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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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Peggy Noonan
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: August 7
Author
Journalist
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Writer
Answers
Came
Presidential
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Wrote
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More quotes by 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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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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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
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The Democratic Party will now stick with its guy forever, no matter how harmful he is. Perhaps you call that loyalty, and perhaps there's something to it, but a bigger part, I believe, is that you have come to think that winning is everything-that victory is the purpose of politics.
Peggy Noonan
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What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them. What President Bush is doing, and has been doing for some time, is sundering a great political coalition.
Peggy Noonan
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Don't fall in love with politicians, they're all a disappointment. They can't help it, they just are.
Peggy Noonan
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When you forget yourself and your fear, when you get beyond self-consciousness because your mind is thinking about what you are trying to communicate, you become a better communicator
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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Morals are concerned with what aids or impedes the fulfillment of basic human needs.
Peggy Noonan
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when men in politics are together, testosterone poisoning makes them insane.
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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I do not know what the Democratic Party spent, in toto, on the 2004 election, but what they seem to have gotten for it is Barack Obama. Let us savor.
Peggy Noonan
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Abortion is either OK or it's not.
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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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
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A great speech is literature.
Peggy Noonan
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Resentment isn't a magnetic personal style.
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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Part of courage is simple consistency.
Peggy Noonan
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Some of the stupidest brilliant people who ever lived.
Peggy Noonan