Real fatherhood means love and commitment and sacrifice and a willingness to share responsibility and not walking away from one's children.

True courage is mixed with circumspection, the kind of healthy skepticism that asks, 'Is this the best way to do this?' True cowardice is marked by chronic skepticism, which always says, 'It can't be done.'

All real education is the architecture of the soul.

If we are surrounded by the trivial and the vicious, it is all too easy to make our peace with it.

President Bush was widely ridiculed for consulting the Reverend Billy Graham before the Gulf war.

The formation of character in young people is educationally a different task from, and a prior task to, the discussion of the great, difficult, ethical controversies of the day. First things first. And planting the ideas of virtue, of good traits in the young, comes first. In the moral life, as in life itself, we take one step at a time. Every field has its complexities and controversies. And so does ethics. And every field has its basics. So too with values.

It is our character that supports the promise of our future - far more than particular government programs or policies.