“Every man had his personal habits, passions, and impulses toward goodness, beauty, and truth.”

“The most valuable lessons in life do not come when you are walking or running. They come when you fall down. You better take them and rise up!”

“In recent decades we have seen significant deviation regarding the equal application of the laws, but again, it is not too late to rectify the situation if we the people of the United States take enough interest in our political situation to exercise our right as voters and put people in office who will uphold our Constitution.”

“Men of genius are admired, men of wealth are envied, men of power are feared, but only men of character are trusted.”

“Don’t be so sure you know where to draw the line,” he said. “We carry our past with us. And, mother mine, there’s a thing you don’t know and should—we are Harkonnens.”

“Avoid the use of abusive words in communications that may switch off the attention of your mentor and your customers away.”

“Welfare was taking away the very thing that people needed most—the initiative to provide for themselves. At the same time it was undermining the family: Teenagers from the inner cities, who for various reasons decided they didn’t want to live at home anymore, discovered that by getting pregnant—they didn’t even have to wait for their baby to be born—they got a welfare check that allowed them to rent their own apartment, and they discovered they could increase their monthly welfare check any time they chose simply by getting pregnant again. Meanwhile, the father of the child might have a good job and want to live with his family. But he was told his family was better off financially if he walked out on them; if he stayed, they wouldn’t get a welfare check. Not only was the welfare program a tax-financed incentive for immorality that was destroying the family, it was responsible for an endless and malignant cycle of despair in which generation after generation went on the dole and never had any incentive to leave it.”

“Get books, sit yourself down anywhere, and go to reading them yourself.”

“Don’t be too fast to highlight the weaknesses of other people. That is the quickest way of exposing your own weaknesses.”

“There is a simple rule we can follow to guide us in our conversation: If it is good, uplifting, wholesome, and pleasant, say all you want to, but if it is evil, negative, critical, and complaining, then don’t say it. Ask God to change your heart so there is not even a hint of wanting to say it. What is in our heart will eventually come out of our mouth, so we cannot change what we say unless we change what we think.”

“That's what the leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions, people carried with them some central explanation of themselves. Stories full of terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them. Sacred stories. ”

“—DON M. GREEN is Executive Director of the nonprofit Napoleon Hill Foundation, a position he has held for fourteen years. Don is a board member of The University of Virginia/Wise and president of the University of Virginia/Wise Foundation Board. Prior to his position with the Napoleon Hill Foundation, he was a bank”

“There is an old Eastern fable about a traveler who is taken unawares on the steppes by a ferocious wild animal. In order to escape the beast the traveler hides in an empty well, but at the bottom of the well he sees a dragon with its jaws open, ready to devour him. The poor fellow does not dare to climb out because he is afraid of being eaten by the rapacious beast, neither does he dare drop to the bottom of the well for fear of being eaten by the dragon. So he seizes hold of a branch of a bush that is growing in the crevices of the well and clings on to it. His arms grow weak and he knows that he will soon have to resign himself to the death that awaits him on either side. Yet he still clings on, and while he is holding on to the branch he looks around and sees that two mice, one black and one white, are steadily working their way round the bush he is hanging from, gnawing away at it. Sooner or later they will eat through it and the branch will snap, and he will fall into the jaws of the dragon. The traveler sees this and knows that he will inevitably perish. But while he is still hanging there he sees some drops of honey on the leaves of the bush, stretches out his tongue and licks them. In the same way I am clinging to the tree of life, knowing full well that the dragon of death inevitably awaits me, ready to tear me to pieces, and I cannot understand how I have fallen into this torment. And Itry licking the honey that once consoled me, but it no longer gives me pleasure. The white mouse and the black mouse – day and night – are gnawing at the branch from which I am hanging. I can see the dragon clearly and the honey no longer tastes sweet. I can see only one thing; the inescapable dragon and the mice, and I cannot tear my eyes away from them. And this is no fable but the truth, the truth that is irrefutable and intelligible to everyone.

“Spiritual emptiness is a universal disease.”

“The Church says that the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the Church. Ferdinand Magellan, Portuguese and Spanish explorer”