If you have a family mission statement that clarifies what your purpose is, then you use that as the criterion by which you make the decisions.

Morality is contraband in war.

The wise use of your freedom to make your own decisions is crucial to your spiritual growth, now and for eternity.

Our diplomacy and development budget is not just about reducing spending and finding efficiencies. We need a frank conversation about what we stand for as that ‚shining city on a hill.‘ And that conversation begins by acknowledging that we can’t do it on the cheap.

Our character is what we do when we think no one is looking.

When in doubt tell the truth.

My work is about my life, and what I want to do with it.

Everything I have, my career, my success, my family, I owe to America.

When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, ‚I used everything you gave me‘.

My mother was always fascinated with the fact that I could rhyme so much stuff.

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.

Unless a president can protect the privacy of the advice he gets, he cannot get the advice he needs.

Probably because I’m from a middle class family, I have that nature in me that I don’t get too excited with big things.

It is not more vacation we need – it is more vocation.

I was born in a very poor family. I used to sell tea in a railway coach as a child. My mother used to wash utensils and do lowly household work in the houses of others to earn a livelihood. I have seen poverty very closely. I have lived in poverty. As a child, my entire childhood was steeped in poverty.

A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.

I said on the equality side of it, that it is essential to a woman’s equality with man that she be the decision-maker, that her choice be controlling.

I make decisions all day, so it’s nice for a woman like me to go to dinner and have the man take the menu and say, ‚Let me order.‘ Other women would be offended by that, but I’m like, ‚Good. Because I can’t make one more decision today.‘ I want someone to rub my feet without being asked.

There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right.

It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.

I never had to choose a subject – my subject rather chose me.

I’m just glad I was able to return to some of that innocence and beauty I had as a child when I started my own family, and my children brought me back some of that spirit.

I’d go to, like, six different schools in one year. We were on welfare, and my mom never ever worked.

You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.

I would rather have peace in the world than be President.

A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about.

Favor comes because for a brief moment in the great space of human change and progress some general human purpose finds in him a satisfactory embodiment.

The way to develop decisiveness is to start right where you are, with the very next question you face.

Who shall decide when doctors disagree, And soundest casuists doubt, like you and me?

Everything I do, I hope, is that I represent something, and I represent the right things to my children and give them the right sense of what they’re capable of and the world as it should be seen.

Forethought we may have, undoubtedly, but not foresight.

One aspect of appellate judging is we have to give reasons for all of our decisions. And when you sit down and try to write it out, sometimes you find that your first judgment wasn’t the right one.

The just is close to the people’s heart, but the merciful is close to the heart of God.

With all the… success that I’ve been lucky enough to get? That doesn’t happen unless the home life is solid.

The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.

We should work with the principle that a work that can be done at a lower level should never be escalated to a higher level.

To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.

People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.

The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

A ‚No‘ uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a ‚Yes‘ merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.

We spend so much time sublimatin‘, thinkin‘ about, ‚What am I going to have for lunch, dinner?‘

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

Going home helps the content.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worse kind of suffering.

Among the many values in life, I appreciate freedom most.

All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football.

Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has arrived, stop thinking and go in.

Doing what’s right isn’t the problem. It is knowing what’s right.

To the person with a firm purpose all men and things are servants.

I take my kids to school. And if I go to work, I go to work, and they visit me on set. I come home. I have dinner with my family. I have breakfast with my family. I have a very solid, very warm home.

My father wasn’t perfect. He had a temper. I took some of that. He would snap, but the older he got, he started calming down. He learned about life, but the thing that he taught my whole family was that family was the most important thing and, no matter what, if a family member needs you, you go and help them out; you get there.

We lived in a tall, narrow Victorian house, which my parents had bought very cheaply during the war, when everyone thought London was going to be bombed flat. In fact, a V-2 rocket landed a few houses away from ours. I was away with my mother and sister at the time, but my father was in the house.

I was not raised with wealth or resources or any social standing to speak of.

Life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face.

I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.

I think that everybody needs four things in life. Everybody needs something to do regardless of age. Everybody needs someone to love. Everybody needs something to hope for, and, of course, everybody needs someone to believe in.

The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before. It’s not that there’s something new in our way of thinking – it’s that credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before.

As a father, safety is always a top of mind issue for me.

I am the son of a freedom fighter, and a son of a freedom fighter automatically imbibes the value of democracy.