“DEFINITENESS OF PURPOSE, the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning DESIRE to possess it.”

“Your attitude determines your altitude.

“I have another kind of sight. I see another kind of terrain: the available paths.

“Is there any real purpose in being alive if all we are going to do is get up every day and live only for ourselves? Live your life to help others. Give & live selflessly.” 

“Those joys were so small that they passed unnoticed, like gold in sand, and at bad moments she could see nothing but the pain, nothing but sand; but there were good moments too when she saw nothing but the joy, nothing but gold.”

“Humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.”

“The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the nation's greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable.”

“But the fact that I had learnt to be tolerant to other religions did not mean that I had any living faith in God.”

“The best swordsman in the world may be disarmed by a trick that's new to him.”

“The average man,” explained the late Dr. Ernst Jokl, “loses fifty percent of his muscle mass between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five.”

“We're not completely happy here because we're not supposed to be!”

“If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.”

“My parents constantly drummed into me the importance of judging people as individuals. There was no more grievous sin at our household than a racial slur or other evidence of religious or racial intolerance. A lot of it, I think, was because my dad had learned what discrimination was like firsthand. He’d grown up in an era when some stores still had signs at their door saying, NO DOGS OR IRISHMEN ALLOWED. When my brother and I were growing up, there were still ugly tumors of racial bigotry in much of America, including the corner of Illinois where we lived. At our one local movie theater, blacks and whites had to sit apart—the blacks in the balcony. My mother and father urged my brother and me to bring home our black playmates, to consider them equals, and to respect the religious views of our friends, whatever they were. My brother’s best friend was black, and when they went to the movies, Neil sat with him in the balcony. My mother always taught us: “Treat thy neighbor as you would want your neighbor to treat you,” and “Judge everyone by how they act, not what they are.” Once my father checked into a hotel during a shoe-selling trip and a clerk told him: “You’ll like it here, Mr. Reagan, we don’t permit a Jew in the place.” My father, who told us the story later, said he looked at the clerk angrily and picked up his suitcase and left. “I’m a Catholic,” he said. “If it’s come to the point where you won’t take Jews, then some day you won’t take me either.” Because it was the only hotel in town, he spent the night in his car during a winter blizzard and I think it may have led to his first heart attack.”

“If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they may have planned for you? Not much.”

“Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight. But the enormities of the times in which I have lived, have forced me to take a part in resisting them, and to commit myself on the boisterous ocean of political passions.”