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We are riveted by the soap operas of public lives. We admire the famous most for what makes them infamous: it reassures us that they are not better and no happier than all the people with their noses pressed hard against the glass.

Maureen Dowd

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Maureen Dowd
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: January 14
Columnist
Journalist
Washington
District of Columbia
Maureen Brigid Dowd
Fame
Soap
Public
Happier
Lives
Opera
Makes
Noses
Riveted
Better
Glass
Reassures
Hard
Glasses
Operas
People
Famous
Infamous
Admire
Pressed

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The Mormons even baptized Anne Frank. It took Ernest Michel, then chairman of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, three years to get Mormons to agree to stop proxy-baptizing Holocaust victims.
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A friendship between reporter and source lasts only until it is profitable for one to betray the other.
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Washington is a place where people have always been suspect of style and overt sexuality. Too much preening signals that you're not up late studying cap-and-trade agreements.
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F.D.R. achieved greatness not by means of imposing his temperament and intellect on the world but by reacting to what the world threw at him.
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Digital platforms are worthless without content. They're shiny sacks with bells and whistles, but without content, they're empty sacks. It is not about pixels versus print. It is not about how you're reading. It is about what you're reading.
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I think Hillary Clinton's a very clever politician but she would be too easy to stereotype the way John Kerry was.
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The Clintons want to do big worthy things, but they also want to squeeze money from rich people wherever they live on planet Earth, insatiably gobbling up cash for politics and charity and themselves from the same incestuous swirl.
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I think even the Hollywood money people are saying they've got to get the party back from the Clinton wing. They can't, you know, keep nominating these Northeast liberals. They have to look for people who can win.
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The Republicans, with their crazed Reagan fixation, are a last-gasp party, living posthumously, fighting battles on sex, race, immigration and public education long ago won by the other side. They're trying to roll back the clock, but time is passing them by.
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It takes a lot of adrenaline and fear to make me actually write.
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It is men's worst fear, personally and professionally, that women will pin the sin on them.
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Perpetual optimism is annoying. It is a sign that you are not paying attention.
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The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.
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Celebrity distorts democracy by giving the rich, beautiful, and famous more authority than they deserve.
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Personally, I've decided to stop evolving.
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Good and evil are not like the Redskins and the Cowboys.
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If wit is the most sophisticated form of humor, pranks are the most juvenile.
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Reagan didn't socialize with the press. He spent his evenings with Nancy, watching TV with dinner trays. But he knew that to transcend, you can't condescend.
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IT is an astonishing thing that historians will look back and puzzle over, that in the 21st century, American women were such hunted creatures. Even as Republicans try to wrestle women into chastity belts, the Vatican is trying to muzzle American nuns.
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The insane have achieved political respectability while the sane act too good for it all. The irrational celebrate while the rational act bored and above-it-all.
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