College was at the heart of his sentimental imagination.

Stories are "how we organize the chaos of experience into the order we require just a carry-on." Joan Gideon

Presidents are also always storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies.

Politics is motion." John Sears

What does sincerity mean if it is chosen as deliberate strategy?

Governing is not a hero's profession. It is a profession of compromises.

An anti-politician is hardly an anti-politician once he starts winning and works to close the deal by working to sew up the Establishment.

He talks to people's grievances, but he doesn't seem mad. – Elizabeth Drew

Chronicling the mid-1970s up session with Gerald Ford's clumsiness, the author quotes a medieval maxim that the king has two bodies. The head of state has a physical body like everyone else, but he also represents the body politic, either reflecting its majesty or its weakness.

Now even reformers needed political machines.

Almost alone among successful politicians, he took slights personally.

Richard Nixon was a serial collector of resentments.

A candidate with no experience they would package as a citizen politician, a lifetime hack as an elder statesman.

Violent crimes had increased from 120 per 100,000 in 1962 180 per 100,000 by 1964.

For the first time on Planet Earth (in 1964 America), a nation was made up of more college students than farmers. An unheard-of 42% of high school graduates sought higher education.

Teddy White lamented that TV might spell the death of serious politics: to give a thoughtful response to serious questions, politician needed a good thirty seconds to ponder, but television allowed only five seconds of silence at best. DDB (ad men) found nothing to lament and the fact. They were convinced you could learn everything you needed to KNOW about a product, which in this case happens to be a human being, in half a minute – the speed not of thought but of emotion.

Rebelling against the status quo was one of the definitions of conservatism.

I think the people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate." Martin Luther King, Jr. after the violent reception he received in Chicago in 1966.

(President) Lyndon Johnson still snapped between exultation and insecurity.

Goldwater had never even considered a non-Arizonan. Like a man on his deathbed, he wanted to be surrounded only by friends.

A confused and weak man hides his weakness and uncertainty with fiery speeches.

Richard Nixon's conversation was "loaded with so many stories of all the foreign dignitaries he'd called upon in his career that he sounded like a guy who had pinioned his neighbors into watching his vacation slides.

One of the ladies asked about that awful Bobby Kennedy, and Goldwater responded by speaking about the attorney general with touching affection. (Mary) McGrory recalled how Jack Kennedy behaved at a similar stage in his campaign: spouting statistics, attacking carefully chosen enemies and puffing all the right friends, quoting dead Greeks, never cracking a joke lest he remind the voters how young he was.

To claim the mantle of purity is always a risky business. It just gives an excuse to be disillusioned once your ordinary humidity is exposed.

Goldwater hardly ever mentioned a statistic. He hardly ever used it EXAMPLE. He presumed you already knew what he meant. Reagan SHOWED you.

In politics, if you're explaining, you're loosing.

Do what you are doing. Monastic motto

Increasingly we confused the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of pleasure.

Goldwater's approach to any political problem invariably derived from the evidence of his own eyes.

Ronald Reagan was just as angry. But he made you want to stand right alongside him and shake your fist at the same things he was shaking his fist at.

Chits knew no ideology.

Television was suppressing their freedom not to know.

Fifties advertising was a dogmatic art, to the point of pretending to be a science.

He fetishized limits.

The task of defending capitalism was still important to leave to the capitalists.

One does not hold a conversation with him. One holds a symposium. – Elizabeth Drew

The head of Goldwater's California operation "what was so uncomfortable around people that he worked up a routine to deal with employees with whom he was forced to share an elevator: "Taken your vacation yet?" he would ask when they entered; answer took just long enough to deliver him to his fourth-floor office.

Polls could be self-fulfilling prophecies, shaping reality as much as they described it.