Issues are important, yes, but issues come and go. America as an ideal is timeless.

If our presidents, or potential presidents, don't know this or don't articulate [an America ideal], that's a blown opportunity. The president can teach as well as lead.

Many of these failures can be laid at the feet of the awful state of American higher education, and especially the way in which our secular universities have divorced their instruction from timeless truths like faith and freedom. Many of the professors at these places plainly don't respect the founders and, in particular, the religious foundation of the founders.

It is quite sad, to me, that that ideal, that vision and understanding [of American founding ], doesn't seem to be a part of the current political season.

Reagan thought that school prayer was important because it was crucial to begin each day reminding students that their inalienable rights came to them from their Creator and not from government bureaucrats.

The American founding is not just about a group of people, a group of men. It is about an ideal: Both a vision and understanding of the very essence of democracy, constitutional government, a representative republic, and the remarkably powerful concept of being endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights.

[Ronald Reagan] called the image of [George] Washington praying on his knees in Valley Forge "the most sublime image in American history."