest political change in my lifetime is that Americans no longer assume that their children will have it better than they did. This is a huge break with the past, with assumptions and traditions that shaped us.”
-- Peggy NoonanSource : Peggy Noonan (2015). “The Time of Our Lives: Collected Writings”, p.113, Hachette UK
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“When you forget yourself and your fear, when you get beyond self-consciousness because your mind is thinking about what you are trying to communicate, you become a better communicator”
-- Peggy Noonan -
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“Most people aren't appreciated enough, and the bravest things we do in our lives are usually known only to ourselves. No one throws ticker tape on the man who chose to be faithful to his wife, on the lawyer who didn't take the drug money...”
-- Peggy NoonanSource : Peggy Noonan (1990). “What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era”, Random House (NY)
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“Our patriotic fervor was the result of the old and widespread belief in the idea of American exceptionalism, the idea that America was a new thing in history, different from other countries. Other nations had evolved one way or another, evolved from tribes from a gathering of clans, from inevitabilities of language and tradition and geography. But America was born, and born of ideas: that all men are created equal, that they have been given by God certain rights that can be taken from them by no man, and that those rights combine to create a thing called freedom.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“Naps are nature's way of reminding you that life is nice, like a beautiful swinging hammock strung between birth and infinity.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“We must try again to be alive to what the people of our country really long for in our national life: forgiveness and grace, maturity and wisdom. ...Our political leaders will know our priorities only if we tell them, again and again, and if those priorities begin to show up in the polls.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
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“I should say here, because some in Washington like to dream up ways to control the Internet, that we don't need to 'control' free speech, we need to control ourselves.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“What we need most right now, at this moment, is a kind of patriotic grace - a grace that takes the long view, apprehends the moment we're in, comes up with ways of dealing with it, and eschews the politically cheap and manipulative. That admits affection and respect. That encourages them. That acknowledges that the small things that divide us are not worthy of the moment; that agrees that the things that can be done to ease the stresses we feel as a nation should be encouraged, while those that encourage our cohesion as a nation should be supported.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“Speeches are not magic and there is no great speech without great policy.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“Boundaries aren't all bad. That's why there are walls around mental institutions.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
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“Cynicism is not realistic and tough. It's unrealistic and kind of cowardly because it means you don't have to try. ---in Good Housekeeping”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“The battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I: never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain.”
-- Peggy NoonanSource : What I Saw at the Revolution ch. 14 (1990)
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“Sincerity and competence is a strong combination. In politics, it is everything.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“Remember the waterfront shack with the sign FRESH FISH SOLD HERE. Of course it's fresh, we're on the ocean. Of course it's for sale, we're not giving it away. Of course it's here, otherwise the sign would be someplace else. The final sign: FISH.”
-- Peggy NoonanSource : Peggy Noonan (1990). “What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era”, Random House (NY)
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“I love eulogies. They are the most moving kind of speech because they attempt to pluck meaning from the fog, and on short order, when the emotions are still ragged and raw and susceptible to leaps.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“If you join government, calmly make your contribution and move on. Don't go along to get along; do your best and when you have to - and you will - leave, and be something else.”
-- Peggy NoonanSource : Peggy Noonan, Steven Emerson, Brian Duffy, Thomas J. Watson, Peter Petre (1990). “Today's Best Nonfiction”
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“My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage.”
-- Peggy NoonanSource : Peggy Noonan (1995). “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, Adams Media Corp
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“We are all afraid. That's the thing that unites all truly successful people: fear, fear of failing, fear of criticism, fear of letting down the team in some way. That why they try so hard, that's why they pay attention to detail and try to get every possible duck in a row. It's fear”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“Resentment isn't a magnetic personal style.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“This is the Democratic paradox: You want so much to run America and yet you seem not so fond of Americans.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
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“George W. Bush, 43rd president of the United States, became the first incumbent president to increase his majority in both the Senate and the House and to increase his own vote (by over 3.5 million) since Franklin D. Roosevelt, political genius of the 20th century, in 1936.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“I do not know what the Democratic Party spent, in toto, on the 2004 election, but what they seem to have gotten for it is Barack Obama. Let us savor.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“The Irish are often nervous about having the appropriate face for the occasion. They have to be happy at weddings, which is a strain, so they get depressed; they have to be sad at funerals, which is easy, so they get happy.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
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“At some point, don't voters start to see all of public life as one big polluted river? And if they do, don't they stop saying things like "That's a busted tire floating by" and "That's an old shoe"?”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“The first snow always startles. It covers the tricycle in the driveway, turning its frame into an abstact sculpture that says: See how quickly yesterday turns into today.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“Wit penetrates; humor envelops. Wit is a function of verbal intelligence; humor is imagination operating on good nature.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“If you commit a big crime then you are crazy, and the more heinous the crime the crazier you must be. Therefore you are not responsible, and nothing is your fault.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
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“The Democrats had long labeled the impeachment debate a distraction from the urgent business of a great nation. But the Republicans argued that the pursuit of justice is the business of a great nation. In winning this point, they caught the falling flag, producing a triumph for the rule of law, a reassertion of the belief that no man is above it, and a rebuke for an arrogance that had grown imperial,”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“The 2008 election settled nothing, not even for a while. Our national politics are reflecting what appears to be going on geologically, on the bottom of the oceans and beneath the crust of the Earth: the tectonic plates are moving.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“Speeches are more important in politics than talking points, as a rule, and are better remembered.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“When everyone in America knows you're in a dreadful position, admit you're in a dreadful position. Don't lie about it and make them roll their eyes, tell the truth and make them blink.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
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“You can get so well educated in America that your thoughts become detached from common sense. You can get so complicated in your thinking that the obvious isn't real to you anymore.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“Some of the stupidest brilliant people who ever lived.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“The Democratic Party is that amazing thing, out of power for six years and yet exhausted. They're pale, tired, and unready. Too bad, since it's their job to be an alternative, not an embarrassment.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“Now he is a statesman, when what he really wants is to be what most reporters are, adult delinquents.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
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“Here is an old tradition badly in need of return: You have to earn your way into politics. You should go have a life, build a string of accomplishments, then enter public service....”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“Great speeches have always had great soundbites. The problem now is that the young technicians who put together speeches are paying attention only to the soundbite, not to the text as a whole, not realizing that all great soundbites happen by accident, which is to say, all great soundbites are yielded up inevitably, as part of the natural expression of the text. They are part of the tapestry, they aren't a little flower somebody sewed on.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“I guess the second-term team is not quite as adoring as the first.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
“The Democratic Party will now stick with its guy forever, no matter how harmful he is. Perhaps you call that loyalty, and perhaps there's something to it, but a bigger part, I believe, is that you have come to think that winning is everything-that victory is the purpose of politics.”
-- Peggy Noonan -
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“Do not be afriad! I can see that Americans are not afraid. They are not afraid of the sun, they are not afraid of the wind, they are not afraid of 'today'. They are, generally speaking, brave, good people. And so I say to you today, always be brave. Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid. God is with you. Do not be afraid to search for God-then you will truly be the land of the free, the home of the brave. God Bless America.”
-- Peggy Noonan
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