It is easy to criticize, particularly in a political season. But to lead is something altogether different. The leader must live in the real world of the price that might be paid for the goal that has been set.

There is a real opportunity right now as parents and grandparents to come up with a plan that leaves our kids with something better than we have; that is, an opportunity to own, build, and grow a nest egg of their own.

We have to get away from the class warfare and recognize that we are growing jobs by helping small business.

Our cattlemen have given us the safest, most abundant, most affordable beef supply in the world and I trust their judgment. And if you look at consumer confidence in this country, so does the American public.

It's obviously unfair to paint with a broad brush here, but the germ of an idea for a breakthrough in technology doesn't come out of a business school curriculum. It comes out of a laboratory or a math lecture or a physics tutorial.

The final outcome cannot be known, either to the originator of a new theory, or to his colleagues and critics, who are bent on falsifying it. Thus, the scientific innovator may feel all the more lonely and uncertain.

Our annual school physics trip was always to Blackpool Pleasure Beach, as it's such a good example of Newtonian physics. You can learn about centrifugal force and Newton's first law from the roller coasters, and the Viking long boat is a giant pendulum. It's good for children to understand that science underpins all these brilliant things.

My eyes are constantly wide open to the extraordinary fact of existence. Not just human existence, but the existence of life and how this breathtakingly powerful process, which is natural selection, has managed to take the very simple facts of physics and chemistry and build them up to redwood trees and humans.