We know television should educate and inform, and I believe it should entertain.

I have no message or answers to social questions.

I've worked on what I think are good things.

I've been involved in some movies that I really thought were going to take off that didn't. And then I've thought, 'This movie's not going anywhere,' and it worked. The same thing with television shows.

I just think 'Law & Order' is the gold standard. History is going to show that it's probably one of the best series of shows that has been on television.

I really don't think there's such a thing as an ex-policeman.

Most cop movies and TV shows are fantasies.

I even played a part in 'Miami Vice.'

I like being in the '60s.

There's not too many offers that come my way about being in a musical.

It was a great time, and I liked the guys. I liked getting up every morning and being a cop.

My parents, I don't know about 'strict,' but I would say they were fair and judicious, you know?

If you did something, and it wasn't right, you definitely found out about it. And they were pretty smart people, both my parents, so you didn't get too much by them.

I think my high-school acting career lasted a day.

You really have to act on the force, too. You're involved in a hundred things a day, and you have to react in a hundred different ways, depending on what's going on. And you learn that as you go through your career, how you handle certain situations, interrogations, how you carry yourself. There's a kind of acting to it.

Am I a good actor? I don't think about it. But I'm working on it.

I have - and you gotta believe this - hardly ever met anybody in Hollywood who's not nice. There are some people I don't like, but everybody has been very nice.

I had seen 'Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels' and I thought that was a different kind of film than I'd seen before, with that kind of editing and slick camera movements.

You can't act for the editing. You have to leave that to him. So you just go in and do the scene the way you think is right or whatever you're directed to do, and leave the rest of that technical stuff up to the director.

Everybody wants to look in the mirror and see Cary Grant looking back at them, but that's just not the case.

Maybe it's because I was too much reality, but I'm not interested in seeing too much reality anymore. I'd rather watch a Dean Martin concert and let the world go by.

I've probably played more non-police roles than people realize.

I like working. I like getting up every morning and going somewhere. Where I do it or what form doesn't matter.

I live my life. And the best place to do that is Chicago.

This isn't the most handsome face in the world, and there are a lot of younger guys out there, but I keep hanging in there.

I'm a bit of a clotheshorse, and having a tailor-made suit is a big deal.

Goodness is about character - integrity, honesty, kindness, generosity, moral courage, and the like. More than anything else, it is about how we treat other people.

Happiness is dependent on self-discipline. We are the biggest obstacles to our own happiness. It is much easier to do battle with society and with others than to fight our own nature.

Socialism values equality more than liberty.

As you get older and wiser you realize that when people are given anything without having to earn it (unless they are physically or mentally utterly incapable of earning anything), they become ungrateful and lazy. They also become less happy.

Corruption is Africa's greatest problem. Not poverty. Not lack of riches. Not racism.

Those who believe in nothing are very, very jealous and angry at those who believe in something.

Unhappy, let alone angry, religious people provide more persuasive arguments for atheism and secularism than do all the arguments of atheists.

Conservatives divide the world in terms of good and evil while liberals do it in terms of the rich and poor.

Rather than dividing the world between good and evil, the Left divided the world in terms of economics. Economic classes, not moral values, explained human behavior. Therefore, to cite a common example, poverty, not one's moral value system, or lack of it, caused crime.

Complaining not only ruins everybody else's day, it ruins the complainer's day, too. The more we complain, the more unhappy we get.

If there is no God, the labels 'good' and 'evil' are merely opinions. They are substitutes for 'I like it' and 'I don't like it.' They are not objective realities.

More harm was done in the 20th century by faceless bureaucrats than tyrant dictators.

There is no limit to suffering human beings have been willing to inflict on others, no matter how innocent, no matter how young, and no matter how old. This fact must lead all reasonable human beings, that is, all human beings who take evidence seriously, to draw only one possible conclusion: Human nature is not basically good.

I have never written that there is a threat of fascism in America. I always considered the idea overwrought. But now I believe there really is such a threat - and it will come draped not in an American flag, but in the name of tolerance and health.

The election, and even the re-election, of a black man as president, in a country that is 87 percent non-black - a first in human history - has had no impact on what are called 'racial tensions.'

Our scientific age demands that we provide definitions, measurements, and statistics in order to be taken seriously. Yet most of the important things in life cannot be precisely defined or measured. Can we define or measure love, beauty, friendship, or decency, for example?

People confuse goodness with weakness. It is weak people, not good people (goodness demands strength), who are taken advantage of.

Given the amount of unjust suffering and unhappiness in the world, I am deeply grateful for, sometimes even perplexed by, how much misery I have been spared.

In a lifetime of observing and participating in political debate, I have seen a lot of meanness.

Once one understands that 'racial tensions' is a euphemism for a black animosity toward whites and a left-wing construct, one begins to understand why the election of a black president has had no impact on most blacks or on the left.

Therefore the vast majority of the people who affirm leftist beliefs think of their views as the only way to properly think about life.

The idea that you earn things - that you earn respect, that you earn income, responsibility, the vote, punishment... these ideas are anathema to the liberal mind.

There's a lot more power in calm than in vituperation.

Liberals tend to put the onus of your success on society and conservatives on you and your family.