Our problem is not to find better values but to be faithful to those we profess.

The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept.

Some people have greatness thrust upon them. Very few have excellence thrust upon them.

The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursing his own education. This will not be a widely shared pursuit until we get over our odd conviction that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else.

The cynic says, "One man can't do anything." I say, "Only one man can do anything."

All laws are an attempt to domesticate the natural ferocity of the species.

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.

Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all.

Our problem is not to find better values but to be faithful to those we profess.

Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.

Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community.

History never looks like history when you are living through it.

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

Some people strengthen the society just by being the kind of people they are.

When one may pay out over two million dollars to presidential and Congressional campaigns, the U.S. government is virtually up for sale.

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.

Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.

Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach.

One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.

If you have some respect for people as they are, you can be more effective in helping them to become better than they are.

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.

The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.

We are all faced with a series of great opportunities - brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.

Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.

It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.

True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.

For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.

The idea for which this nation stands will not survive if the highest goal free man can set themselves is an amiable mediocrity. Excellence implies striving for the highest standards in every phase of life.

The cynic says, 'One man can't do anything.' I say, 'Only one man can do anything.'

One of my less pleasant chores when I was young was to read the Bible from one end to the other. Reading the Bible straight through is at least 70 percent discipline like learning Latin. But the good parts are of course simply amazing. God is an extremely uneven writer but when Hes good nobody can touch Him.

We get richer and richer in filthier and filthier communities until we reach a final state of affluent misery crocus on a garbage heap.

If you have some respect for people as they are you can be more effective in helping them to become better than they are.

When hiring key employees there are only two qualities to look for judgement and taste. Almost everything else can be bought by the yard.

We cannot have islands of excellence in a sea of slovenly indifference to standards.

To sensible men, every day is a day of reckoning.

All excellence involves discipline and tenacity of purpose.

On the road to equality there is no better place for blacks to detour around American values than in forgoing its example in the treatment of its women and the organization of its family.

Don't try to be somebody you're not because it doesn't work. If you try to be this perfect person or perfect persona of what you think that somebody should be when they're involved in public office, it's just not going to work. Just be yourself, stay true to your core values, and really just stay abreast of the issues.

Alabama citizens, like the vast majority of Americans, respect and value the meaning of decency, and appreciate public institutions that reflect the common values of our society.

If you take the creation of music and the creation of your own life values as your overall goal, then living becomes a musical process.

However, when the privilege depends solely on the broad, undifferentiated claim of public interest in the confidentiality of such conversations, a confrontation with other values arises.

Values are not trendy items that are casually traded in.

Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.

All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.

In any case, his judgment and set of values, acting alone or through his assistants, determine not only what is gold and what is dross but the design of the history which he creates out of the metal. The historian decides what is significant, and what is not.

The secret of a good life is to have the right loyalties and hold them in the right scale of values.

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom, and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.

We have a close, unshakable bond between the United States and Israel, and between the American and Israeli people. We share common values and a commitment to a democratic future for the world, and we are both committed to a two-state solution. But that doesn't mean that we're going to agree.

Catholic schools in our Nation's education have been paramount in teaching the values that we as parents seek to instill in our children.