“but that what was for him the greatest and most cruel injustice appeared to others a quite ordinary occurrence.”

“We must repent of our prayerlessness. We must make prayer our priority. Even our churches today have gotten away from prayer meetings.”

“When your desires are strong enough, you will appear to possess superhuman powers to achieve.”

“That the good of the individual is contained in the good of all. (2) That a lawyer’s work has the same value as the barber’s inasmuch as all have the same right of earning their livelihood from their work. (3) That a life of labour, i.e., the life of the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman is the life worth living.”

“Some people come in our life as blessings. Others come in our life as lessons.”

“There are no drive-thru breakthroughs. Breakthroughs take time.”

“Years may wrinkle your skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles your soul.”

“Prayer is not an option but a necessity.”

“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.”

“Only God is able. It is faith in Him that we must rediscover. With this faith we can transform bleak and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of joy and bring new light into the dark caverns of pessimism.”

“Tell them how much you appreciate them.”

“I will cut taxes - cut taxes - for 95 percent of all working families, because, in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle class.”

“unity to be real must survive the severest strain without breaking.”

“the harder the conflict, the greater the triumph.”

“Humble yourself before the Lord and he will lift you high. People who are gentle, humble and able always have a great ending no matter how small and where obscured they have started!”