"Government has the role of suiting people for freedom. People aren't made for freedom spontaneously. There's sort of a 19-year race between when people are born and when they become adults. And government has a role in making them, at the end of 19 years, suited to be upright, trustworthy repositories of popular sovereignty."

"I suppose there's a melancholy tone at the back of the American mind, a sense of something lost. And it's the lost world of Thomas Jefferson. It is the lost sense of innocence that we could live with a very minimal state, with a vast sense of space in which to work out freedom."

"Voters don't decide issues, they decide who will decide issues."

"Leadership is, among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it - short-term pain for long-term gain."

"One of the pleasant duties of America's most famous announcers during the relatively short swing era of the big bands was to host late-night remotes from some of the most famous ballrooms throughout the country."

"When government disappears, it's not as if paradise will take its place. When governments are gone, other interests will take their place."

"Just as everybody has the vote including women, I think children should, because as a child is conscious of itself then it has to me an existence and has a stake in what happens."

"In war there is no prize for runner-up."