The gap between ideals and actualities, between dreams and achievements, the gap that can spur strong men to increased exertions, but can break the spirit of others -- this gap is the most conspicuous, continuous land mark in American history. It is conspicuous and continuous not because Americans achieve little, but because they dream grandly. The gap is a standing reproach to Americans; but it marks them off as a special and singularly admirable community among the world's peoples.
We are given children to test us and make us more spiritual.
Today more Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses than for property crimes
Modern man's capacity for destruction is quixotic evidence of humanity's capacity for reconstruction. The powerful technological agents we have unleashed against the environment include many of the agents we require for its reconstruction.
Actually, there is only one first question of government, and it is How should we live? or What kind of people do we want our citizens to be?
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.
Americans are overreaching; overreaching is the most admirable and most American of the many American excesses.
Football combines the two worst features of American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.
As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.
Ronald Reagan has held the two most demeaning jobs in the country; President of the United States and radio broadcaster for the Chicago Cubs.
It is no longer enough to be lusty. One must be a sexual gourmet.
It is said that God gave us memory so we could have roses in winter. But it is also true that without memory we could not have self in any season. The more memories you have, the more you have. That is why, as Swift said, No wise man ever wished to be younger.
She is so totally absorbed in a vocation -- both a gift and a mastering passion -- that she has no time to be absorbed with the self's worries about itself. And that is the moral of the story: You can pursue happiness by wearing a torn jersey. You can catch it by being good at something you love.
The pursuit of perfection often impedes improvement.
The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.
Pessimism is as American as apple pie. Frozen apple pie with a slice of processed cheese.
All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are up to a point.
A politician's words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.
Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.
If your job is to leaven ordinary lives with elevating spectacle, be elevating or be gone.
Long before Einstein told us that matter is energy, Machiavelli and Hobbes and other modern political philosophers defined man as a lump of matter whose most politically relevant attribute is a form of energy called self-interestedness. This was not a
Voters don't decide issues, they decide who will decide issues.