Candor

eg
“Boundaries aren't all bad. That's why there are walls around mental institutions.”
― Peggy Noonan, Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now

“Cynicism is not realistic and tough. It's unrealistic and kind of cowardly because it means you don't have to try. ---in Good Housekeeping”
― Peggy Noonan

“We must try again to be alive to what the people of our country really long for in our national life: forgiveness and grace, maturity and wisdom.

...Our political leaders will know our priorities only if we tell them, again and again, and if those priorities begin to show up in the polls.”
― Peggy Noonan, Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now

“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, Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now

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

“What we need most right now, at this moment, is a kind of patriotic grace - a grace that takes the long view, apprehends the moment we're in, comes up with ways of dealing with it, and eschews the politically cheap and manipulative. That admits affection and respect. That encourages them. That acknowledges that the small things that divide us are not worthy of the moment; that agrees that the things that can be done to ease the stresses we feel as a nation should be encouraged, while those that encourage our cohesion as a nation should be supported.”
― Peggy Noonan, Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now

“Do not be afriad! I can see that Americans are not afraid. They are not afraid of the sun, they are not afraid of the wind, they are not afraid of 'today'. They are, generally speaking, brave, good people. And so I say to you today, always be brave. Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid. God is with you. Do not be afraid to search for God-then you will truly be the land of the free, the home of the brave. God Bless America.”
― Peggy Noonan, John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father

“But one immediate thing can be done right now, and that is: lower the temperature. Any way you can, and everybody. Just lower it.”
― Peggy Noonan

“Here is an old tradition badly in need of return: You have to earn your way into politics. You should go have a life, build a string of accomplishments, then enter public service....”
― Peggy Noonan

“You shouldn’t hold on to things, to neuroses. People-artists-think they have to hold on to their neuroses, their pains, or they won’t be a good actor anymore or a good artist. That’s the Liar. The Liar tells you that. You hold on to them, you’ll just wind up a lonely person. People become lonely with them, and the fame has moved on to someone else. You have to heal, you have to maintain relationships... That’s why we say the Our Father: ‘Deliver us from evil”
― Peggy Noonan

“Hubert Humphrey’s wife is said to have advised him: “Darling, for a speech to be immortal it need not be interminable.”
― Peggy Noonan, On Speaking Well

“Each of us struggles through primary and essential questions that we cannot avoid once we reach or approach maturity. Why was I born? What is the meaning of life, and its purpose? Where and how can I find happiness? Why is life so full of pain and difficulty? How should we live, by what model or principles or arrangements?
A great mystery embraces our lives, John Paul said. Then he added something that has been to me deeply inspiring:
These questions we ask do not come only from your restless mind, and are not just products of your very human anxiety. They come from God. They are the beginning of the process by which you find them. God prompts them. He made you ask.
The questions are, in fact, a kind of preparation for God, a necessary preamble to the story he wants to write on your heart. And the moment you ask them, your freedom has been set in motion. You become more sharply aware that there are choices.
This, in a way, is the beginning of morality, because there is no morality without freedom. Only in freedom can you turn toward what is good. (p. 127)”
― Peggy Noonan

“The new home fashion will be spare. This will be the return of an old WASP style: the good, frayed carpet; dogs that look like dogs and not a hairdo in a teacup, as miniature dogs back from the canine boutique do now.

A friend, noting what has and will continue to happen with car sales, said America will look like Havana—old cars and faded grandeur. It won't. It will look like 1970, only without the bell-bottoms and excessive hirsuteness. More families will have to live together. More people will drink more regularly. Secret smoking will make a comeback as part of a return to simple pleasures. People will slow down. Mainstream religion will come back. Walker Percy again: Bland affluence breeds fundamentalism. Bland affluence is over.”
― Peggy Noonan

“As we have become more open minded (tolerant) in society we have become more closed hearted.”
― Peggy Noonan

