Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.

Well, you know, the definition of second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.

A society that thinks the choice between ways of living is just a choice between equally eligible 'lifestyles' turns universities into academic cafeterias offering junk food for the mind.

I suppose there's a melancholy tone at the back of the American mind, a sense of something lost. And it's the lost world of Thomas Jefferson. It is the lost sense of innocence that we could live with a very minimal state, with a vast sense of space in which to work out freedom.

Freedom means the freedom to behave coarsely, basely, foolishly.