Promoting dependency is the Democratic Party's vocation. It knows that almost all entitlements are forever, and those that are not - e.g., the lifetime eligibility for welfare, repealed in 1996 - are not for the middle class.

If your job is to leaven ordinary lives with elevating spectacle, be elevating or be gone.

Big government inevitably drives an upward distribution of wealth to those whose wealth, confidence and sophistication enable them to manipulate government.

There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.

Politicians and leaders who see the media as 'the enemy within' divide society into two clashing cultural camps. Populist demagogues benefit from binary oppositions.

If you can inculcate in your team that every moment means everything, you can then step back to let them lead.

I don't like sweating the details, and I'm pretty disorganized. To be a better leader, I need to stay on top of these shortcomings, and being reminded really helps.

Your true nature doesn't come out. So the gods let you do what you want because free will would be compromised if they showed up at the White House saying, 'Take us to your leader.'