“The bottom line was that we have only ourselves to blame. We create our own destiny by the way we do things. We have to take advantage of opportunities”

“We all have choices in the way we react to the words we hear. Our lives and the lives of all those around us will be significantly improved if we choose to react positively rather than negatively.”

“God cares about every area of our lives, and God wants us to ask for help.”

“In any career, whether as a surgeon, a musician, or a secretary, one needs to have a confidence that says, “I can do anything, and if I can’t do it, I know how to get help.”

“the doors of the world are open to dose who can read.”

“The human brain has billions of neurons and hundreds of billions of interconnections. It can process more than two million bits of information per second and can remember everything you have ever seen or heard.”

“When someone is being particularly mean and nasty, I simply think to myself, he or she used to be a cute little baby, I wonder what happened?”

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free . . . it expects what never was and never will be.”

“Compassion, however, should mean providing a mechanism to escape poverty rather than simply maintaining people in an impoverished state by supplying handouts. By doing this we give them an opportunity to elevate their personal situations, which eventually decreases our need to take care of them and empowers them to be able to exercise compassion toward others.”

“Doing the right thing when it is not popular or when it is not going to get everyone’s approval is not always easy, but I am convinced that if we truly care about other people, we will go ahead and take the risk anyway.”

“Disagreement is part of being a person who has choices. One of those choices is to respect others and engage in intelligent conversation about differences of opinion without becoming enemies, eventually allowing us to move forward to compromise.”

“If we are to put an end to division, people from all political persuasions will have to stop fighting one another and seek true unity, not just a consensus that benefits one party.”

“When we have done our best, we also have to learn that we still need to rely on God. Our best — no matter how good — is incomplete if we leave God out of the picture.”

“GROWING UP changes one’s definition of what is fun — maturation does that, thankfully — so I hate to admit now that as a boy I thoroughly enjoyed throwing rocks at cars. It was a thrill to wait in hiding, ambush the car driving by, and then make our escape. Occasionally, a driver would stop their vehicle and get out to yell at us. But if we were really fortunate, they would chase us. We would run just far enough ahead to encourage them, but when they got close, we would turn on the afterburners of youth, leaving them far behind while we laughed hysterically. Once in a while, the police would come by — usually in unmarked cars — and the chase would be much more dramatic until we reached the ten-foot-tall fences at the end of the neighborhood field. To the police, it must have appeared as if they had us trapped. They had no idea, however, how practiced we were at vaulting those fences. We treated it like an Olympic event, running at full speed toward the fence and then leaping high into the air, grabbing the chain links, and allowing the momentum of our feet to swing us over the top and down on the other side. We would laugh at the police as we ran off, knowing there was no way they would follow us. Today I have great admiration for the police, who risk their lives on a daily basis to protect our lives, freedom, and property.”

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angles, but am note nice, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but am not nice, I am nothing. If I give all I posses to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but am not nice, I gain nothing.”