Quotes from Jonathan Alter

The only thing worse than a silly politician analyzing art is a silly artist analyzing politics

I think it's a terrible system, but money in politics is like water running downhill -- it finds its way.

The basic problem is with the business model of journalism. That business model is premised on the idea that talk is cheap and reporting is expensive.

By laying the groundwork for a system centered on home ownership rather than the public housing popular in Europe, the New Deal made possible the great postwar housing boom that populated the Sun Belt and boosted millions of Americans into the middle class, where, ironically, they often became Republicans.

I think it's a terrible system, but money in politics is like water running downhill -- it finds its way.

Election night. Fairmont Hotel. NBC News calls the election for Obama, and Valerie Jarret says, "You won." And the President says, "I'll believe it when I hear it on FOX."

My own story isn't typical, because none is. Every patient reacts a little differently, both biologically and psychologically. The only constant in cancer is inconstancy; the only certainty is a future of uncertainty, a truism for all of modern life but one made vivid by life-threatening illness.

Almost no one under 60 remembers what fundraising was like before Watergate. Until the 1970s, campaign money was collected by "bagmen," familiar characters from the world of organized crime. As fans of Boardwalk Empire know, a bagman is a political fixer who walked around with stacks of $100 and $1,000 bills. At lower levels, he used brown paper bags. In presidential campaigns, the cash was more likely to be in briefcases. Classier that way.

Millions of Americans would still despair in the eight long years of the Depression that lay ahead and many of their individual dreams would be dashed on the rocks of economic hardship. But collectively, the country was in a new place, with a new confidence that the federal government would actively try to solve problems rather than fiddle or cater to the rich. Hope was no longer for Pollyannas; the cynics about the American system were in retreat.

The only reason the House hasn't done even more damage is that the Senate often sands down the most noxious ideas, making the bills merely bad, not disastrous.

The key to fixing education is better teaching, and the key to better teaching is figuring out who can teach and who can't.

Obama was willing to compromise and Republicans were not. That's not a biased statement. One of my problems with the limitations of journalism is that straightforward descriptions of reality are seen as being biased.

And by laying the groundwork for a system centered on home ownership rather than the public housing popular in Europe, the New Deal made possible the great postwar housing boom that populated the Sun Belt and boosted millions of Americans into the middle class, where, ironically, they often became Republicans.

many of the refugees were criminals and mental patients whom Castro had released from Cuban jails. As the number of refugees surged (including tens of thousands of

It's time for America to move and to speak, not with boasting and belligerence, but with a quiet strength—to depend in world affairs not merely on the size of an arsenal but on the nobility of ideas—and to govern at home not by confusion and crisis but with grace and imagination and common sense.

Nowhere in the Constitution of the United States or the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights or the Emancipation Proclamation, the Old Testament or the New Testament, do you find the words 'economy' or 'efficiency.' Not that these two words are unimportant. But you discover other words like honesty, integrity, fairness, liberty, justice, love.… Words which describe what a government of human beings ought to be.

It would be a long ten days before Sadat and Begin were in the same room at the same time again. In the meantime, Carter would meet for many hours alone with each one, a level of personal diplomacy unmatched by any other American president.

In Warsaw in 1977 he made an unscheduled and highly symbolic visit to the head of Poland's Catholic Church, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, and advised Edward Gierek, the first secretary of the Polish Communist Party, to speak more often with the cardinal. "It's never too late" to become a believer, he told Gierek, skillfully exploiting the tension between Gierek's ancestral Catholicism and the atheism of Communist doctrine.

Carter's human rights policy was "ambiguous, ambivalent, and ambidextrous," as Hodding Carter (no relation), Derian's husband and the State Department spokesman, described it.

Carter also showed respect by becoming the first American president to visit sub-Saharan Africa while in office: a state visit to Nigeria in 1978. He invited more African heads of state to the White House in his first year than any of his predecessors had in four.

He would negotiate with the devil if he thought he could get a hearing," Young said.

As a boy, Jimmy sent a nickel every week to Baptist missionaries building hospitals and schools in China.

Jim Cannon, Baker's top aide, knew that his boss was "more responsible than he is ambitious." When Cannon advised Baker that voting yes would prevent him from becoming the Republican nominee for president in 1980, the senator snapped, "So be it.

Supporters were heartened when hawkish Democrat Tom McIntyre of New Hampshire decided to deliver an impassioned speech attacking "the bully boys of the radical Right." He told his wife as he left for the floor, "Come and watch me lose my seat.