Peggy Noonan Quotes

I should say here, because some in Washington like to dream up ways to control the Internet, that we don't need to 'control' free speech, we need to control ourselves.

— Peggy Noonan

“What we need most right now, at this moment, is a kind of patriotic grace - a grace that takes the long view, apprehends the moment we're in, comes up with ways of dealing with it, and eschews the politically cheap and manipulative. That admits affection and respect. That encourages them. That acknowledges that the small things that divide us are not worthy of the moment; that agrees that the things that can be done to ease the stresses we feel as a nation should be encouraged, while those that encourage our cohesion as a nation should be supported.”

— Peggy Noonan

“But one immediate thing can be done right now, and that is: lower the temperature. Any way you can, and everybody. Just lower it.”

— Peggy Noonan

“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

“Hubert Humphrey's wife is said to have advised him: Darling, for a speech to be immortal it need not be interminable.”

— Peggy Noonan

“As we have become more open minded (tolerant) in society we have become more closed hearted.”

— Peggy Noonan

“I now know that God has a plan for each of us. The thing is to find out what it is. How? Through prayer, through keeping your mind open, and trough the circumstances of daily life and the people you meet.”

— Peggy Noonan

What I got was not so much gifts and whishes come trues but a feeling of peace. I got peace itself, actually. And when you have peace, you can be strong; and when you are strong, you can get through what you have to get through, and not with exhaustion and frown marks and slumped shoulders but with relative happiness, and humor, and sometimes even gaiety.

— Peggy Noonan

The Pope replied, "of what should we not be afraid? We should not fear the truth about ourselves." He spoke of how Saint Peter himself, the rock on which Christ had built his church, had told Christ to leave him, "for I am a sinful man." Peter was a sinful man. We all are, including popes. We are imperfect and "our hearts are anxious." But we cannot and should not let the fact of our unworthiness and flaws and failures build that wall with a kind of inverted pride that says, Oh, I'm so unworthy, and I'd know how unworthy I am better than you would.

— Peggy Noonan

“Everyone over 50 in America feels like a refugee. In the Old America there were a lot of bad parents. There always are, because parenting is hard. Inadequate parents could say, 'Go outside and play in the culture,' and the culture
relatively innocent, and boring
could be more or less trusted to bring the kids up. Grown ups now know that you can't send the kids out to play in the culture, because the culture will leave them distorted and disturbed.”

— Peggy Noonan

I always got the feeling with John Paul that if he could have narrowed down the people he met and blessed those he loved the most, they would not be cardinals, princes, or congressman, but nuns from obscure convents and Down syndrome children, especially the latter. Because they have suffered, and because in some serious and amazing way the love of God seems more immediately available to them. Everyone else gets themselves tied up in ambition and ideas and bustle, all the great distractions, but the modest and unwell are so often unusually open to this message: God loves us, his love is all around us, he made us to love him and be happy

— Peggy Noonan

“My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage”

— Peggy Noonan

“Our work is a vocation to which we have been called from the beginning of time. When we work we are partaking in and joining with God's ongoing creation of the world.”

— Peggy Noonan

“Things change. Time changes them. Great nations, and institutions, rethink. But only if they're great.”

— Peggy Noonan

“Word of the day- kakistocracy. From the Greek meaning government by the worst persons, least qualified or most unprincipled.”

— Peggy Noonan

Let's cause some senators distress.

— Peggy Noonan

“Sincerity and competence is a strong combination. In politics, it is everything.”

— Peggy Noonan

“I think miracles exist in part as gifts and in part as clues that there is something beyond the flat world we see.”

— Peggy Noonan

“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

“A great speech is literature.”

— Peggy Noonan

“Don't fall in love with politicians, they're all a disappointment. They can't help it, they just are.”

— Peggy Noonan

“I ought to pray as much as God's on my mind, because then I'd pray a lot. All I can tell you is God is real, and so that infuses everything.”

— Peggy Noonan

“If you commit a big crime then you are crazy, and the more heinous the crime the crazier you must be. Therefore you are not responsible, and nothing is your fault.”

— Peggy Noonan

“TV gives everyone an image, but radio gives birth to a million images in a million brains.”

— Peggy Noonan

The president - every president - works for us. We don't work for him. We sometimes lose track of this, or rather get the balance wrong. Respect is due and must be palpable, but now and then you have to press, to either force them to be forthcoming or force them to reveal that they won't be.

