Actually, there is only one "first question" of government, and it is "How should we live?" or "What kind of people do we want our citizens to be?"

Language

As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.

Passion

She is so totally absorbed in a vocation -- both a gift and a mastering passion -- that she has no time to be absorbed with the self's worries about itself. And that is the moral of the story: You can pursue happiness by wearing a torn jersey. You can catch it by being good at something you love.

Self-interest

Long before Einstein told us that matter is energy, Machiavelli and Hobbes and other modern political philosophers defined man as a lump of matter whose most politically relevant attribute is a form of energy called "self-interestedness." This was not a