At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of the Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family.

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.

Never worry what others say when you walk away from all the drama. Be grateful you had the strength and courage to stay out of the conflict and be at peace with your choices.

Here's to the moments when you realize the simple things are wonderful and enough.

You know what turns dirt into diamonds?""Pressure. Weight. Heat...""The geological equivalent of torture.

Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.

The laws of physics and chemistry must be the same in a crucible as in the larger laboratory of Nature.

Phone networks can capture life on our planet.

The joy about the recording is that you are your own boss. You don't have a director telling you how to do it.

I always liked paintings to be walls rather than windows. When we see a painting on a wall, it's a window, so I often put my paintings in the middle of the space to make a wall.

There are a lot of good actors, and writers out there.

Burt Lancaster was largely responsible for me becoming a director.