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Speeches are not magic and there is no great speech without great policy.

Peggy Noonan

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Peggy Noonan
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: August 7
Author
Journalist
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Policy
Without
Great
Speeches
Speech
Magic

More quotes by Peggy Noonan

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The thing political figures fear most is a terror event that will ruin their careers. The biggest thing they fear is that a bomb goes off and it can be traced to something they did or didn’t do, an action they did or didn’t support. They all fear being accused of not doing enough to keep the citizenry safe.
Peggy Noonan
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We must try again to be alive to what the people of our country really long for in our national life: forgiveness and grace, maturity and wisdom. ...Our political leaders will know our priorities only if we tell them, again and again, and if those priorities begin to show up in the polls.
Peggy Noonan
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Abortion is either OK or it's not.
Peggy Noonan
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Here is an old tradition badly in need of return: You have to earn your way into politics. You should go have a life, build a string of accomplishments, then enter public service.
Peggy Noonan
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when men in politics are together, testosterone poisoning makes them insane.
Peggy Noonan
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The Democrats often seem like the Not Republican Party, no more and no less.
Peggy Noonan
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Resentment isn't a magnetic personal style.
Peggy Noonan
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Now he is a statesman, when what he really wants is to be what most reporters are, adult delinquents.
Peggy Noonan
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The biggest improvement in the flow of information in America in our lifetimes is that no single group controls the news anymore.
Peggy Noonan
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Boundaries aren't all bad. That's why there are walls around mental institutions.
Peggy Noonan
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The tea party saved the Republican Party. In a broad sense, the tea party rescued it from being the fat, unhappy, querulous creature it had become, a party that didn't remember anymore why it existed, or what its historical purpose was. The tea party, with its energy and earnestness, restored the GOP to itself.
Peggy Noonan
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We are all afraid. That's the thing that unites all truly successful people: fear, fear of failing, fear of criticism, fear of letting down the team in some way. That why they try so hard, that's why they pay attention to detail and try to get every possible duck in a row. It's fear
Peggy Noonan
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[On President Clinton's address:] It was the worst inaugural address of our lifetime, and I think the only controversy will be between those who say it was completely and utterly banal and those who say, 'Well, not completely and utterly.
Peggy Noonan
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Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their natures there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen.
Peggy Noonan
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Part of courage is simple consistency.
Peggy Noonan
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The Irish are often nervous about having the appropriate face for the occasion. They have to be happy at weddings, which is a strain, so they get depressed they have to be sad at funerals, which is easy, so they get happy.
Peggy Noonan
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Ted Sorrenson, JFK's presidential speech writer, when asked how it came about that he wrote the ask not what you can do... speech, he would answer 'ask not.'
Peggy Noonan
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I was sailing from tedium to apathy with a side trip to torpor.
Peggy Noonan
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I love eulogies. They are the most moving kind of speech because they attempt to pluck meaning from the fog, and on short order, when the emotions are still ragged and raw and susceptible to leaps.
Peggy Noonan
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In ancient Israel and Rome the judge had appeared as a stand-in for the divine, and corruption was a blinding of the representative of the divine.
Peggy Noonan