Mary McGrory Quotations

Haldeman is the only man in America in this generation who let his hair grow for a courtroom appearance.

Baseball is what we were, and football is what we have become

as a companion to the distraught, sort of a psychiatric nurse, just saying: 'You're OK. They're wrong.'

[On George H.W. Bush:] A man who wishes to lead the Western world should be able to find the right words, string them together in coherent sentences, and steer them to an intelligible conclusion. His sentences have the stuttering start of an old car on a cold morning. They never run smoothly. The only speech part that he has mastered completely is the non sequitur.

[On George H.W. Bush vs. Michael Dukakis:] Americans now know they can vote for a man who can't express his thoughts or a man who can't express his feelings.

[On Senator Everett Dirksen:] His great enemy was boredom and he won every engagement.

[On Italy:] ... the country where kindness to strangers is a religion, you can't turn your head without seeing something beautiful, and you can't get a bad meal if you try.

Baseball has a special place in our hearts. It is the game that shows us as we would like to be.

Human sacrifice is much in vogue right now. The Republican right thinks that people who get on its nerves, especially women, should be sent to the stake. . .

I am hoping for better times. That's how you know us hapless gardeners - by our dirty fingernails and our absurd, unquenchable optimism about next year.

Anyone who has undergone home repair lately knows that your everyday artisan uses language so loosely and makes false promises so glibly as to make your politicians, even the presidential candidate, seem like a model of accuracy and rectitude. 'Be there Wednesday at nine,' the workman will tell you. It is a lie. He is humoring you. He says it to silence you, the way you tell a child you will take it to Disneyland if it will stop crying.

[On men:] On their best days, the best of them are eight years old.

Appliances have idiosyncracies, just like us. Unfortunately they have picked up our less attractive traits - they are proud, spiteful, and unforgiving.

My friend Phil has a theory that the Lord, having made teenagers, felt constrained to make amends and so created the golden retriever.

We have a new class in this country: the deserving rich. ... The deserving rich do nice things for each other. Comforting the unafflicted is something that comes naturally to them.

And the propensity of weak and empty people to follow a leader into the darkness from which there is no return is still flourishing, as ever.

Dogs, bless them, operate on the premise that human beings are fragile and require incessant applications of affection and reassurance. The random lick of a hand and the furry chin draped over the instep are calculated to let the shaky owner know that a friend is nearby.

You need the will to disarm the civilian population. If we can do it in Somalia, we can do it here.

Baseball is what we were, football is what we have become.

If there is a secret to writing, I haven’t found it yet. All I know is you need to sit down, clear your mind, and hang in there.