I wanted to wear her as you would a piece of clothing, to fold into her ribs, be a stone in her mouth.
And so the greatest of American triumphs. . . became a peculiarly joyless victory. We had won the Cold War, but there would be no parades.
If Iraq and Afghanistan have taught us anything in recent history, it is the unpredictability of war and that these things are easier to get into than to get out of, and, frankly, the facile way in which too many people talk about, 'Well, let's just go attack them.
I think in the context of senior government positions, I think an anecdote of what I told President-Elect Barack Obama when we had our first meeting. And I said, "You don't know me. Can you trust me? Why do you think you can trust me?" and so on. But at the end, I said, "You can count on me to be loyal to you. I will not leak. I will keep my disagreements with you private. And if I cannot be loyal, I'll leave. " Loyalty means doing what you think is in the best interest of that person as well as the country.
Congress is best viewed from a distance—the farther the better—because up close, it is truly ugly. I saw most of Congress as uncivil, incompetent at fulfilling their basic constitutional responsibilities (such as timely appropriations), micromanagerial, parochial, hypocritical, egotistical, thin-skinned and prone to put self (and re-election) before country.
I fired a lot of senior people myself and I think the key, when you feel compelled to remove a senior official, is essentially to have all your ducks in a row at the beginning. Have everybody understand what the rationale was.
What I know concerns me. What I don't know concerns me even more. What people aren't telling me worries me the most.
He [Lincoln] had mastered it {the Bible] absolutely. . . mastered it so that he became almost 'a man of one Book', who knew that Book and who instinctively put into practice what he had been taught therein.
and he began to understand what a wild game we play in life; he began to understand that a thing once done cannot be undone nor changed by saying "I am sorry!
Everyone gets the experience. Some get the lesson.
Celebrate the feast of Christmas every day, even every moment in the interior temple of your spirit, remaining like a baby in the bosom of the heavenly Father, where you will be reborn each moment in the Divine Word, Jesus Christ.