The world's largest debtor is a distinction of sorts, but not the one we like having.

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

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.

...there is simply nothing so important to a people and its government as how many of them there are, whether their number is growing or declining, how they are distributed as between different ages, sexes, and different social classes and racial and ethnic groups, and again, which way these numbers are moving.

If you don't have 30 years to devote to social policy, don't get involved.

Government cannot provide values to persons who have none, or who have lost those they had. It cannot provide inner peace. It can provide outlets for moral energies, but it cannot create those energies.

No one is innocent after the experience of governing. But not everyone is guilty.