Our middle class majority, deeply in personal debt, elects political leaders who increase our benefits. Then we vote them out because we dislike the soaring national debt.

Thinking is like exercise, it requires consistency and rigor. Like barbells in a weightlifting room, the classics force us to either put them down or exert our minds. They require us to think.

The slaves in Rome were incapable of leisure and so their masters gave them entertainment to keep them pacified.

Americans must either choose big government and be willing to pay for and submit to it, or they must move toward smaller, less intrusive government and be willing to enjoy fewer government programs.

No matter what the Constitution says, it won't endure if the people don't closely read it and demand that it be followed.

Until the American majority is willing to live within its means, it can hardly force its political leaders to do so.

The only person who can fix education is the student.

Real value means people value-and creating value really means helping people choose better lives.

The liberal arts are the arts of communication and thinking. 'They are the arts indispensable to further learning, for they are the arts of reading, writing, speaking, listening, figuring.

Still reading but learning a lot about true education and the process of guiding our children in their educational pursuits.

Education means the ability to think independently and creatively, and development of the skill of applying one's knowledge in dealing with people and situations in the real world.

Water was liquid silver, water was gold. It was clarity—a sacred thing. Drinking was no longer something to take for granted. I’d never needed to consider water before.

I think we've moved to thinking of parenting and pregnancy as something in which you should lose yourself.

True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.

[To waiter who had spilled soup on her:] Never darken my Dior again!

Delight in itself is the approach of sanity. Delight is to open our eyes to the reality of the situation rather than siding with this or that point of view.

Voltaire expected that within fifty years of his lifetime there would not be one Bible in the world. His house is now a distribution center for Bibles in many languages.

Nobody . . . took me seriously. They wondered why in the world I wanted to be a chemist when no women were doing that. The world was not waiting for me.

If you do not feel the bitter cold inside you when you look at the poor trembling out of cold, it means you are lack of compassion; in other words, you are lack of everything!

Everything new troubles us. Life catches us unawares and obliges us to journey towards the unknown, even when we do not want to, even when we do not need to.

Civil religion is the attempt to empower religion, not for the good of religion, but for the creation of the citizen.