In politics, if you're explaining, you're loosing.

— Rick Perlstein

In Ronald Reagan's chaotic childhood, the imagination was armor. There is nothing unusual about that; transcending the doubts, hesitations, and fears swirling around you by casting yourself internally as the hero of your own adventure story is a characteristic psychic defense mechanism of the Boy Who Disappears.

— Rick Perlstein

I think the people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate." Martin Luther King, Jr. after the violent reception he received in Chicago in 1966.

— Rick Perlstein

Leaders are for calling people to their better angels, for helping guide them to a kind of sterner, more mature sense of what we need to do. To me, Reagan's brand of leadership was what I call 'a liturgy of absolution.' He absolved Americans almost in a priestly role to contend with sin. Who wouldn't want that?

— Rick Perlstein

Liberals tend to stress how marvelous education is, in and of itself, and also adore it as a vessel for genuine equality. (That's me, by the way: Hell, I think we should be spending $50 billion a year to make college education free).

— Rick Perlstein

Look at liberty's greatest historic advances: ending slavery. Giving women the vote. Outlawing legal segregation. Each and every time, the people at the forefront of advancing those reforms - often putting their lives on the line - called themselves liberals.

— Rick Perlstein

Lyndon B. Johnson thought he'd have the boys home from Vietnam by Christmas - for four Christmases in a row (he never shifted course, and lost his presidency for it).

— Rick Perlstein

Now even reformers needed political machines.

— Rick Perlstein

One does not hold a conversation with him. One holds a symposium. – Elizabeth Drew

— Rick Perlstein

One of the ladies asked about that awful Bobby Kennedy, and Goldwater responded by speaking about the attorney general with touching affection. (Mary) McCrory recalled how Jack Kennedy behaved at a similar stage in his campaign: spouting statistics, attacking carefully chosen enemies and puffing all the right friends, quoting dead Greeks, never cracking a joke lest he remind the voters how young he was.

— Rick Perlstein