The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.

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.

And finally - FINALLY - after a lifetime of feelings and anxiety and more feelings, I didn't have any feelings left. I had spent my last feeling being disappointed that I couldn't rent Jumanji.

The child in you like all children loves to laugh to be around people who can laugh at themselves and life. Children instinctively know that the more laughter we have in our lives the better.

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family friends and society are the natural enemies of a writer. He must be alone uninterrupted and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.

I live my daydreams in music.

I'd probably have been wealthier if I had stayed with law, but pretty miserable doing it.

Intricate minglings of different uses in cities are not a form of chaos. On the contrary, they represent a complex and highly developed form of order.

Skating is what got me into punk rock.

French people are strange about America, I think.

Keeping the mind happy makes work effortless. This is the skill for productivity!

I believe in thrift as I believe in freedom, but I don't support the plutocratic hostility to taxation, regulation, and protections of land, water, and air.