Top 60 Peggy Noonan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Part of courage is simple consistency.”

— Peggy Noonan

Featured in: Courage Quotes, Consistency Quotes

2. “By trying to do too much, you risk not doing enough.”

— Peggy Noonan

3. “A speech is poetry: cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweep! A speech reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart.”

— Peggy Noonan

4. “Candor is a compliment; it implies equality. It’s how true friends talk.”

— Peggy Noonan

5. “When you forget yourself and your fear, when you get beyond self-consciousness because your mind is thinking about what you are trying to communicate, you become a better communicator.”

— Peggy Noonan

6. “You can get so well educated in America that your thoughts become detached from common sense. You can get so complicated in your thinking that the obvious isn’t real to you anymore.”

— Peggy Noonan

7. “Humor is the shock absorber of life; it helps us take the blows.”

— Peggy Noonan

8. “TV gives everyone an image, but radio gives birth to a million images in a million brains.”

— Peggy Noonan

9. “Don’t fall in love with politicians, they’re all a disappointment. They can’t help it, they just are.”

— Peggy Noonan

10. “A great speech is literature.”

— Peggy Noonan

11. “The Democratic Party is that amazing thing, out of power for six years and yet exhausted. They’re pale, tired, and unready. Too bad, since it’s their job to be an alternative, not an embarrassment.”

— Peggy Noonan

12. “Boundaries aren’t all bad. That’s why there are walls around mental institutions.”

— Peggy Noonan

13. “I love eulogies. They are the most moving kind of speech because they attempt to pluck meaning from the fog, and on short order, when the emotions are still ragged and raw and susceptible to leaps.”

— Peggy Noonan

14. “I was sailing from tedium to apathy with a side trip to torpor.”

— Peggy Noonan

15. “Wit penetrates; humor envelops. Wit is a function of verbal intelligence; humor is imagination operating on good nature.”

— Peggy Noonan

16. “The battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I: never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain.”

— Peggy Noonan

17. “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

18. “Speeches are not magic and there is no great speech without great policy.”

— Peggy Noonan

19. “The first snow always startles. It covers the tricycle in the driveway, turning its frame into an abstact sculpture that says: See how quickly yesterday turns into today.”

— Peggy Noonan

20. “We are all afraid. That’s the thing that unites all truly successful people: fear, fear of failing, fear of criticism, fear of letting down the team in some way. That why they try so hard, that’s why they pay attention to detail and try to get every possible duck in a row. It’s fear.”

— Peggy Noonan

21. “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

22. “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

23. “This is the Democratic paradox: You want so much to run America and yet you seem not so fond of Americans.”

— Peggy Noonan

24. “The Irish are often nervous about having the appropriate face for the occasion. They have to be happy at weddings, which is a strain, so they get depressed; they have to be sad at funerals, which is easy, so they get happy.”

— Peggy Noonan

25. “The biggest political change in my lifetime is that Americans no longer assume that their children will have it better than they did. This is a huge break with the past, with assumptions and traditions that shaped us.”

— Peggy Noonan

26. “Now he is a statesman, when what he really wants is to be what most reporters are, adult delinquents.”

— Peggy Noonan

27. “Where you falter, alter.”

— Peggy Noonan

28. “Speeches are more important in politics than talking points, as a rule, and are better remembered.”

— Peggy Noonan

29. “Abortion is either OK or it’s not.”

— Peggy Noonan

30. “Sincerity and competence is a strong combination. In politics, it is everything.”

— Peggy Noonan

31. “I think miracles exist in part as gifts and in part as clues that there is something beyond the flat world we see.”

— Peggy Noonan

32. “If you join government, calmly make your contribution and move on. Don’t go along to get along; do your best and when you have to – and you will – leave, and be something else.”

— Peggy Noonan

33. “You don’t have to be old in America to say of a world you lived in: ‘that world is gone.’”

— Peggy Noonan

34. “What is in the air there in Washington, what is in the water? What is wrong with them? This is not a rhetorical question. I think it is unspoken question No.1 as Americans look at so many of the individuals in our government. What is wrong with them?”

— Peggy Noonan

35. “The biggest improvement in the flow of information in America in our lifetimes is that no single group controls the news anymore.”

— Peggy Noonan

36. “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

37. “When everyone in America knows you’re in a dreadful position, admit you’re in a dreadful position. Don’t lie about it and make them roll their eyes, tell the truth and make them blink.”

— Peggy Noonan

38. “Naps are nature’s way of reminding you that life is nice, like a beautiful swinging hammock strung between birth and infinity.”

— Peggy Noonan

39. “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

40. “The core of the concept of a bribe is an inducement improperly influencing the performance of a public function meant to be gratuitously exercised.”

— Peggy Noonan

41. “In ancient Israel and Rome the judge had appeared as a stand-in for the divine, and corruption was a blinding of the representative of the divine.”

— Peggy Noonan

42. “Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their natures; there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen.”

— Peggy Noonan

43. “Morals are concerned with what aids or impedes the fulfillment of basic human needs.”

— Peggy Noonan

44. “Read good, big important things.”

— Peggy Noonan

45. “If you commit a big crime then you are crazy, and the more heinous the crime the crazier you must be. Therefore you are not responsible, and nothing is your fault.”

— Peggy Noonan

46. “Loyalty consists of many things, including being truthful with our friends. When you really disagree, you have to say so.”

— Peggy Noonan

47. “I guess the second-term team is not quite as adoring as the first.”

— Peggy Noonan

48. “Politicians, please, think of yourselves! Move to help Terri Schiavo, and no one will be mad at you, and you’ll keep a human being alive.”

— Peggy Noonan

49. “The Democratic Party will now stick with its guy forever, no matter how harmful he is. Perhaps you call that loyalty, and perhaps there’s something to it, but a bigger part, I believe, is that you have come to think that winning is everything-that victory is the purpose of politics.”

— Peggy Noonan

50. “Resentment isn’t a magnetic personal style.”

— Peggy Noonan