Give people plenty and security, and they will fall into spiritual torpor.

Illegitimacy is the single most important social problem of our time - more important than crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy, welfare or homelessness because it drives everything else.

We tried to provide more for the poor and produced more poor instead. We tried to remove the barriers to escape poverty, and inadvertently built a trap.

It was raining cats and dogs, and I fell in a poodle.

The welfare state is an enemy of private property. The excessive taxation used to support the welfare state is extremely dangerous.

The most troubling aspect of social policy towards the poor in late 20th century America is or how much it costs, but what it has bought.

Educational romanticism asks too much from students at the bottom of the intellectual pile, asks the wrong things from those in the middle, and asks too little from those at the top.

We believe that human happiness requires freedom and that freedom requires limited government.

When life becomes an extended picnic, with nothing of importance to do, ideas of greatness become an irritant. Such is the nature of the Europe syndrome.

The United States Congress, acting with large bipartisan majorities, at the urging of the President, enacted as the law of the land that all children are to be above average.

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.

Diplomacy in leadership is winning the war on behalf of both sides

There's nothing more demoralizing than a leader who can't clearly articulate why we're doing what we're doing.

And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.

Most true things are kind of corny, don’t you think? But we make them more sophisticated out of sheer embarrassment.

After all, I don't see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood.

Wait a minute! This is grass! We've been eating grass!

Why should it be that just when technology is most encouraging of creativity, the law should be most restrictive?

When philosophers try to understand consciousness, much of what they claim is not conceptual analysis at all, though it may be shopped under that description.