“All too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows”

“Asking for something is easy… being responsible for it is the part that develops character.” 

“We must be prepared to make the same heroic sacrifices for the cause of peace that we make ungrudgingly for the cause of war.”

“And when you discover what you will be in your life, set out to do it as if God Almighty called you at this particular moment in history to do it. Don’t just set out to do a good job. Set out to do such a good job that the living, the dead or the unborn couldn’t do it any better. If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.”

“Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.”

“If you fall into a pit, you need a ladder, not a hoe. You must climb up and not dig up. Leaders discover the right way out of limitations.”

“People are unrealistic, illogical, and self-centered. Love them anyway.”

“You can put a public school and university in the middle of every block of every city in America—but you will never keep America from rotting morally by mere intellectual education.”

“Why is it that no one understands me and everybody likes me”

“… the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.”

“Stop the blame game; you can't win it! All fans of blame are defeated in every way... Don't join them!”

“God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong, but I can't. If a thing is free to be good it's also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata -of creatures that worked like machines- would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they've got to be free. Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently, He thought it worth the risk. (...) If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will -that is, for making a real world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings- then we may take it it is worth paying.”

“This is the moment we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.”

“Prior preparation is Success divided by half. Once you have fully prepared, every hand glove that obstacles wear to pull you away from reaching your destination will become slippery!”

“Perhaps the greatest psychological, spiritual, and medical need that all people have is the need for hope.”