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If you join government, calmly make your contribution and move on. Don't go along to get along do your best and when you have to - and you will - leave, and be something else.

Peggy Noonan

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Peggy Noonan
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: August 7
Author
Journalist
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Best
Join
Something
Contribution
Make
Along
Move
Leave
Moving
Else
Government
Calmly

More quotes by Peggy Noonan

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It's better for the country when each party looks like it stands for something serious, for some big things, but they're not narrow and they're not bought.
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Some of the stupidest brilliant people who ever lived.
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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.
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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.
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Resentment isn't a magnetic personal style.
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Morals are concerned with what aids or impedes the fulfillment of basic human needs.
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Boundaries aren't all bad. That's why there are walls around mental institutions.
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Speeches are not magic and there is no great speech without great policy.
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.
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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.
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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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I was sailing from tedium to apathy with a side trip to torpor.
Peggy Noonan
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What is in the air there in Washington, what is in the water? What is wrong with them? This is not a rhetorical question. I think it is unspoken question No.1 as Americans look at so many of the individuals in our government. What is wrong with them?
Peggy Noonan
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Wit penetrates humor envelops. Wit is a function of verbal intelligence humor is imagination operating on good nature.
Peggy Noonan
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A great speech is literature.
Peggy Noonan
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Politicians, please, think of yourselves! Move to help Terri Schiavo, and no one will be mad at you, and you'll keep a human being alive.
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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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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At some point, don't voters start to see all of public life as one big polluted river? And if they do, don't they stop saying things like That's a busted tire floating by and That's an old shoe?
Peggy Noonan
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Cynicism is not realistic and tough. It's unrealistic and kind of cowardly because it means you don't have to try. ---in Good Housekeeping
Peggy Noonan