— Peggy Noonan

“What Andrew Cuomo said is, truly, a scandal. It's a scandal if he actually thinks it - that those who hold conservative views on abortion, gun rights and marriage are extreme, anathema and have no place in the state.”

— Peggy Noonan

In a president, character is everything. A president doesn't have to be brilliant ... He doesn't have to be clever; you can hire clever ... You can hire pragmatic, and you can buy and bring in policy wonks. But you cant buy courage and decency, you cant rent a strong moral sense. A president must bring those things with him. He needs to have, in that much maligned word, but a good one nonetheless, a vision of the future he wishes to create.. But a vision is worth little if a president doesn't have the character - the courage and heart - to see it through.

— Peggy Noonan

“You can get so well educated in America that your thoughts become detached from common sense. You can get so complicated in your thinking that the obvious isn't real to you anymore.”

— Peggy Noonan

“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

“Remember the waterfront shack with the sign FRESH FISH SOLD HERE. Of course it's fresh, we're on the ocean. Of course it's for sale, we're not giving it away. Of course it's here, otherwise the sign would be someplace else. The final sign: FISH.”

— Peggy Noonan

“By trying to do too much, you risk not doing enough.”

— Peggy Noonan

“The first snow always startles. It covers the tricycle in the driveway, turning its frame into an abstact sculpture that says: See how quickly yesterday turns into today.”

— Peggy Noonan

“Now he is a statesman, when what he really wants is to be what most reporters are, adult delinquents.”

— Peggy Noonan

“Loyalty consists of many things, including being truthful with our friends. When you really disagree, you have to say so.”

— Peggy Noonan

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

“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

“No news conferences? Interviews now only with friendly journalists? You can't be president or vice president and govern in that style, as a sequestered figure. This has been Mr. Bush's style the past few years, and see where it got us. You must address America in its entirety, not as a sliver or a series of slivers but as a full and whole entity, a great nation trying to hold together. When you don't, when you play only to your little piece, you contribute to its fracturing.”

— Peggy Noonan

“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

“When everyone in America knows you're in a dreadful position, admit you're in a dreadful position. Don't lie about it and make them roll their eyes, tell the truth and make them blink.”

— Peggy Noonan

“Our patriotic fervor was the result of the old and widespread belief in the idea of American exceptionalism, the idea that America was a new thing in history, different from other countries. Other nations had evolved one way or another, evolved from tribes from a gathering of clans, from inevitabilities of language and tradition and geography. But America was born, and born of ideas: that all men are created equal, that they have been given by God certain rights that can be taken from them by no man, and that those rights combine to create a thing called freedom.”

— Peggy Noonan

“The Democrats had long labeled the impeachment debate a distraction from the urgent business of a great nation. But the Republicans argued that the pursuit of justice is the business of a great nation. In winning this point, they caught the falling flag, producing a triumph for the rule of law, a reassertion of the belief that no man is above it, and a rebuke for an arrogance that had grown imperial,”

— Peggy Noonan

“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

Naps are nature's way of reminding you that life is nice, like a beautiful swinging hammock strung between birth and infinity.

— Peggy Noonan

“There should be a name for this, for the process whereby one knows one is being yanked and concedes it has been done successfully - that one is grateful to have been spun. In the theater, it is called the willing suspension of disbelief. That's what allows the play to make an impact on the audience: they have to be able to make believe that what's happening on the stage is really happening. Maybe to a degree it is a requirement for all political participation, all effective political communication, too.”

— Peggy Noonan

“George W. Bush, 43rd president of the United States, became the first incumbent president to increase his majority in both the Senate and the House and to increase his own vote (by over 3.5 million) since Franklin D. Roosevelt, political genius of the 20th century, in 1936.”

— Peggy Noonan

The Democratic Party's complete obeisance to [the abortion] lobby makes Democrats look bought, frightened and craven.

— Peggy Noonan

“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

“One way to keep people close to you is by not giving them enough ... with people who give a lot of themselves, you sometimes lean back - but with people who give little you often lean forward, as if they're a spigot in the desert and you're the empty cup. It is the tropism of deprivation: We lean toward those who do not give.”

— Peggy Noonan

“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

“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