Ever since man began to till the soil and learned not to eat the seed grain but to plant it and wait for harvest, the postponement of gratification has been the basis of a higher standard of living and of civilization.

Republicans are people who, if you were drowning 50 feet from shore, would throw you a 25-foot rope and tell you to swim the other 25 feet because it would be good for your character. Democrats would throw you a hundred-foot rope and then walk away looking for other good deeds to do.

Those terrifying verbal jungles called laws are simply such directives, accumulated, codified, and systematized through the centuries.

The traditional educational theory is to the effect that the way to bring up children is to keep them innocent (i.e., believing in biological, political, and socioeconomic fairy tales) as long as possible ... that students should be given the best possible maps of the territories of experience in order that they may be prepared for life, is not as popular as might be assumed.

We live in a highly competitive society, each of us trying to outdo the other in wealth, in popularity or social prestige, in dress, in scholastic grades or golf scores. One is often tempted to say that conflict, rather than cooperation, is the great governing principle of human life.

We should keep [the Panama Canal]. After all, we stole it fair and square.

In the age of television, image becomes more important than substance.