William J. Bennett Quotes

• “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.”

  William J. Bennett

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• “There are no menial jobs, only menial attitudes.”

  William J. Bennett

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• “A falsehood can run around the world while the truth is still putting its shoes on.”

  William J. Bennett

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• “The essence of education is, in the words of William James, to teach a person what deserves to be valued, to impart ideals as well as knowledge, to cultivate in students the ability to distinguish the true and good from their counterfeits and the wisdom to prefer the former to the latter.”

  William J. Bennett

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• “John Stuart Mill, the British philosopher, said, “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.”

  William J. Bennett

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• “American soldiers were dying in frigid Korea. One of our greatest generals told us that the president and his team were not trying to win. And some strident voices were saying that that was because they didn't want to win,”

  William J. Bennett

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• “Politics is the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order,”

  William J. Bennett

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• “Eisenhower has been much criticized for his failure publicly to endorse the Court's decision. But he felt that doing so would set an undesirable precedent. If a president endorsed decisions he agreed with, might he feel compelled to oppose decisions he did not agree with? And what would that do to the rule of law? "The Supreme Court has spoken and I am sworn to uphold ... the constitutional processes.... I will obey."3”

  William J. Bennett

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• “and line of cases. Justice Byron R. "Whizzer" White, a JFK appointee, dissented, calling Doe an act of "raw judicial power," as it took these decisions from the states and enshrined their determination in the Supreme Court's reasoning.”

  William J. Bennett

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• “While the Bible was the definitive reference point for settling questions of doctrine and practice, questions not clearly settled by Scripture that were of theological importance were numerous (and difficult), and churches could not always look to precedents in church history as a guide. The difficulty of resolving disputes is evident in an even more serious controversy from the late second century.”

  William J. Bennett

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• “One good way to understand what conservatism is really about is to use the acronym FLINT to remember five core concepts: Free enterprise, Limited government, Individual liberty, National defense, and Traditional values. These five principles are a good summary of conservative thought in America today.”

  William J. Bennett

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• “Although his deafness required shouted conversation or written questions and answers, reporters enjoyed interviewing him for his pithy, penetrating comments. Once, asked what advice he had for youth, he replied, “Youth doesn’t take advice.” He never accepted happiness or contentment as worthwhile goals. “Show me a thoroughly satisfied man,” he said, “and I will show you a failure.”

  William J. Bennett

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• “Those who follow that part of themselves which is great are great men; those who follow that part which is little are little men. To the mind belongs the office of thinking. By thinking, it gets the right view of things; by neglecting to think, it fails to do this. Let a man first stand fast in the supremacy of the nobler part of his constitution, and the inferior part will not be able to take it from him. It is simply this which makes the great man.”

  William J. Bennett

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• “There is no end to the good you can do if you don’t care who gets credit for it.”

  William J. Bennett

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• “Whatsoever is not said in all sincerity, is wrongly said. And not to be able to rid oneself of this vice is only to sink deeper toward perdition. “Those who do evil in the open light of day—men will punish them. Those who do evil in secret—God will punish them. Who fears both man and God, he is fit to walk alone.”

  William J. Bennett

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• “The final salute, on the day of his funeral, was to be the cutoff of all electric current in the nation for one minute. But this was deemed too costly and dangerous. Instead, only certain lights were dimmed. The wheels of progress were not stilled, even for an instant. Thomas Edison, I am sure, would have wanted it that way.”

  William J. Bennett

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• “Walt Whitman (1819–1892) traveled to the Virginia battlefront in 1862 to tend to his wounded brother. Afterwards, he worked in Washington, D.C., as a volunteer nurse in army hospitals.”

  William J. Bennett

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• “I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”

  William J. Bennett

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• “Conservatives recognize that free enterprise—or capitalism, as it’s also known—is the best system the world has ever seen for creating jobs and good living conditions. It has lifted countless millions of people out of poverty and made their lives better.”

  William J. Bennett

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• “Sweden, where he had traveled to accept the Nobel Prize for literature. It is foremost an exhortation to young writers, a reminder that artistic creation does have duties, and that forgetting those duties relegates one’s work to the ranks of mediocrity. But his words speak to every reader of literature as well. Faulkner reminds us that what we study in school and what we read in our precious spare time matters. Great literature—the kind we cannot afford to miss—speaks to problems of the spirit, the “human heart in conflict with itself,” and nothing less. It lifts our eyes to the virtues we possess and the nobility we would acquire, and helps us to prevail.”

  William J. Bennett

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• “8. Show not yourself glad at the misfortune of another, though he were your enemy.”

  William J. Bennett

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• “Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong, merely relative to this. . . . The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of man as his leg or arm. It is given to all human beings in a stronger or weaker degree, as force of members is given them in a greater or less degree.”

  William J. Bennett

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• “Robert Louis Stevenson Children, you are very little, And your bones are very brittle; If you would grow great and stately, You must try to walk sedately. You must still be bright and quiet, And content with simple diet; And remain, through all bewild’ring, Innocent and honest children. Happy hearts and happy faces, Happy play in grassy places— That was how, in ancient ages, Children grew to kings and sages. But the unkind and the unruly, And the sort who eat unduly, They must never hope for glory— Theirs is quite a different story! Cruel children, crying babies, All grow up as geese and gabies, Hated, as their age increases, By their nephews and their nieces.”

  William J. Bennett

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• “Competition between businesses creates better products and services, as well as lower prices. It encourages entrepreneurship and fosters good, hard work. The competition of free enterprise is a major reason businesses are usually more efficient and productive than government.”

  William J. Bennett

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• “We can look back on each day as being either lost or spent. Mary Ann Evans, better known as George Eliot (1819–1880), shows us how to tell the difference, and what is worth a day’s expense. If you sit down at set of sun And count the acts that you have done, And, counting, find One self-denying deed, one word That eased the heart of him who heard, One glance most kind That fell like sunshine where it went— Then you may count that day well spent. But if, through all the livelong day, You’ve cheered no heart, by yea or nay— If, through it all You’ve nothing done that you can trace That brought the sunshine to one face— No act most small That helped some soul and nothing cost— Then count that day as worse than lost.”

  William J. Bennett

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