All laws are an attempt to domesticate the natural ferocity of the species. |
America's greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive. |
Be willing to make decisions. That's the most important quality in a good leader. Don't fall victim to what I call the ready-aim-aim-aim-aim syndrome. You must be willing to fire. |
Eighty-seven percent of all people in all professions are incompetent. |
Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well. |
Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well. |
For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred. |
History never looks like history when you are living through it. |
I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive. |
I am for integrity, if only because life is very short and truth is hard to come by. |
I think all human systems require continuous renewal. They rigidify. They get stiff in the joints. They forget what they cared about. The forces against it are nostalgia and the enormous appeal of having things the way they have always been, appeals to a supposedly happy past. But we've got to move on. |
If you have some respect for people as they are, you can be more effective in helping them to become better than they are. |
It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government. |
Leaders can express the values that hold the society together. Most important, they can conceive and articulate goals that life people out of their petty preoccupations, carry them above the conflicts that tear a society apart, and unite them in the pursuit of objectives worthy of their best efforts. |
Leaders come in many forms, with many styles and diverse qualities. There are quiet leaders and leaders one can hear in the next county. Some find strength in eloquence, some in judgment, some in courage. |