Joe Klein

“Ever since John Kennedy, Democrats have had a weakness for dashing younger men like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and, I suppose, Jimmy Carter. They balance their tickets with senior statesmen - Lyndon Johnson, Joe Biden, Walter Mondale. (Al Gore was young but played ancient).”

“I invented the psychological histories and the relationship between Jack and Susan Stanton. I didn't know anything about the Clintons. I don't know more about the Clintons' marriage than you do.”

“Republicans should embrace the possibility that Obamacare could pave the way toward lower health care entitlement spending overall. That won't be easy. But it's not unthinkable, either.”

“You can't get all of your news from Jon Stewart, especially since it's a comedy show.”

“I've been described as a grizzled political veteran.”

“Diversity has been written into the DNA of American life; any institution that lacks a rainbow array has come to seem diminished, if not diseased.”

“You know, larger than life is always better than smaller than life in politicians. And, you know, God save us from mediocrities.”

“Previous presidents, including great ones like Roosevelt, have used the IRS against their enemies. But I don't think Barack Obama ever wanted to be on the same page as Richard Nixon.”

“Bush promised a foreign policy of humility and a domestic policy of compassion. He has given us a foreign policy of arrogance and a domestic policy that is cynical, myopic and cruel.”

“I came to political consciousness with John F. Kennedy's magnificent 1961 Inaugural Address. It seemed the start of something fresh and exciting, and it was.”

“In 2012 there was a megafoolish, if well-funded, effort by a group called Americans Elect to raise an independent Cincinnatus to run for president via an Internet draft. It flopped, spectacularly.”

“We journalists are never so idiotic as when we analyze things that we shouldn't be analyzing.”

“Affirmative action was always racial justice on the cheap.”

“Throughout history, civilizations have built a common cause through coming-of-age rituals. But we don't do that anymore. Maybe we should think about that.”

“For those of us who consider ourselves political moderates, life is a dispiriting slog, a sorry mix of rectitude and ineptitude.”

“When politicians began to see that every last thing that they did in public could be broadcast to a mass audience, the fact that the stakes were so much higher now that every moment became fraught caused them to become more cautious, and the consultants very gradually but inevitably became literal reactionaries.”

“You know that Moses was spinning like crazy in Exodus XIV through XVII when the Jewish people wanted to go back and become a place again because tramping through the desert was a bit too hard.”

“For me, a really radical position for journalism to take is to stop being cynical. Cynicism is what passes for insight among the mediocre.”

“This dilettante notion that the global economy is evil because big corporate leaders make too much money... they do make too much money, but the only way we've figured out how to generate wealth in this world is through the market economy.”