The great task of life is transmission: the task of transmitting the essential tools and graces of life from our parents to our children

In September 1942 the U.S. government purchased 58,575 acres of wilderness in eastern Tennessee. Soon there was a town, Oak Ridge, and amazing scientific facilities. Thirty-four months after the purchase, an atomic blast lit the New Mexico desert. After 43 months in Iraq, U.S. forces still struggle to cope with improvised explosive devices.

The Soviet Union tried for 70 years to plant Marxism with bayonets in Eastern Europe. Today there are more Marxists on the Harvard faculty than there are in Eastern Europe.

Political nature abhors a vacuum, which is what often exists for a year or two in a party after it loses a presidential election.

Politicians fascinate because they constitute such a paradox; they are an elite that accomplishes mediocrity for the public good.

Good biology without good philosophy will be a calamity.

We are suffering from a kind of slow-motion barbarization from within.