You will be a happier person if you don't do what you want to do, most of the time

Much of the world's moral compass is broken. The moral north reads south and the moral south reads north.

If anything, we older people yearn for a peaceful world even more than young people do. We are the ones who lost friends or relatives in some war. We are the ones who have lived a lifetime of seeing and reading about human suffering.

Of all the characteristics needed for both a happy and morally decent life, none surpasses gratitude. Grateful people are happier, and grateful people are more morally decent.

The fact is that people who strap bombs to their bodies to blow up families at a Bar Mitzvah in Israel, plant bombs at a nightclub in Bali, or slit stewardesses' throats and ram airplanes filled with innocent Americans into office buildings do not do so for any reason related to poverty. They do so because they hold evil beliefs and have deformed consciences

Having travelled to some 20 African countries, I find myself, like so many other visitors to Africa before me, intoxicated with the continent. And I am not referring to the animals, as much as I have been enthralled by them during safaris in Kenya, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Rather, I am referring to the African peoples.

No American conservative has ever argued that the government should never be involved in peoples' lives. That is anarchy, and we don't argue for that.