Politics is motion." John Sears

— Rick Perlstein

Polls could be self-fulfilling prophecies, shaping reality as much as they described it.

— Rick Perlstein

Prediction is structurally inseparable from the business of punditry: It creates the essential image of indefatigable authority that is punditry's very architecture; it flows from that calcified image, and it provides the substance for the story that keeps getting told about the inevitability of American progress.

— Rick Perlstein

(President) Lyndon Johnson still snapped between exultation and insecurity.

— Rick Perlstein

Presidents are also always storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies.

— Rick Perlstein

Reagan's emotional intelligence, his ability to suss out people's longings and to channel them for political purposes, was better than just about any human being that ever lived.

— Rick Perlstein

Rebelling against the status quo was one of the definitions of conservatism.

— Rick Perlstein

Richard Nixon's conversation was "loaded with so many stories of all the foreign dignitaries he'd called upon in his career that he sounded like a guy who had pinioned his neighbors into watching his vacation slides.

— Rick Perlstein

Richard Nixon was a serial collector of resentments.

— Rick Perlstein

Ronald Reagan was just as angry. But he made you want to stand right alongside him and shake your fist at the same things he was shaking his fist at.

— Rick Perlstein