William Bennett Quotations

Our schools should get five years to get back to where they were in 1963. If they're still bad maybe we should declare educational bankruptcy, give the people their money and let them educate themselves and start their own schools

If we are surrounded by the trivial and the vicious, it is all too easy to make our peace with it.

There are no menial jobs, only menial attitudes.

Happiness is like a cat. If you try to coax it or call it, it will avoid you. It will never come. But if you pay no attention to it and go about your business, you'll find it rubbing up against your legs and jumping into your lap.

All real education is the architecture of the soul.

Real fatherhood means love and commitment and sacrifice and a willingness to share responsibility and not walking away from one's children.

A kind and compassionate act is often its own reward.

For children to take morality seriously they must be in the presence of adults who take morality seriously. And with their own eyes they must see adults take morality seriously.

Sometimes we need to remind ourselves that thankfulness is indeed a virtue.

The formation of character in young people is educationally a different task from, and a prior task to, the discussion of the great, difficult, ethical controversies of the day. First things first. And planting the ideas of virtue, of good traits in the young, comes first. In the moral life, as in life itself, we take one step at a time. Every field has its complexities and controversies. And so does ethics. And every field has its basics. So too with values.

America's support for human rights and democracy is our noblest export to the world.

Now we have reason to be grateful once again that Al Gore is not the man in the White House, and never will be.

Give yourself an even greater challenge than the one you are trying to master and you will develop the powers necessary to overcome the original difficulty.

It is our character that supports the promise of our future - far more than particular government programs or policies.

The elementary school must assume as its sublime and most solemn responsibility the task of teaching every child in it to read. Any school that does not accomplish this has failed.

Our common language is English. And our common task is to ensure that our non-English-speaking children learn this common language.

There are no mental jobs, only mental attitudes.

I don't think people have the right to be angry, if they look at the whole thing. But if they get a selective part of my comment, I can see why they would be angry. If somebody thought I was advocating that, they ought to be angry. I would be angry.

If it comes across that Clinton is weaseling the law and obscuring the truth, I think he's in more trouble.

He will throw it right back in their faces. He knows more about it than they do. He's spent more time dealing with the problem, and he's actually solved the problem rather than pontificating about it from Capitol Hill.

We've got to have candor and talk about these things while we reject wild hypotheses,

What you are going to see (Monday), I take it, is an unrehearsed president, a president without makeup, so to speak, standing in front of the grand jury getting some very tough questions, ... Late Edition.

Our Transportation Department has followed the progress of the union contract negotiations closely so we were aware of the potential for a strike for many months. As a result we had been having informal conversations with Penn transportation personnel for well over two months in preparation for how we would respond.

Some of us in college, some of us in high school, you know, did things that we weren't particularly happy about or proud of later, speaking here for myself,

I was putting forward a bad argument in order to put it down, ... They reported and emphasized only the abhorrent argument, not my shooting it down.

an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.

an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do.

a bad argument in order to put it down.

Anytime you have a strike it is a difficult situation and we hope an agreement can be reached quickly. In the mean time, we are prepared to continue to provide the additional services until the situation is resolved.

If Senator Lott can provide a satisfactory explanation for his statement, this entire episode should be forgotten. If he cannot, he needs to step down as the Senate majority leader.

In my position it is hard to say exactly how many students are affected but certainly a significant portion of the student body is affected.

The Irish say, you know, 'the merry-hearted boys make the best of all men,'

The current controversy that has arisen around comments I made on my radio show, based on a willful distortion of what I said, will take away from the serious discussion I wanted to engage in with the students and community at the University of Cincinnati,

True courage is mixed with circumspection, the kind of healthy skepticism that asks, 'Is this the best way to do this?' True cowardice is marked by chronic skepticism, which always says, 'It can't be done.'

I have no doubt that the real irritation of those on the religious right is not that their particular creed is not embraced by the schools, but that often their creed is the only one singled out for contempt.

When you have an individual that is committed to killing someone else, you can`t expect a restraining order or the police to provide 24-hour protection.

