Top 51 Quotes & Sayings by William Bennett

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.

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.

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.

All real education is the architecture of the soul.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

A kind and compassionate act is often its own reward.

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.

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 not attention to it and go about your business, you'll find it rubbing against your legs and jumping into your lap.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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?

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

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

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

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.

We are here to help one another along life's journey.

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