You have to know one big thing and stick with it. The leaders who had one very big idea and one very big commitment. This permitted them to create something. Those are the ones who leave a legacy.

Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions - it only guarantees equality of opportunity.

Even if we can't be happy, we must always be cheerful.

One can be unhappy before eating caviar, even after, but at least not during.

The enemy of liberal capitalism today is not so much socialism as nihilism.

A conservative is a liberal mugged by reality.

If you believe that no one was ever corrupted by a book, you have also to believe that no one was ever improved by a book.

Nostalgia is one of the legitimate and certainly one of the most enduring of human emotions; but the politics of nostalgia is at best distracting, at worst pernicious.

The major political event of the twentieth century is the death of socialism.

A welfare state, properly conceived, can be an integral part of a conservative society.

The really difficult moral issues arise, not from a confrontation of good and evil, but from a collision between two goods

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

The habit of thinking prevents us at times from experiencing reality, immunises us against it, makes it seem no more than any other thought.

At moments of wonder, it is easy to avoid small thinking, to entertain thoughts that span the universe, that capture both thunder and tinkle, thick and thin, the near and the far.

As a boy, I believed freedom for America meant freedom for me. There was a time I believed every word spoken.

You can love someone you mistrust.

In cases in which the related previous personality had committed suicide, the subject has shown an inclination to contemplate and threaten suicide.

If we are growing we are always going to be outside our comfort zone.

Just one time before I turn into the villain of this piece, just one time before I become the fourth and final Unseelie prince, I want to be her Highlander. And her hero.

Gut level is a good level to deal with life, and for me, I have to say that Buddhism makes sense for me because it's how I'm an artist.

Writing is no respecter of blueprints.