A weakened sense of responsibility does not weaken the fact of responsibility.

It is ironic that anyone who appeals to religious values today runs the risk of being called 'divisive' or attacked as an enemy of pluralism.

America's only respectable form of bigotry is bigotry against religious people. And the only reason for hatred of religion is that it forces us to confront matters many would prefer to ignore.

In the battle for preserving sound social and moral norms, many religious institutions can no longer be counted as allies.

Have we come to the point where it is now considered a secular blasphemy to acknowledge the name of God at all?

From Samuel Adams to Patrick Henry to Benjamin Franklin to Alexander Hamilton, all the Founders intended religion to provide a moral anchor for our liberty in democracy.

President Bush was widely ridiculed for consulting the Reverend Billy Graham before the Gulf war.

Nothing in recent years, on television or anywhere else, has improved on a good story that begins "Once upon a time..."

The new source of divisiveness is the assault of secularism on religion.

The history of our nation is intertwined with a certain religious tradition, and that the First Amendment was not intended to result in the complete exclusion of religious beliefs from our public classrooms.

A City University of New York study done in 1991 revealed that nearly 90% of the American people identify themselves religiously as Christians or Jews, while only 7.5 percent claim no religion.

The secretary of education does not work for the education establishment. The secretary works for the American people.

I do not suggest that you should not have an open mind ... but don't keep your mind so open that your brains fall out.

There is nothing more influential in a child's life than the moral power of quiet example. For children to take morality seriously they must see adults take morality seriously.

Too much of anything, even a good thing, may prove to be our undoing...[We] need ...to set definite boundaries on our appetites.

I think we need to find out why the citizens of the world's wealthiest, most envied, most powerful country are so cynical, so distressed, so angry, so ticked of about so many things.

When we were attacked on Sept. 11, we knew the main reason for the attack was that Islamists hated our way of life, our virtues, our freedoms. What we never imagined was that the free press - an institution at the heart of those virtues and freedoms - would be among the first to surrender.

I can only speak about my own commute and can say that it has certainly affected my commute, making it longer and more hectic.

Government, obviously, cannot fill a child's emotional needs. Nor can it fill his spiritual and moral needs. Government is not a father or mother. Government has never raised a child, and it never will.

Home is a shelter from storms - all sorts of storms.

Loving your homeland is just as natural as loving your father or mother - after all, your country nourishes you, protects you, and in many ways makes you who you are. Just as it's a virtue to honor your parents, it's a good and admirable thing to honor the land you call home.

What you've got here is really a case of journalists making fun of people who believe in God and the devil.

If there is one thing educators can agree on, it's this: children do better in school when their parents get involved in their learning.

People of good character are not all going to come down on the same side of difficult political and social issues. Good people-people of character and moral literacy-can be conservative, and good people can be liberal. We must not permit our disputes over thorny political questions to obscure the obligation we have to offer instruction to all our young people in the area in which we have, as a society, reached a consensus: namely, on the importance of good character, and some of its pervasive particulars.

Responsible persons are mature people who have taken charge of themselves and their conduct, who own their actions and own up to them--who answer for them.

I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could—if that were your sole purpose—you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down,

And I'm supposed to believe that Reagan was a great leader? This is who he chose as the Secretary of Education...

The President is the symbol of who the people of the United States are. He is the person who stands for us in the eyes of the world and the eyes of our children.

If we want our children to possess the traits of character we most admire, we need to teach them what those traits are and why they deserve both admiration and allegiance. Children must learn to identify the forms and content of those traits.

"Honor never grows old, and honor rejoices the heart of age. It does so because honor is, finally, about defending those noble and worthy things that deserve defending, even if it comes at a high cost. In our time, that may mean social disapproval, public scorn, hardship, persecution, or as always, even death itself. The question remains: What is worth defending? What is worth dying for? What is worth living for?

Much of the left-liberal elite despise traditional religious beliefs ... in general, they are profoundly uncomfortable with religious institutions and the traditional values they embody.

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