Somebody talked me into writing an autobiography about six or seven years ago. And I said I'd try. We talked into a tape recorder, and after a couple of months, I said, To hell with it. I was so depressed. It was like saying, 'This is the end.' I was more interested in what the hell was coming the next day or the next week.

My worry about the New York Times is that it's got the only position as a national elitist general-interest paper. So the network news picks up its cues from the Times. And local papers do too. It has a huge influence. And we'd love to challenge it.

Can we change the world? No, but hell, we can all try.

I'm not an economist and we all know economists were created to make weather forecasters look good.

We're not spending enough money, but probably we let the teachers unions set curriculas which don't teach them the right things. There's not emphasis on the ...the basic learning that you need if you're going to go on in a college and into post-graduate work.

John Marks Templeton has achieved exemplary success in both business and philanthropy. For Looking Forward he has assembled a diverse and remarkable group of experts in their fields-including the environment, medicine, the physical sciences, religion, the family, and international relations-and contributed two stellar pieces as well. Together these essays dispel fashionable pessimism and show how the world can progress-and is progressing-toward a better future.

I'm considered homophobic and crazy about these things and old fashioned. But I think that the family - father, mother, children - is fundamental to our civilisation.