“I now know that God has a plan for each of us. The thing is to find out what it is.” How? Through prayer, through keeping your mind open, and trough the circumstances of daily life and the people you meet.”
― Peggy Noonan

“What I got was not so much gifts and whishes come trues but a feeling of peace. I got peace itself, actually. And when you have peace, you can be strong; and when you are strong, you can get through what you have to get through, and not with exhaustion and frown marks and slumped shoulders but with relative happiness, and humor, and sometimes even gaiety.”
― Peggy Noonan

“The Pope replied, “of what should we not be afraid? We should not fear the truth about ourselves.” He spoke of how Saint Peter himself, the rock on which Christ had built his church, had told Christ to leave him, “for I am a sinful man.” Peter was a sinful man. We all are, including popes. We are imperfect and “our hearts are anxious.” But we cannot and should not let the fact of our unworthiness and flaws and failures build that wall with a kind of inverted pride that says, Oh, I’m so unworthy, and I’d know how unworthy I am better than you would.”
― Peggy Noonan

“Everyone over 50 in America feels like a refugee. In the Old America there were a lot of bad parents. There always are, because parenting is hard. Inadequate parents could say, 'Go outside and play in the culture,' and the culture -- relatively innocent, and boring -- could be more or less trusted to bring the kids up. Grown ups now know that you can't send the kids out to play in the culture, because the culture will leave them distorted and disturbed.”
― Peggy Noonan

“I further know that if God has something special for you, you have a knowledge of it inside you, which causes you not to be satisfied with anything that isn't this thing. You're "restless" until you find it.”
― Peggy Noonan, John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father

“Enjoy life, it’s ungrateful not to,” said Ronald Reagan.”
― Peggy Noonan, The Time of Our Lives: Collected Writings

“I always got the feeling with John Paul that if he could have narrowed down the people he met and blessed those he loved the most, they would not be cardinals, princes, or congressman, but nuns from obscure convents and Down syndrome children, especially the latter. Because they have suffered, and because in some serious and amazing way the love of God seems more immediately available to them. Everyone else gets themselves tied up in ambition and ideas and bustle, all the great distractions, but the modest and unwell are so often unusually open to this message: God loves us, his love is all around us, he made us to love him and be happy”
― Peggy Noonan

“I find this to be true of my spiritual life, and maybe it applies to yours as well: I think about things more than I do them; I ponder what seems their goodness more than I perform them. As if my thought alone were enough. But a thought alone isn’t quite enough; it’s an impulse and not a commitment, a passing thing that doesn’t take root unless you plant it and make it grow.”
― Peggy Noonan

“Novak was saying that the pope’s message was in part: You are not nothing; you are a great deal. God made you in his image, and he calls you to be like him. And so you must walk forward in to the world each day with confidence and humility. This reminded me of what a woman in Bible study said once. “Walk with pride, for you are the daughter of a king.”
― Peggy Noonan

“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

“Most people aren't appreciated enough, and the bravest things we do in our lives are usually known only to ourselves. No one throws ticker tape on the man who chose to be faithful to his wife, on the lawyer who didn't take the drug money...”
― Peggy Noonan

“He [Pope Benedict XVI] spoke of the distilled message of John Paul's reign: "Be not afraid”
― Peggy Noonan

“Our work is a vocation to which we have been called from the beginning of time. When we work we are partaking in and joining with God's ongoing creation of the world.”
― Peggy Noonan, John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father

“I was starting to feel that Washington was a city run by two rival gangs that had a great deal in common with each other, including an essential lack of interest in the well-being of the turf on which they fought.”
― Peggy Noonan, Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now

“But what is happening in America today is, I think, unparalleled in history. We are rising to the top and falling to the bottom; we are becoming wealthier as individuals and baser as a society; we are more powerful than ever and less mindful; we share a level of prosperity that is so high that it is a new thing in history, unprecedented in the story of man, and yet this wonderful thing we share has not made us closer as a people. And this has implications.”
― Peggy Noonan