If you don't have 30 years to devote to social policy, don't get involved.

You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.

To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.

The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it's so rare.

Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from life what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government agencies to do good.

Marriage orients men and women toward the future, asking them not just to commit to each other but to plan, to earn, to save, and to devote themselves to advancing their children's prospects.

The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.

I'm a Democrat, and there are an important group of things only the government can do. But let us be clear that for most of the world, what they most need is less government.

If the newspapers of a country are filled with good news, the jails of that country will be filled with good people.

I can live with the robber barons, but how do you live with these pathological radicals?

The principal objective of American government at every level should be to see that children are born into intact families and that they remain so.

Any fool can know. The point is to understand.

The truth is, after all the declamations we have heard, that the Constitution is itself, in every rational sense, and to every useful purpose, A BILL OF RIGHTS.

Society says that men need to be bigger and stronger, and they must protect their women and so on.

I was 46 when 'Cold Mountain' came out. I was settled. We had a nice house in Raleigh and a horse farm.

I fired Mike Flynn because of what he said to Mike Pence, very simple. Mike was doing his job, calling countries and his counterparts, so it certainly would have been ok with me if he did it.

Logic , like lyrical poetry , is no employment for the middle-aged

This rascal ego must be obliterated.

I am glad I am an optimist. The pessimist is half-licked before he starts.

A great leap in the dark

The notion that a story has a message assumes that it can be reduced to a few abstract words, neatly summarized in a school or college examination paper or a brisk critical review.