Peggy Noonan Quotes

37 Sourced Quotes

My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage.

Peggy Noonan
Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their natures; there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen.

Peggy Noonan
I love eulogies. They are the most moving kind of speech because they attempt to pluck meaning from the fog, and on short order, when the emotions are still ragged and raw and susceptible to leaps.

Peggy Noonan
If you join government, calmly make your contribution and move on. Don't go along to get along; do your best and when you have to - and you will - leave, and be something else.

Peggy Noonan
If you commit a big crime then you are crazy, and the more heinous the crime the crazier you must be. Therefore you are not responsible, and nothing is your fault.

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

Peggy Noonan
TV gives everyone an image, but radio gives birth to a million images in a million brains.

Peggy Noonan
Remember the waterfront shack with the sign FRESH FISH SOLD HERE. Of course it's fresh, we're on the ocean. Of course it's for sale, we're not giving it away. Of course it's here, otherwise the sign would be someplace else. The final sign: FISH.

Peggy Noonan
Candor is a compliment; it implies equality. It's how true friends talk.

Peggy Noonan
I was sailing from tedium to apathy with a side trip to torpor.

Peggy Noonan
One way to keep people close to you is by not giving them enough.... with people who give a lot of themselves, you sometimes lean back — but with people who give little you often lean forward, as if they're a spigot in the desert and you're the empty cup. It is the tropism of deprivation: We lean toward those who do not give.

Peggy Noonan
Of George W. Bush:
If you woke most Americans up at 3:00 in the morning and said, 'Tell me, looking back, what would you have liked in an American president after 9/11?' most of them would answer, 'I was just hoping for a good man who did moderately good things.'…Not this historical drama queen, this good witch or bad.

Peggy Noonan
At some point, don't voters start to see all of public life as one big polluted river? And if they do, don't they stop saying things like "That's a busted tire floating by" and "That's an old shoe"?

Peggy Noonan
Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing — who is really one of them and who is not — and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy.

Peggy Noonan
The battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I. Never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain.

Peggy Noonan
The Democrats had long labeled the impeachment debate a distraction from the urgent business of a great nation. But the Republicans argued that the pursuit of justice is the business of a great nation. In winning this point, they caught the falling flag, producing a triumph for the rule of law, a reassertion of the belief that no man is above it, and a rebuke for an arrogance that had grown imperial.

Peggy Noonan
We are all actors now.... Everyone in America now explains a moment in their lives by saying, 'It was like a scene out of...'

Peggy Noonan
Now he is a statesman, when what he really wants is to be what most reporters are, adult delinquents.

Peggy Noonan
Great speeches have always had great soundbites. The problem now is that the young technicians who put together speeches are paying attention only to the soundbite, not to the text as a whole, not realizing that all great soundbites happen by accident, which is to say, all great soundbites are yielded up inevitably, as part of the natural expression of the text. They are part of the tapestry, they aren't a little flower somebody sewed on.

Peggy Noonan
Loyalty consists of many things, including being truthful with our friends. When you really disagree, you have to say so.

Peggy Noonan
The Irish are often nervous about having the appropriate face for the occasion. They have to be happy at weddings, which is a strain, so they get depressed; they have to be sad at funerals, which is easy, so they get happy.

Peggy Noonan
I should say here, because some in Washington like to dream up ways to control the Internet, that we don't need to 'control' free speech, we need to control ourselves.

Peggy Noonan
The biggest political change in my lifetime is that Americans no longer assume that their children will have it better than they did. This is a huge break with the past, with assumptions and traditions that shaped us.

Peggy Noonan
Wit penetrates; humor envelops. Wit is a function of verbal intelligence; humor is imagination operating on good nature. John Kennedy had wit, and so did Lincoln, who also had abundant humor; Reagan was mostly humor.

Peggy Noonan
Some things in life need to be mysterious. Sometimes you need to just keep walking. … It's hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents and sending them out to the world and thinking, oh, much good will come of that.

Peggy Noonan
I do not know what the Democratic Party spent, in toto, on the 2004 election, but what they seem to have gotten for it is Barack Obama. Let us savor.

Peggy Noonan
I think miracles exist in part as gifts and in part as clues that there is something beyond the flat world we see.

Peggy Noonan
Who knows what to make of the weighting of the polls and the assumptions as to who will vote? Who knows the depth and breadth of each party's turnout efforts? Among the wisest words spoken this cycle were by John Dickerson of CBS News and Slate, who said, in a conversation the night before the last presidential debate, that he thought maybe the American people were quietly cooking something up, something we don't know about. I think they are and I think it's this: a Romney win.

Peggy Noonan
When you forget yourself and your fear, when you get beyond self-consciousness because your mind is thinking about what you are trying to communicate, you become a better communicator

Peggy Noonan
The most qualified? No. I think they went for this — excuse me — political bullshit about narratives.

Peggy Noonan