Quotes from David Gergen

How in heaven's name can a nation with a $1 trillion surplus threaten so much scientific research so vital to its future?

Trust remains the coin of the realm in politics. A President who is trusted, by the people, by the congress, by the press, by foreign countries, is a President who can get a lot of good things done.

He never conquered polio, but he wrote a new narrative about his life that not only transformed him but won him the presidency.

a stoic always kept two files in his mind: one for those things that are up to him and within his power, and one for those that are not up to him and thus beyond his power. If you pay lots of attention to events beyond your power, you will ultimately have a life of fear and guilt; you must let those go and pay attention only to those things within your power.

This is not a quote by me, but one of my favorites: "If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don't have integrity, nothing else matters.

Sidney Harman, another highly successful CEO who was largely self-educated (he co-founded Harman Kardon), expressed the point well in his memoir, Mind Your Own Business: "Writing is not the simple transfer of fully formed intellectual inventory from brain to paper… Writing is discovery. It is, as Dylan Thomas said, 'the blank page on which I read my mind.

We know from past history that when young people vote for one party a couple of times, they tend to vote for that party during their adult lifetimes in disproportionate numbers.

At the heart of leadership is the leader's relationship with followers. People will entrust their hopes and dreams to another person only if they think the other is a reliable vessel.

A leader's role is to raise people's aspirations for what they can become and to release their energies so they will try to get there.

Leadership is a journey. Each one of us has to take our own path, and get there our own way.

Leadership is about calling people to do things beyond themselves.

We are making politics a spectator sport in which our only duty is to vote somebody into office and then retire to the grandstands.

Ronald Reagan is clearly to television what Franklin Roosevelt was to radio.

When he hung up on Nancy Reagan, that's when he crossed his final threshold.

We know that second terms have historically been marred by hubris and by scandal.

We've seen the hubris. And now we're seeing the scandals.

Morality in government begins with officials using words as honestly as possible to describe the truth.

If you've got some news that you don't want to get noticed, put it out Friday afternoon 4:00 pm.