Liberty is the essential precondition for achieving virtue... In order to exercise virtue, we need to have the ability to choose freely.

I don't want reporters to talk to me because I'm a revolutionary and if it got out that I'm basically friendly with Obama it would hurt Obama.

Some critics accuse capitalism of being a selfish system, but the selfishness is not in capitalism - it is in human nature.

In the Sixties, there was a big resistance to the Vietnam War. People began reinterpreting all American history as a series of misadventures and crimes and oppressions visited upon the innocent, the poor, the defenseless, the minorities, and so on. This created a new narrative in America. Let's call it, "America the inexcusable." And this narrative has been drummed into the minds of our young people. A whole generation of Americans has been taught that theirs is a bad country. And it's then very difficult for them to figure out how one can one be a good citizen in a bad country.

The free society does not guarantee virtue, any more than it guarantees happiness. But it allows for the pursuit of both, a pursuit rendered all the more meaningful and profound because success is not guaranteed, it has to be won through personal striving.

Somehow freedom for religious expression has become freedom from religious expression.

What was distinctively Western was not slavery but the moral crusade to end slavery.