The person who pays an ounce of principle for a pound of popularity gets badly cheated.

What's happening in Cuba is not a failure of the Cuban people. It's a failure of Fidel Castro and the Communists.

We have not inherited an easy world. If developments like the Industrial revolution, which began in England, and the gifts of science and technology have made life much easier for us, they have also made it more dangerous. There are threats now to our freedom, indeed to our very existence, that other generations could never even have imagined. There is first the threat of global war. No president, no Congress, no prime minister, no parliament can spend a day entirely free of this threat. If history teaches anything, it teaches self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly.

I'm convinced that today the majority of Americans want what those first Americans wanted: A better life for themselves and their children; a minimum of government authority.

We could say the government spend like drunken sailors, but that would be unfair to drunken sailors, because the sailors are spending their own money.

To grasp and hold a vision, that is the very essence of successful leadership-not only on the movie set where I learned it, but everywhere.

Too often, people forget the basic fact of life: all those good things we enjoy come from the ache in [our] backs and the willingness to shoulder great personals risks.