MARY MCGRORY

Haldeman is the only man in America in this generation who let his hair grow for a courtroom appearance.

Baseball is what we were, and football is what we have become.

[Describing Richard M. Nixon] ... a kamikaze pilot who keeps apologizing for the attack.

An election year is no time for nuances.

If he had been sent to check out Bluebeard's castle, he would have come back with a glowing report about the admirable condition of the cutlery.

It is an axiom that any criticism of high out-of-wedlock birth rates is an attack on blacks.

Never attack a politician through his children.

Nothing so marks Republicans as their genius for organizing, and their take-no-prisoners approach to problems that Democrats leave to chance.

While the country was daffy about the dummy, it never cared for the ventriloquist.

We [journalists] have a tendency to go on talking even when we have nothing to say.

If you want to reduce nuclear weapons, get rid of bad judges, eliminate stupid laws…, you have my number.

Human sacrifice is much in vogue right now. The Republican right thinks that people who get on its nerves, especially women, should be sent to the stake. . .

And the propensity of weak and empty people to follow a leader into the darkness from which there is no return is still flourishing, as ever.

You need the will to disarm the civilian population. If we can do it in Somalia, we can do it here.

[On Senator Everett Dirksen:] His great enemy was boredom and he won every engagement.

Anyone who has undergone home repair lately knows that your everyday artisan uses language so loosely and makes false promises so glibly as to make your politicians, even the presidential candidate, seem like a model of accuracy and rectitude. 'Be there Wednesday at nine,' the workman will tell you. It is a lie. He is humoring you. He says it to silence you, the way you tell a child you will take it to Disneyland if it will stop crying.

My friend Phil has a theory that the Lord, having made teenagers, felt constrained to make amends and so created the golden retriever.

Appliances have idiosyncracies, just like us. Unfortunately they have picked up our less attractive traits - they are proud, spiteful, and unforgiving.

Dogs, bless them, operate on the premise that human beings are fragile and require incessant applications of affection and reassurance. The random lick of a hand and the furry chin draped over the instep are calculated to let the shaky owner know that a friend is nearby.

[On George H.W. Bush:] A man who wishes to lead the Western world should be able to find the right words, string them together in coherent sentences, and steer them to an intelligible conclusion. His sentences have the stuttering start of an old car on a cold morning. They never run smoothly. The only speech part that he has mastered completely is the non sequitur.

We have a new class in this country: the deserving rich. ... The deserving rich do nice things for each other. Comforting the unafflicted is something that comes naturally to them.

Baseball has a special place in our hearts. It is the game that shows us as we would like to be.

[On men:] On their best days, the best of them are eight years old.

[On Italy:] ... the country where kindness to strangers is a religion, you can't turn your head without seeing something beautiful, and you can't get a bad meal if you try.

I am hoping for better times. That's how you know us hapless gardeners - by our dirty fingernails and our absurd, unquenchable optimism about next year.