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

When we were attacked on Sept. 11, we knew the main reason for the attack was that Islamists hated our way of life, our virtues, our freedoms. What we never imagined was that the free press - an institution at the heart of those virtues and freedoms - would be among the first to surrender.

When you have an individual that is committed to killing someone else, you can`t expect a restraining order or the police to provide 24-hour protection.

Have we come to the point where it is now considered a secular blasphemy to acknowledge the name of God at all?

Our common language is English. And our common task is to ensure that our non-English-speaking children learn this common language.

A weakened sense of responsibility does not weaken the fact of responsibility.

Our schools should get five years to get back to where they were in 1963. If they're still bad maybe we should declare educational bankruptcy, give the people their money and let them educate themselves and start their own schools