Quotes from Peggy Noonan

Speeches are not magic and there is no great speech without great policy.

You don't have to be old in America to say of a world you lived in: That world is gone.

big things are best said, are almost always said, in small words.

I find this to be true of my spiritual life, and maybe it applies to yours as well: I think about things more than I do them; I ponder what seems their goodness more than I perform them. As if my thought alone were enough. But a thought alone isn't quite enough; it's an impulse and not a commitment, a passing thing that doesn't take root unless you plant it and make it grow.

I was starting to feel that Washington was a city run by two rival gangs that had a great deal in common with each other, including an essential lack of interest in the well-being of the turf on which they fought.

But what is happening in America today is, I think, unparalleled in history. We are rising to the top and falling to the bottom; we are becoming wealthier as individuals and baser as a society; we are more powerful than ever and less mindful; we share a level of prosperity that is so high that it is a new thing in history, unprecedented in the story of man, and yet this wonderful thing we share has not made us closer as a people. And this has implications.

One senses with so many Democrats who support the Clintons an unspoken sentence: "They're all we have." They're the only big national winners the party has left. I always want to say to them: That's not true, you've got better than that, you've got good people, go look and you will find them.

it is harder to decide what you want to say than it is to figure out how to say it.

a speech about everything is a speech about nothing.

you can't say everything, the fact that you have to winnow your thoughts down to the essentials, means that you can get to the heart of the matter quickly.

You must be able to say the sentences you write. And so they cannot be long and serpentine things that curl around clauses, caress subclauses, encompass extended metaphor, stop briefly for a whimsical digression and culminate, ultimately, in a long and rhythmic peroration that signals to your audience that you would not take it unkindly if they, at just about this moment, would interrupt you with vigorous and sustained applause.

It is usually and paradoxically true that the more important the message, the less time required to say it.

Oddly enough, the more tired you get as you write and rewrite, the more likely you are to abandon any self-conscious semi-stentorian writing and write more like yourself. Fatigue lets you emerge. This is good.)

NO SPEECH SHOULD LAST MORE THAN TWENTY MINUTES

We singe but never burn.

Style is not a replacement for substance, and cannot camouflage a lack of substance.

Tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em—tell 'em—then tell 'em what you told 'em.

Every speech has a job to do, and no matter who you are, pope, president, poet or pipe layer, if you're giving a speech you have to understand what its job is and work to make sure it's done.

People don't care how much you know unless they know how much you care.

Outside of a person's love, the most sacred thing that they can give is their labor." -- James Carville

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

I think that to achieve true adulthood is to understand the simplicity of things.

When you are thinking about what you want to say, it is often helpful to define it down, in your own mind, to a sentence or two.

Always reduce it down. This keeps it from having a false bigness in your mind, and allows you to get your hands around it. Another way to get a handle on what you want to say is to ask: What does this speech have to do? Every speech has a job, a reason for being.