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.

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?

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

It's not life or death, the labyrinth. Suffering. Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you.

No problem is so complicated that you cannot make it more complicated.

I believe in a fight between me & Wilder... I can come out on top

Our identity includes our natural world, how we move through it, how we interact with it and how it sustains us.

All pleasure in the world is a passing dream.

That is the ultimate power, to stare death in the face and be unafraid.

I have only one ambition left: I should like to have a good epitaph.

I saw my hometown burning that day.

What is it like to be connected to someone you can never get away from, for better or worse? I love trying to answer that question.

Most people don't know how to tell stories.