My favorite part of the experience of serving in Congress is knowing that my time and effort are spent for the greater good and for the betterment of our nation.
We change who we are to fit the exogenous of our time, and not just strategically or to our own advantage, sometimes sympathetically without our even knowing it for the betterment of the whole group.
Congress, the press, and the bureaucracy too often focus on how much money or effort is spent, rather than whether the money or effort actually achieves the announced goal.
Legal immigrants deserve respect for following the laws of our nation and completing the process. This is not an extreme concept. It is a matter of simply protecting our nation's sovereignty and knowing who is coming into our nation.
I spent an incredible amount of time during my teaching career serving on committees. I now regard the lion's share of the time spent in committee work as having been wasted. One of the great lessons learned by those who achieve is how to manage time.
The goal ever recedes from us. The greater the progress the greater the recognition of our unworthiness. Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment. Full effort is full victory.
If you want to experience joy in your life, you have to be able to step outside yourself and become part of a cause that is much larger than you; one that brings a greater good to a greater community.
The one thing our Founding Fathers could not foresee - they were farmers, professional men, businessmen giving of their time and effort to an idea that became a country - was a nation governed by professional politicians who had an interest in getting re-elected. They probably envisioned a fellow serving a couple of hitches and then eagerly looking forward to getting back to the farm.
Doing nothing requires effort. Over time, that effort is greater than the effort necessary to improve, or move somewhere better. The trick is to redirect energy.
There's only so many guys on a football team that really have a voice. So anytime you have a microphone, you should use it for the betterment of humanity, for the betterment of this country, for the betterment of our kids coming up behind us, for the future of the world. Why not? Make the world a better place.
Do not attempt to accomplish greater results by a greater effort of your little understanding, but by a greater understanding of your little effort. The greater your understanding of the power within yourself, the less effort you need to make in order to achieve.
Our decision about energy will test the character of the American people and the ability of the President and the Congress to govern this Nation. This difficult effort will be the moral equivalent of war, except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not to destroy.
It is my sincere opinion that our precious time on earth should not be spent attempting to justify unbelievable acts of cruelty, death, and disease as a part of 'God’s Plan' or the greater good — and clinging to ancient texts that preach ill-concealed bigotry and sexism. Instead, we should find ways to make this life happy and satisfying, without regard to the unknowable nature of an afterlife.
It must be conceded that a theory has an important advantage if its basic concepts and fundamental hypotheses are 'close to experience,' and greater confidence in such a theory is certainly justified. There is less danger of going completely astray, particularly since it takes so much less time and effort to disprove such theories by experience. Yet more and more, as the depth of our knowledge increases, we must give up this advantage in our quest for logical simplicity in the foundations of physical theory.
I've learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances.
Because of my life experience and because of my public life experience, I have the ability to lead this nation and to bring all people together and to lift up the cause of this nation so that we once again become a nation that comes from the heart and reconnect with our optimism to really create a nation that we can all be proud of.
Since 1981, I've spent every Thanksgiving Day broadcasting a game, and it is one of my favorite days. You can say, 'Woe is me, I never get to be part of the tradition,' or you can say, 'Heck, we've got our own tradition, and it's pretty good.'