"If a person is homosexual by nature - that is, if one's sexuality is as intrinsic a part of one's identity as gender or skin color - then society can no more deny a gay person access to the secular rights and religious sacraments because of his homosexuality than it can reinstate Jim Crow."

"From Jefferson to Jackson to Lincoln to FDR to Reagan, every great president inspires enormous affection and enormous hostility. We'll all be much saner, I think, if we remember that history is full of surprises and things that seemed absolutely certain one day are often unimaginable the next."

"It would be great if politics were fact-based, but it is not, and it is surely not nuance-based. What works in a classroom or a think tank does not work on Capitol Hill or in the White House. Obama sometimes seems to be running the Brookings Institution, not the country."

"Environmental concern is a little like dieting or paying off credit-card debt - an episodically terrific idea that burns brightly and then seems to fade when we realize there's a reason we need to diet or pay down our debt. The reason is that it's really, really hard, and too many of us in too many spheres of life choose the easy over the hard."

"My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government."

"Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners."

"In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way."

"The roots of genuine insight grow deep in the soil of quiet observation. For where clarity resides, peace inevitably follows — an essential principle for the reflective life."