Leadership is, among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it - short-term pain for long-term gain.

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It knows that almost all entitlements are forever, and those that are not - e.g., the lifetime eligibility for welfare, repealed in 1996 - are not for the middle class.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.

Politics is rough and tumble everywhere, and many women recoil from that negative aspect of it - the nastiness, the charges and counter-charges.

The worst day of my political life was when President George W. Bush signed McCain-Feingold into law in the early part of his first administration.

The labour of the farmers, no doubt is of greater value than the financial capacity of the government and non-government institutions which can only play a supportive role.

My hope is that the Chinese government will come to realise that it is futile to repress free speech, and that contrary to what they believe a regime's strength rests not its suppression of a plurality of opinions and ideas, but in its capacity and willingness to encourage them.