MEG GREENFIELD

Ninety percent of politics is deciding whom to blame.

Everybody's for democracy in principle. It's only in practice that the thing gives rise to stiff objections.

Everyone seems to be running against a liar, but nobody seems to be one. Odd - I mean, the math doesn't work out.

In politics, demonstration not description is the name of the game.

The forces of retribution are always listening. They never sleep.

Ideas never quite exist for him until they have been pitted against something else.

If you were starting from scratch to invent an instrument that could impose fiscal discipline, the last one on earth you would come up with is the United States government.

If a politician murders his mother, the first response of the press or of his opponents will likely be not that it was a terrible thing to do, but rather that in a statement made six years before he had gone on record as being opposed to matricide.

In government and out, there are vast realms of the bureaucracy dedicated to seeking more information, in perpetuity if need be, in order to avoid taking action.

In Washington it is an honor to be disgraced.... You have to have been somebody to fall.

There is such a thing as tempting the gods. Talking too much, too soon and with too much self-satisfaction has always seemed to me a sure way to court disaster. The forces of retribution are always listening. They never sleep.

Ninety percent of politics is deciding whom to blame.

Everybody's for democracy in principle. It's only in practice that the thing gives rise to stiff objections.

If a politician murders his mother, the first response of the press or of his opponents will likely be not that it was a terrible thing to do, but rather that in a statement made six years before he had gone on record as being opposed to matricide.

In politics, demonstration not description is the name of the game.

Ideas never quite exist for him until they have been pitted against something else.

Refusal to answer a question by setting up a straw man to attack is a not an uncommon device of debating.

In Washington it is an honor to be disgraced.... You have to have been somebody to fall.

Since when do grown men and women, who presume to hold high government office and exercise what they think of as "moral leadership," require ethics officers to tell them whether it is or isn't permissible to grab the secretary's behind or redirect public funds to their own personal advantage?

If you were starting from scratch to invent an instrument that could impose fiscal discipline, the last one on earth you would come up with is the United States government.

The forces of retribution are always listening. They never sleep.

Washington, under Democrats and Republicans, has a profoundly neurotic attitude toward 'the people.' It is built on equal parts of suspicion, loathing, fear, respect and dependence.

Everyone seems to be running against a liar, but nobody seems to be one. Odd - I mean, the math doesn't work out.

Thin skin is the only kind of skin human beings come with.

In government and out, there are vast realms of the bureaucracy dedicated to seeking more information, in perpetuity if need be, in order to avoid taking action.

Among all the complaints you hear these days about the crimes of the media, it seems to me the critics miss the big one. It is that especially TV, but also we of the print press, tend to reduce mess and complexity and ambiguity to a simple story line that doesn't reflect reality so much as it distorts it. ... What bothers me about the journalistic tendency to reduce unmanageable reality to self-contained, movielike little dramas is not just that we falsify when we do this. It is also that we really miss the good story.