Date: June 18, 2015

"This was not an unthinkable act. A man may have had a rat's nest for a mind, but it was well thought out. It was a cool, considered crime, as well planned as any bank robbery or any computer fraud."

— Pierce, Charles P. (b. 1953)

Date: November 14, 2015

"The venerated political strategist David Axelrod once described a presidential campaign as 'an M.R.I. for the soul.'"

— Bruni, Frank (b. 1964)

Date: December 15, 2015

"I needed to put that on the record because its basic truth was completely lost in a dark land of fear and amid the waving poison ferns in Wolf Blitzer's amygdala."

— Pierce, Charles P. (b. 1953)

Date: January 3, 2016

"It is popular among these people who apparently have brains wired like short-wave radios broadcasting from upper Michigan to say that the real constitutional authority in this country resides in its local sheriffs."

— Pierce, Charles P. (b. 1953)

Date: January 14, 2016

"Then there's the risible campaign commercial in which the Tailgunner dresses up in camo and face paint and hangs out in the blind with the Duck Dynasty crew, looking like a G.I. Joe who's lost his kung-fu grip on his senses."

— Pierce, Charles P. (b. 1953)

Date: July 26, 2016

"We've got to win this battle in the mindfield."

— Clinton, Bill (b. 1946)

Date: July 27, 2016

"But, gradually, I found myself caught up in the flow of the thing, gliding in my mind around every bend in the river, riding a raft with someone who knows where all the snags and sunken rocks of public life are."

— Pierce, Charles P. (b. 1953)

Date: February 18, 2017

"'He lives inside his head, where he runs the same continuous loop of conflict with people he turns into enemies for the purposes of his psychodrama,' says Trump biographer Michael D'Antonio."

— Dowd, Maureen (b. January 14, 1952)

Date: February 18, 2017

"So we're stuck in Trump's head with him. ... It's a very cluttered place to be, a fine-tuned machine spewing a torrent of chaos, cruelty, confusion, farce and transfixing craziness."

— Dowd, Maureen (b. January 14, 1952)

Date: February 18, 2017

"Then think of the president's skull, which is stuffed with other humours: insecurity, insincerity, victimhood, paranoia, mockery, self-delusion, suspicion, calculation, illogic, vindictiveness, risk, bullying, alimentiveness, approbativeness, vitativeness. Gall, divided into three parts."

— Dowd, Maureen (b. January 14, 1952)