The aim of any good constitution is to achieve in a society a high degree of political harmony, so that order and justice and freedom may be maintained.

Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it: they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light.

If you want to have order in the commonwealth, you first have to have order in the individual soul.

I am a conservative. Quite possibly I am on the losing side; often I think so. Yet, out of a curious perversity I had rather lose with Socrates, let us say, than win with Lenin.

We ought not to endeavor to revise history according to our latter day notions of what things ought to have been, or upon the theory that the past is simply a reflection of the present

Every right is married to a duty, every freedom owes a corresponding responsibility.

If the state - and within the state, the judiciary particularly - harasses and undermines the Church , in any society the state undoes itself.

Sudden and slashing reforms are as perilous as sudden and slashing surgery.

Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings.

A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.

The Secular City, having legislated and litigated itself out of any entanglement with the City of God, would be a hell upon earth .

One’s life is short, but the life of the spirit is long.

the bible gives me a deep comforting sense that (things seen are temporal, and things unseen are eternal.

Nature understands you more than you understand nature. Nature is your true mother.

Whatever is well said by another is mine.

My reputation is too important to put it aside for purposes of some friendship. We have a job to do.

You must begin to think of yourself as becoming the person you want to be.

I don't create the movies I'm in. When it comes to music, it's my clothes, it's my guitar, it's my voice, it's my song.

La guerre, la guerre, everything la guerre. That's how I grew up. So for me, it's real. It's not something in the past.

Perhaps a good resolution for the new year would be to keep asking what world we want to pass on to the next generation. Indeed to ask whether we have a real and vivid sense of that next generation.

You may have crap that wants to drag you down, but if you really like what you're doing, then there's always a silver lining.