I soon discovered, after I became chairman of the NEH, that, for a number of academics, the truth was not merely irrelevant - it no longer existed.
What the power structure is afraid of is that we're going to learn to recognize the truth when we hear it.
Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.
As precious as life itself is our heritage of individual freedom, for man's free agency is a God-given gift.
Happy is said to be the family which can eat onions together. They are, for the time being, separate, from the world, and have a harmony of aspiration.
Members of weakly religious families get, of course, no religious training from any source outside the family.
When I was a child, on Sunday mornings the family would assemble around the blue-leather-covered gramophone to listen to records.
A family is too frail a vessel to contain the risks of all the warring impulses expressed when such a group meets on common ground.
And as a child I was filled with passionate admiration for acts of civic courage I had seen performed by an elderly military doctor, who was a friend of my family.
You surprise yourself on some balls off the bat. You don't think you have a chance to catch it. And then your natural ability just takes over.
Change is tough, people don't like it, but it is necessary. Take two aspirins and call me in the morning.
Those who are rooted in the depths that are eternal and unchangeable and who rely on unshakeable principles, face change full of courage, courage based on faith.
I realized if you can change a classroom, you can change a community, and if you change enough communities you can change the world.
The lies the government and media tell are amplifications of the lies we tell ourselves. To stop being conned, stop conning yourself.
If you're going to pick a book and you want to base a system of government around it, why not 'Harry Potter?'
The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character. The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality, but no one would have regarded it as vitally necessary.
Then in my early teens, when the home computer bubble was blowing, I had one of the first, an Acorn Atom, and used to write primitive adventures on that.
It's nonsense to say money doesn't buy happiness, but people exaggerate the extent to which more money can buy more happiness.
Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill.
A liberal education... frees a man from the prison-house of his class, race, time, place, background, family and even his nation.
Western democracies exalt the ideal of social equality, but our economic system arguably emerged from 16th-century Calvinism, a religion whose members believed that God showed favor by bestowing wealth and other forms of success on what they called '...
