Richard Brookhiser quotes:

Libertarians are believers in small government who really mean it -- no excuses, no exceptions. [For Libertarians], the excesses of government are their best recruiters.

[Washington had won] a war for independence and then gone home. [He embodied] the legend of the Roman who returned to his plow after saving his country.

Madison loathed Hamilton and loved Jefferson above all.

Lincoln was less well-read than many a professor or journalist, but what he read, he read deeply.

Lincoln loved other people's jokes as much as his own.

The Dutch practice euthanasia so briskly that they will kill themselves even before the Islamists get around to it.

Public opinion should not be confused with popular sentiment. Popular sentiment is what people say to one another around their dinner tables. Popular opinion is what they say to callers from polling organizations.

Lincoln admitted his infirmities to make way for his spring.

Depression can seem absurdly self aggrandizing to those who do not experience it, But that does not make it any less painful to those who do.

Jefferson could strike up the band even when he was being lazy or fearful.

Young, healthy communities can afford to roll the dice.

As with almost every long oration, there were loose ends.

Lincoln bore down or anything he handled, mastering both the details and the principles.

Aaron Burr was like a new refrigerator. He was bright, cold and empty.

Only the stupefying ignorance of young women prevents them from comprehending the stupefying emptiness of the men who cluster round them.

Depression manifests itself in a lack of will.

Madison lived in his head and public speaking did not come naturally to him.

One of the benefits of a bad education is the constant pleasure of discovery.

Routine is supposed to be the great deadener of souls; how much worse is the half-completed task, the broken round, the unfulfilled routine?

It was as simple as walking and as hard as walking on with so far gone and so far yet to go.

Good politicians know when to move on, sooner or later.

Most principles are limp until they are tested.

A storyteller, a displaced poet, will absorb reading differently.

To use the past, he had to save it from aspects of itself.

The towering genius is not apolitical.

Some lawns have all the cheer of old cemeteries.

The young women who attract so much attention never change: They are all stupid. They have at best only the crudest notions of their own power, and never calculate motives or consequences. Giving a young woman a young woman's body makes as much sense as giving ten teenagers Lamborghinis and telling them to drive in figure 8s around a parking lot.