A healthy degree of party unity among Democrats and Republicans has deteriorated into bitter partisan warfare.

Presidents are elected not by direct popular vote but by 538 members of the Electoral College.

In addition to the decline in competition, American politics today is characterized by a growing ideological polarization between the two major political parties.

But presidential approval also became a surrogate measure of national unity and patriotism.

Knowledge of the soul would unfailingly make us melancholy if the pleasures of expression did not keep us alert and of good cheer.

We are not separate and independent entities, but like links in a chain, and we could not by any means be what we are without those who went before us and showed us the way.

Responsibility for overseeing the implementation of election law typically resides with partisan officials, many with public stakes in the election outcome.

Congress requires states to draw single-member districts.

While Republican voters have remained universally supportive of their President, Democrats and Independents are returning to a more naturally critical stance.

Votes in federal elections are cast and counted in a highly decentralized and variable fashion, with no uniform ballots and few national standards.

Further-more, partisan attachments powerfully shape political perceptions, beliefs and values, and incumbents enjoy advantages well beyond the way in which their districts are configured.

All the time you're saying to yourself, 'I could do that, but I won't, ' — which is just another way of saying that you can't.

Character is long-standing habit.

Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.

I think I was the healthiest prisoner of conscience in the world.

Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers.

Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.

Love is blind, there was no doubt about it. In Tara's case it was also deaf, dumb, dyslexic, had a bad hip and the beginnings of Alzheimer's

Making good design is easy. It's polishing the half-assed stuff that takes time.

Consciousness is phenomenologically subjective whenever there is a stable, consciously experienced first-person perspective.