“There comes a time when silence is betrayal.”

“Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.”

“- In my country we go to prison first and then become President.”

“I believe if you keep your faith, you keep your trust, you keep the right attitude, if you're grateful, you'll see God open up new doors.”

“It is not where you start but how high you aim that matters for success.”

“Its good to live alone than to live in a bad company”

“The very nastiest and coarsest, I can't tell you. It is not grief, not dullness, but much worse. It is as if all that was good in me had hidden itself, and only what is horrid remains.

“Do you want your faith to grow? Then let the Bible begin to saturate your mind and soul.”

“Learn to say 'no' to the good so you can say 'yes' to the best.”

“Déjele todo a Dios, viva una vida de perdón y no se la viva intentando vengarse con todos, pagándoles por lo que le hicieron. Dios ve cada injusticia que se le ha hecho, cada persona que le ha lastimado. Él tiene el archivo, y la Escritura dice que si usted no se venga, Dios le recompensará, le pagará. Y amigo, no sólo le pagará, Él le pagará abundantemente.”

“The fact that earth is not our ultimate home explains why, as followers of Jesus, we experience difficulty, sorrow, and rejection in this world.11 It also explains why some of God’s promises seem unfulfilled, some prayers seem unanswered, and some circumstances seem unfair. This is not the end of the story. In order to keep us from becoming too attached to earth, God allows us to feel a significant amount of discontent and dissatisfaction in life — longings that will never be fulfilled on this side of eternity. We’re not completely happy here because we’re not supposed to be! Earth is not our final home; we were created for something much better.”

“But whenever I tried to pin down this idea of self-esteem, the specific qualities we hoped to inculcate, the specific means by which we might feel good about ourselves, the conversation always seemed to follow a path of infinite regress. Did you dislike yourself because of your color or because you couldn’t read and couldn’t get a job? Or perhaps it was because you were unloved as a child—only, were you unloved because you were too dark? Or too light? Or because your mother shot heroin into her veins … and why did she do that anyway? Was the sense of emptiness you felt a consequence of kinky hair or the fact that your apartment had no heat and no decent furniture? Or was it because deep down you imagined a godless universe? Maybe one couldn’t avoid such questions on the road to personal salvation. What I doubted was that all the talk about self-esteem could serve as the centerpiece of an effective black politics. It demanded too much honest self-reckoning from people; without such honesty, it easily degenerated into vague exhortation. Perhaps with more self-esteem fewer blacks would be poor, I thought to myself, but I had no doubt that poverty did nothing for our self-esteem. Better to concentrate on the things we might all agree on. Give that black man some tangible skills and a job. Teach that black child reading and arithmetic in a safe, well-funded school. With the basics taken care of, each of us could search for our own sense of self-worth.”

“If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.”

“They compose poems to their knives.”

“There can be no peace for us, only misery, and the greatest happiness.”