Top 40 William J. Bennett Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— William J. Bennett

2. “Home is a shelter from storms – all sorts of storms.”

— William J. Bennett

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

— William J. Bennett

4. “We are here to help one another along life’s journey.”

— William J. Bennett

5. “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.”

— William J. Bennett

6. “Tis a lesson you should heed, Try, try again; If at first you don’t succeed, Try, try again; Then your courage should appear, For, if you will persevere, You will conquer, never fear; Try, try again.”

— William J. Bennett

7. “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.”

— William J. Bennett

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

— William J. Bennett

9. “All real education is the architecture of the soul.”

— William J. Bennett

10. “America’s support for human rights and democracy is our noblest export to the world.”

— William J. Bennett

11. “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.’”

— William J. Bennett

12. “A weakened sense of responsibility does not weaken the fact of responsibility.”

— William J. Bennett

13. “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.”

— William J. Bennett

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

— William J. Bennett

15. “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

16. “It is our character that supports the promise of our future – far more than particular government programs or policies.”

— William J. Bennett

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

— William J. Bennett

18. “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.”

— William J. Bennett

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

— William J. Bennett

20. “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.”

— William J. Bennett

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

— William J. Bennett

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

— William J. Bennett

23. “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.”

— William J. Bennett

24. “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.”

— William J. Bennett

25. “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.”

— William J. Bennett

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

26. “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.”

— William J. Bennett

27. “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.”

— William J. Bennett

28. “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.”

— William J. Bennett

29. “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.”

— William J. Bennett

30. “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.”

— William J. Bennett

31. “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.”

— William J. Bennett

32. “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.”

— William J. Bennett

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

— William J. Bennett

34. “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.”

— William J. Bennett

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

— William J. Bennett

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

— William J. Bennett

37. “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.”

— William J. Bennett

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

— William J. Bennett

39. “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

40. “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.”

— William J. Bennett

41. “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

42. “We Americans are so good at critiquing our own nation, so determined to make it better, that sometimes we neglect to acknowledge all that is wonderful about it. Let us not commit the sin of ingratitude for so many blessings.”

— William J. Bennett

43. “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.”

— William J. Bennett

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

— William J. Bennett

45. “The day Americans stop viewing explicit patriotism as a virtue and begin to view it as something “eccentric and foolish” is the day we cease to be a great country.”

— William J. Bennett

46. “For half a century we sought happiness,” Elias’s wife says in this story, “and as long as we were rich we never found it. Now that we have nothing left, and have taken service as laborers, we have found such happiness that we want nothing better.” This simple yet profound story is a good one for anybody choosing a career, job, or task. There’s certainly nothing wrong with working to get money, but there may be something very wrong if you think getting the money gets you happiness.”

— William J. Bennett

47. “Simply put, war restores in man the belief that there are some things worth fighting and dying for; things like love, liberty, and faith.”

— William J. Bennett