I will be able to love above all discontentment. To give even when I am stripped of everything. To dry tears even when I am still crying. To believe even when I am discredited.
We do not believe that if you cut back what government does you diminish its authority. On the contrary, a government that did less, and therefore did better, would strengthen its authority.
I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.
There are those who believe that a new modernity demands a new morality. What they fail to consider is the harsh reality that there is no such thing as a new morality. There is only one morality . All else is immorality.
There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil, a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome." "And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody." "And yours," he replied with a smile, "is wilfully to misunderstand them.
The kids that are different and out there and expressive and are bold with those choices, those are the people that grow up to be people we all want to hang out with, that become celebrities or become really successful in what they do because they believe in who they are.
It sometimes happened that you might be familiar with a man for several years thinking he was a wild animal, and you would regard him with contempt. And then suddenly a moment would arrive when some uncontrollable impulse would lay his soul bare, and you would behold in it such riches, such sensitivity and warmth, such a vivid awareness of its own suffering and the suffering of others, that the scales would fall from your eyes and at first you would hardly be able to believe what you had seen and heard. The reverse also happens.
I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.
But I'm here to say that when we do speak out, we're going to do so because the United States of America does believe, and will always stand for, a certain set of universal values.