Quote collection
250 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The Soviet Union tried for 70 years to plant Marxism with bayonets in Eastern Europe. Today there are more Marxists on the Harvard faculty than there are in Eastern Europe."
"Pessimism is as American as apple pie - frozen apple pie with a slice of processed cheese."
"We have 3,141 counties in this country. That would be 20 per county. The idea that we can't assimilate these 8-year-old criminals with their teddy bears is preposterous."
"I say statecraft is soulcraft. Just as all education is moral education because learning conditions conduct, most legislation is moral legislations because it conditions the action and the thought of the nation in broad and important spheres in life."
"Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings."
"As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise."
"Liberalism is wrong because it doesn't work. If a company is too big to fail, it is too big to exist."
"No matter how deeply you distrust the government's judgment, you are too trusting."
"This is an age in which one cannot find common sense without a search warrant."
"Government has the role of suiting people for freedom. People aren't made for freedom spontaneously. There's sort of a 19-year race between when people are born and when they become adults. And government has a role in making them, at the end of 19 years, suited to be upright, trustworthy repositories of popular sovereignty."
"Perhaps the soundest advice for parents is: Lighten up. People have been raising children for approximately as long as there have been people."
"The great task of life is transmission: the task of transmitting the essential tools and graces of life from our parents to our children"
"Obama entered the presidency trailing clouds of intellectual self-regard. His carefully cultivated persona was of a uniquely thoughtful, judicious, deliberative, evidence-driven man comfortable with complexity. The protracted consideration of Keystone supposedly displayed these virtues. Now, however, it is clear that his mind has always been as closed as an unshucked oyster."
"World War II was the last government program that really worked."
"Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it."
"Modern Americans travel light, with little philosophic baggage other than a fervent belief in their right to the pursuit of happiness."
"The strongest continuous thread in America's political tradition is skepticism about government."
"In 1976, Jimmy Carter - peanut farmer; carried his own suitcase, imagine that - somewhat tapped America's durable but shallow reservoir of populism. By 1980, ordinariness in high office had lost its allure."
"It is extraordinary how extraordinary the ordinary person is."
"Americans complain a lot about the government and they voice a generalized suspicion of the government, but they constantly clammer for more of it."