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.

In too many cases, if our Government had set out determined to destroy the family, it couldn't have done greater damage than some of what we see today.

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

The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it's so rare.

Citizen participation is a device whereby public officials induce nonpublic individuals to act in a way the officials desire.

The work of democratic government is routinely concerned with matters defined as troubles. In "The Presidency and the Press" I make the point, familiar to anyone who has flown about the world much, that the best quick test of the political nature of a regime is to read the local papers on arrival. If they are filled with bad news, you have landed in a libertarian society of some sort. If, on the other hand, the press is filled with good news, it is a fair bet that the jails will be filled with good men.

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.