After that [father’s death] I never cried with any real conviction, nor expected much of anyone’s God except indifference, nor loved deeply without fear that it would cost me dearly in pain. At the age...

Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity, there is no parent left to tell them.

Letter writing was clearly important to Reagan. Even as president he kept dashing off letters to friends, pen pals, media people, statesmen, critics, and the kind of people who write to presidents never expecting a...

It’s always seemed odd to me that after a group of terrorists commits a vile and odious deed they rush messages to the public to claim credit for it.

Roosevelt’s declaration that Americans had ‘nothing to fear but fear itself’ was a glorious piece of inspirational rhetoric and just as gloriously wrong.

The American press has the blues. Too many authorities have assured it that its days are numbered, too many good newspapers are in ruins.

One of the many burdens of the person professing Christianity has always been the odium likely to be heaped upon him by fellow Christians quick to smell out, denounce and punish fraud, hypocrisy and general...

Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.

My natural instinct after doing something shameful is not to rush into the street boasting about it but to put on dark glasses and head for the next county, hoping nobody notices I’ve been in...

Objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don’t work, those that break down and those that get lost.

Situation comedy on television has thrived for years on ‘canned’ laughter, grafted by gaglines by technicians using records of guffawing audiences that have been dead for years.

Few expected very much of Franklin Roosevelt on Inauguration Day in 1933. Like Barack Obama seventy-six years later, he was succeeding a failed Republican president, and Americans had voted for change. What that change might...

Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.

In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.

Reporters thrive on the world’s misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.

Feel good about linking hands in human chain for good causes.

When sudden death takes a president, opportunities for new beginnings flourish among the ambitious and the tensions among such people can be dramatic, as they were when President Kennedy was killed.

It’s good for the soul to hear yourself as others hear you, and next time maybe, just maybe, you will not talk so much, so loudly, so brilliantly, so charmingly, so utterly shamelessly foolishly.