It was raining cats and dogs, and I fell in a poodle.

Illegitimacy is the single most important social problem of our time - more important than crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy, welfare or homelessness because it drives everything else.

We tried to provide more for the poor and produced more poor instead. We tried to remove the barriers to escape poverty, and inadvertently built a trap.

Give people plenty and security, and they will fall into spiritual torpor.

The welfare state is an enemy of private property. The excessive taxation used to support the welfare state is extremely dangerous.

The most troubling aspect of social policy towards the poor in late 20th century America is or how much it costs, but what it has bought.

Educational romanticism asks too much from students at the bottom of the intellectual pile, asks the wrong things from those in the middle, and asks too little from those at the top.

We believe that human happiness requires freedom and that freedom requires limited government.

When life becomes an extended picnic, with nothing of importance to do, ideas of greatness become an irritant. Such is the nature of the Europe syndrome.

The United States Congress, acting with large bipartisan majorities, at the urging of the President, enacted as the law of the land that all children are to be above average.

Risk is the stuff that sucks the predictability right out of the very things that we desperately wish were predictable.

Everyone can identify with a fragrant garden, with beauty of sunset, with the quiet of nature, with a warm and cozy cottage.

When you first start working, you take whatever job is offered, because you have to build your resume. But you don't think about what you're building.

Religion is not just incongruent with morality, but in essential ways incompatible with it.

I commend you, however, for passing the time in as merry a manner as you possibly could; it is assuredly better to go laughing than crying thro' the rough journey of life.

When you have children, you start to play with them and you mirror yourself. You see your parents in yourself. It's all about mirroring.

They come for you in the morning in a limousine; they take you to the studio; they stick a pretty girl in your arms... They call that a profession? Come on!

Progress is a choice. Job creation is a choice. Whether we give our children a future of more or a future of less - this, too, is a choice.

Fatherlessness didn't strike me as being an event. It was a state of life.

Three of my children married Jewish people. One did not and that marriage didn't last more than half a dozen years or so. The others are still very close.