Leadership is, among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it - short-term pain for long-term gain.

• 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.
• Government has the role of suiting people for freedom. People aren't made for freedom spontaneously. There's sort of a 19-year race between when people are born and when they become adults. And government has a role in making them, at the end of 19 years, suited to be upright, trustworthy repositories of popular sovereignty.
• The future has a way of arriving unannounced.
• World War II was the last government program that really worked.
• If you seek Hamilton's monument, look around. You are living in it. We honor Jefferson, but live in Hamilton's country, a mighty industrial nation with a strong central government.
• World War II was the last government program that really worked.