Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.
Technology has enabled government to have investigative and situational awareness on a scale and scope that were science fiction when the Stasi shut its doors.
Some of you read with me 40 years ago a portion of Aristotle's Ethics, a selection of passages that describe his idea of happiness. You may not remember too well.
The term 'natural resources' confuses people. 'Natural resources' are not like a finite number of gifts under the Christmas tree. Nature is given, but resources are created.
I made a decision when my father passed away that I was going to be who God made me to be and not try to preach like my father.
I ought to pray as much as God's on my mind, because then I'd pray a lot. All I can tell you is God is real, and so that infuses everything.
And another thing is that I think as a church whenever we become politically driven, we alienate at least 50 percent of the people that God called us to reach with our political orientations.
I wanted to hold onto and exploit the power of narrative. This is not only a book about a great storyteller, but there have to be stories about the storyteller.
We live in this world of great promise, where everything seems to offer an unchanging final happiness, if we can only get enough of it. It is very intoxicating.
I understand that it's good tactics to categorize me as a close-minded, unobjective extremist, but nobody that respects me has those views.
What I have always wanted for myself is much more primitive. It is probably nothing more than the affection of the people with whom I am in contact, and their good opinion of me.
When you have good ingredients, cooking doesn't require a lot of instruction because you can never go very wrong.
People confuse goodness with weakness. It is weak people, not good people (goodness demands strength), who are taken advantage of.
If kids can learn how to make a simple Bolognese sauce, they will never go hungry. It's pretty easy to cook pasta, but a good sauce is way more useful.
The key to good decision making is evaluating the available information - the data - and combining it with your own estimates of pluses and minuses. As an economist, I do this every day.
If everyone is good at something different, assigning chores is easy. If your partner is great at grocery shopping and you are great at the laundry, you're set. But this isn't always - or even usually - the case.
Politics is a place of humble hopes and strangely modest requirements, where all are good who are not criminal and all are wise who are not ridiculously otherwise.
There ain't any news in being good. You might write the doings of all the convents of the world on the back of a postage stamp, and have room to spare.
The economy is much bigger than the market. We will not be able to build a good economy - nor a good society - unless we look at the vast expanse beyond the market.
I've taught myself how to use good, fresh ingredients and to prepare them as simply as possible by cooking only to enhance their intrinsic flavors.
If venereal delight and the power of propagating the species were permitted only to the virtuous, it would make the world very good.
