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.

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.

And their conviction is that if it is done with that kind of purity it will go somewhere. I believe that with all my heart, but I'm not responsible for its going somewhere.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

Ronald Reagan's well documented final battles with Alzheimer's disease were fought with the same conviction and courage that his many public battles were fought.

Many hard comments have been made on my efforts in India from the side of the Congress party, yet I feel content in the deep conviction that the offer I traveled 22,000 miles to discuss with Indian leaders was a real contribution to a solution of our differences.

For a successful revolution it is not enough that there is discontent. What is required is a profound and thorough conviction of the justice, necessity and importance of political and social rights.

I was induced to establish several orders of merit, from conviction that emulation, well directed, becomes a useful servant; and, that the latent genius of some youth is more easily brought into action this way, than by the more sordid gratification of self-interest.

Music is a hobby, because I'm not making any money out of it, but I put just as much conviction into that as I do into my acting.

The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting.

One of the dreariest spots on life's road is the point of conviction that nothing will ever again happen to you.

Insurance - an ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.

The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

It was very important that it be done in such a way that it be executed with complete conviction. If I had done it both ways, if I was trying to cover myself in case it didn't work, then it would have been to no purpose.