“According to James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans, once a year in the 1980s, the Reagan administration flew Cheney to a secret bunker to practice rebuilding the government if the Soviets destroyed Washington. Cheney's role, Mann reported, was to use his White House chief of staff experience to run the government in the name of any surviving cabinet member who made it to the bunker. The Reagan plan ignored the Presidential Succession Act, a 1947 law that put two top congressional leaders higher in the line of succession than cabinet secretaries. The program also made no plan for reconstituting Congress, because "it would be easier to operate without them," a participant told Mann.”

“Hef ég drepið mann eða hef ég ekki drepið mann? Hver hefur drepið mann og hver hefur ekki drepið mann? Hvenær drepur maður mann og hvenær drepur maður ekki mann? Fari í helvíti sem ég drap mann. Og þó.”

“Even President Reagan couldn’t understand him. During an early briefing Casey delivered to the national security cabinet, Reagan slipped Vice President Bush a note: “Did you understand a word he said?” Reagan later told William F. Buckley, “My problem with Bill was that I didn’t understand him at meetings. Now, you can ask a person to repeat himself once. You can ask him twice. But you can’t ask him a third time. You start to sound rude. So I’d just nod my head, but I didn’t know what he was actually saying.”Such was the dialogue for six years between the president and his intelligence chief in a nuclear-armed nation running secret wars on four continents.”

“Council housing, once the cherished centrepiece of Bevanite socialism, took just twenty years for successive governments to pick apart.”

“Question: Which Mediterranean government shares all of Ronald Reagan's views on international terrorism, the present danger of Soviet advance, the hypocrisy of the United Nations, the unreliability of Europe, the perfidy of the Third World and the need for nuclear defense policy? Question: Which Mediterranean government is Ronald Reagan trying, with the help of George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger, to replace with a government led by a party which professes socialism and which contains extreme leftists?If you answered 'the government of Israel' to both of the above, you know more about political and international irony than the President does.”

“When one may pay out over two million dollars to presidential and Congressional campaigns, the U.S. government is virtually up for sale.”