History is a better guide than good intentions.

Words can destroy. What we call each other ultimately becomes what we think of each other, and it matters.

All of us confront limits of body, talent, temperament. But that is not all. We are, all of us, also constrained by our time, our place, our civilization.

A doctrine of class war seemed to provide a solution to the problem of poverty to people who know nothing about how wealth is created

I don't think the government (of El Salvador) was responsible. The nuns were not just nuns; the nuns were political activists. We ought to be a little more clear-cut about this than we usually are. They were political activists on behalf of the Frente and somebody who is using violence to oppose the Frente killed them.

For all their faults, right-wing authoritarian regimes more easily accept democratic reforms than left-wing totalitarian states.

The absence of utopianism in the Constitution, law, and traditional political culture has been ... important in limiting expectations concerning what can be achieved by politics. The history of the last two centuries confirms what the framers of the Constitution understood: that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and the search for unalloyed virtue in public life leads to unalloyed terror.