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There was once a philosopher who said, 'I don't believe in God, but I fear him greatly.' That's about where I am.
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The one thing that's always been the center of my political thinking - and it goes back to when I was 19 and editor of my college paper - is an abhorrence of the extreme.
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Sometimes it's easy to go where the wind blows, but those that stand firmly planted are forces to be reckoned with.
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Life and consciousness are the two great mysteries. Actually, their substrates are the inanimate. And how do you get from neurons shooting around in the brain to the thought that pops up in your head and mine? There's something deeply mysterious about that. And if you're not struck by the mystery, I think you haven't thought about it.
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I believe that the pursuit of truth and right ideas through honest debate and rigorous argument is a noble undertaking.
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I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix.
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I'm not a global warming believer. I'm not a global warming denier. I'm a global warming agnostic who believes instinctively that it can't be very good to pump lots of CO2 into the atmosphere but is equally convinced that those who presume to know exactly where that leads are talking through their hats.
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There used to be a cruel joke that said Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be; Obama is the Brazil of today's politicians. He has obviously achieved nothing.
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If you get a call to go to a certain place in the middle of the night to pick up stolen goods, and it turns out the stolen goods don't show up but the cops show up, I think you're going to have a very weak story saying, 'Well, I got swindled here.'
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Trump's behavior is deeply disturbing but hardly surprising. His mercurial nature is not the product of a post-inaugural adder sting at Mar-a-Lago. It's been there all along. And the American electorate chose him nonetheless.
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I don't mind going into a liberal lion's den. That's where you test yourself.
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If you believe that health care is a public good to be guaranteed by the state, then a single-payer system is the next best alternative. Unfortunately, it is fiscally unsustainable without rationing.
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For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics, and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its most exacting subspecialty - statecraft). Because if we don't get politics right, everything else risks extinction.
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I don't think the West needs to apologize - or pay - for having invented the steam engine.
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I happen to believe that the preemption school is correct, that the risks of allowing Saddam Hussein to acquire his weapons will only grow with time.
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Every once in a while, the Senate seems to remember that it belongs to a coequal branch.
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Obama was quite serious when he said he was going to change the world. And now he has a national crisis, a personal mandate, a pliant Congress, a desperate public - and, at his disposal, the greatest pot of money in galactic history.
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I leave this life with no regrets. It was a wonderful life - full and complete with the great loves and great endeavors that make it worth living.
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I am grateful to have played a small role in the conversations that have helped guide this extraordinary nation's destiny.
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If Obama has his way, the change that is coming is a new America: 'fair,' leveled and social democratic. Obama didn't get elected to warranty your muffler. He's here to warranty your life.
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The conservative idea is not that government has no role. You might have argued that in the thirties when conservatives opposed the New Deal.
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Ron Paul is not going to be president, so we don't have to worry about who's going to be in his cabinet.
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I was a Great Society liberal on domestic issues. People ask me, 'How do you go from Walter Mondale to Fox News?' The answer is, 'I was young once.' End of answer.
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When under attack, no country is obligated to collect permission slips from allies to strike back.