Great Throughts Treasury

"Whether a man is burdened by power or enjoys power; whether he is trapped by responsibility or made free by it; whether he is moved by other people and outer forces or moves them - this is of the essence of leadership."

"A genuine primary is a fight within the family of the party - and, like any family fight, is apt to be more bitter and leave more enduring wounds than battle with the November enemy."

"All endeavors which are directed to a purely worldly end, contain within themselves the seeds of their own corruption."

"A liberal is a person who believes that water can be made to run uphill. A conservative is someone who believes everybody should pay for his water. I'm somewhere in between: I believe water should be free, but that water flows downhill."

"All men who run for presidency of the United States are amateurs; there is no way of becoming a professional at it, and all of them, win or lose, are forever altered in spirit of character by the ordeal."

"Every American election summons the individual voter to weigh the past against the future."

"Generally students are the best vehicles for passing on ideas, for their thoughts are plastic and can be molded and they can adjust the ideas of old men to the shape of reality as they find it in villages and hills of China or in ghettos and suburbs of America."

"Don't ever let anybody teach you to think; it is the curse of the world."

"I class myself as a manual laborer."

"I happen to think that American politics is one of the noblest arts of mankind; and I cannot do anything else but write about it."

"I saw Chungking for the first time more than 40 years ago - a city of hills and mists, of grays and lavenders, two rivers shaping it to a point and the cliff rising above me like a challenge."

"His passion has aroused the best and the beast in man. And the beast waited for him in the kitchen."

"He who is created by television can be destroyed by television."

"He is like a good prewar house-solidly built. They don't build them that way anymore. He's also been repainted several times."

"If you make a living, if you earn your own money, you're free - however free one can be on this planet."

"In politics, the things that do not happen are frequently as significant as those that do."

"In the politics of consent, no victory is ever permanent unless the victor makes it firm on a base of persuasion."

"It was like walking through a field playing a brass tuba the day it rained gold. Everything was sitting around waiting to be reported."

"Liberalism: for every complicated problem there exists both an intellectual and a moral solution and they coincide."

"Politics in America is the binding secular religion."

"Politics is a process which should slowly bring to public all the private worries and hopes of the individual."

"Professionals in a campaign are servants; they can tell him only how to do something once he tells them what it is he wants to do."

"I'd get into a room and disappear into the woodwork. Now the rooms are so crowded with reporters getting behind-the-scenes stories that nobody can get behind-the-scenes stories."

"I, alas, must present myself somewhat ignominiously as a chef in a busy kitchen. Somewhere a novel is bubbling on a back burner, an old attempt at history may come out of the freezer."

"Quality - in its classic Greek sense - how to live with grace and intelligence, with bravery and mercy."

"The Americans of the age were not an irreligious people; and the fact that they were Christian was very important, for the marks of Christianity lay all across the Constitution."

"The best politics for any president is to be a good president."

"The best time to listen to a politician is when he's on a stump on a street corner in the rain late at night when he's exhausted. Then he doesn't lie."

"The development of an image is a mysterious thing: once a public figure has been cast in a public role, it is almost impossible for him to change the character. It is as if someone has assembled personality traits into a convenient pattern, no writer ever re-examines it: it is easier to use the accepted pattern."

"The first and most essential quality of a presidential candidate, as Averell Harriman once pointed out, is that he should lust for the job - he should want it more than all things, with a passion surpassing all emotion and probably even all principle."

"The flood of money that gushes into politics today is a pollution of democracy."

"The gusto of one, the indignation of the other; the challenge of the one party, the response of the other; the eloquence and the comedy, the passion and the issues were ours-no other country can provide them."

"The job of intellectuals is to come up with ideas, and all we've been producing is footnotes."

"The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch somebody else do it wrong without comment."

"The President's decisions make the weather, and if he is great enough, change the climate, too."

"The 'smoke-filled room' as political reality is now as dead as Prohibition."

"The world is beautiful if you are beautiful."

"There is no excitement anywhere in the world, short of war, to match the excitement of an American presidential campaign."

"Those 40 or 50 national correspondents who had followed Kennedy since the beginning of his electoral exertions into the November days had become more than a press corps-they had become his friends and, some of them, his most devoted admirers."

"To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform."

"To know everything there is to know about one subject is the secret of happiness."

"When a reporter sits down at the typewriter, he's nobody's friend."

"When that book came out, it was like Columbus telling about America at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella."

"When the bus or the plane rolled or flew through the night, they sang songs of their own composition about Mr. Nixon and the Republicans in chorus with the Kennedy staff and felt that they, too, were marching like soldiers of the Lord to the New Frontier."

"With electricity we were wired into a new world, for electricity brought the radio, a crystal set and with enough ingenuity, one could tickle the crystal with a cat's whisker and pick up anything."

"With the end of the nominating process, American politics leaves logic behind."

"You can't get unless you give. And you have to give without wanting to get."

"Whether a man is burdened by power or enjoys power; whether he is trapped by responsibility or made free by it; whether he is moved by other people and outer forces or moves them this is of the essence of leadership."