ELEANOR CLIFT

If you think of life and death on a continuum, finding the point where it tips is complicated. It cuts across all political lines and gets to the root of our humanity. It requires faith informed by years of intimacy that you're doing what's right for your loved one.

People want change but not too much change. Finding that balance is tricky for every politician.

Hospice means end-of-life care. The admission ticket is a diagnosis from a doctor that you have six months or less to live.

It's a complicated set of opinions that women bring to the voting booth.

At the unveiling at the White House of the presidential portrait, President Bush pointed out that Hillary Clinton was the first sitting Senator in history to have her portrait hanging in the White House.

If privacy ends where hypocrisy begins, Kitty Kelley's steamy expose is a contribution to contemporary history.

Bush does not want to go down in history as the president who lost in Iraq. His strategy to the extent he has one is to hang tough and let whoever succeeds him take the fall.

Often, the disparities in the ways men and women are treated are subtle; there are not these clear barriers that you have to break down.

Today's young women don't really see inequities until they go out into the real world.

If there is a ground zero in the cultural wars, it is Missouri, a state where pro-life groups are strong and well organized and their agenda dominates local politics.

Bush is good at stating the obviously untrue.

If you look at where presidents come from, they're former governors or senators.

Living in the fishbowl is hard enough without worrying about a Secret Service that can't keep mum.

Looking at female candidates today, other women are the hardest on them, especially older women who were brought up in a different culture.

The list of women to potentially be on a major party ticket, in both parties, is embarrassingly short.

Politics is so much about serendipity that we've got to have a bigger pool of women, so that when people drop out of the process, you've got others to turn to.

You get elected, often, if you're a woman, on the strength of the women's vote; then you get into office, and you have to adapt to an overwhelmingly male environment.

He has no control over his mouth. He will say anything that flits across his frontal lobe.

Anyone who gets too close to President Bush will get burned.

Labor leaders today have gotten too male, stale and pale.

The Congress is not a court of law but it is a court of public opinion.

Different occasions require different rhetoric.

No one has ever seen a congressman who left office because he didn't get paid enough. On the contrary, many of them spend millions of dollars to get there.... Congressmen do not make good hardship cases.

If you open yourself up to a wade variety of press questions, the press sets the agenda, not you.

The art of diplomacy is to take your humiliations in private.