Let the dust take me when the adventure's done and I shall make the dust glitter for all eternity with my marvelous fury. - Gore Vidal

I'm exactly as I appear. There is no warm lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.

Professor Richard N. Current fusses, not irrelevantly, about the propriety of fictionalising actual political figures. I also fuss about this. But he has fallen prey to the scholar-squirrel's delusion that there is a final Truth revealed only to the tenured few in their footnote maze; in this he is simply naïve.

My father had a deep and lifelong contempt for politicians in general ("They tell lies," he used to say with wonder, "even when they don't have to").