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.

There is one unmistakable lesson in American history; a community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future - that community asks for and gets chaos.

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

The liberal left can be as rigid and destructive as any force in American life.

Liberty lives in protest and democracy prospers under conditions of change. When we travel about the world and come to a country whose newspapers are filled with bad news we feel that liberty lives in that land. When we come to a country whose newspapers are filled with good news, we feel differently.

If we get into the mind-set where the good becomes the enemy of the best, we will get nothing.

To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.