“The Christian life is more than just commitment to Christ; it includes a commitment to other Christians.”

“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind,’” Paul quoted.”

“How much more does Sonia Gandhi’s son know about the past of the party of which he is now the vice president? Not very much. In Rahul Gandhi’s understanding of his party’s history, only five leaders have mattered: his mother, his father, his grandmother, his great-grandfather and Mahatma Gandhi, the only Indian politician whom he (and Sonia) have granted parity with their own family. Gokhale, Tilak, Rajaji, Azad, Kamaraj, even (or especially) Patel—these are merely names (and sometimes not even that) to the heir apparent. By”

“This is the paradox: victory comes through surrender. Surrender doesn’t weaken you; it strengthens you. Surrendered to God, you don’t have to fear or surrender to anything else.”

“Don't fear failure. — Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.”

“What we believe is a result of our thinking. If we think wrong, we will believe wrong.”

“I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism. Albert Einstein, German-born American physicist”

“When you aspire to inspire before you expire, you conspire to inspire even after you pause to respire. Keep pushing it!”

“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.”

“All of us do not have equal talent, but all of us should have an equal opportunity to develop those talents.”

“we can say that Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad’Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson. —”

“They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.”

“Choose organic, grass-fed, free-range, and hormone-, antibiotic-, and pesticide-free poultry whenever you can.”

“The mark of Friendship is not that help will be given when the pinch comes (of course it will) but that, having been given, it makes no difference at all.”

“To sit back hoping that someday, someway, someone will make things right is to go on feeding the crocodile, hoping he will eat you last - but eat you he will.”