“Sometimes I’m asked to list the most important steps in preparing for an evangelistic mission, and my reply is always the same: prayer . . . prayer . . . prayer.”

“To become a better you, be diligent and never let the charms of procrastination and excuses seduce you to fall for mediocrity.”

“Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized.”

“A Centaur has a man-stomach and a horse-stomach. And of course both want breakfast. So first of all he has porridge and pavenders and kidneys and bacon and omlette and cold ham and toast and marmalade and coffee and beer. And after that he tends to the horse part of himself by grazing for an hour or so and finishing up with a hot mash, some oats, and a bag of sugar. That's why it's such a serious thing to ask a Centaur to stay for the weeekend. A very serious thing indeed.”

“If you are a woman who truly wants to have peaceful relationships, I encourage you to examine yourself and ask God to reveal to you any unrealistic expectations you may have of other people.”

“Although we had no hope of defeating the enemy in the battlefield, nevertheless, we fought back to keep the idea of liberation alive. From a conversation with Richard Stengel, January 13, 1993”

“There is a special way that you can accelerate your progress toward becoming the highly productive, effective, efficient person that you want to be.”

“Developing and maintaining integrity require constant attention. John Weston, chairman and CEO of Automatic Data Processing, Inc., says, “I`ve always tried to live with the following simple rule: Don`t do what you wouldn`t feel comfortable reading about in the newspapers the next day.” That`s a good standard all of us should keep.”

“The believer’s hope is in the unshakable, all-powerful, all-knowing, and ever-present one true God and His Son, Jesus Christ.”

“No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.”

“When the two people who thus discover that they are on the same secret road are of different sexes, the friendship which arises between them will very easily pass – may pass in the first half hour – into erotic love. Indeed, unless they are physically repulsive to each other or unless one or both already loves elsewhere, it is almost certain to do so sooner or later. And conversely, erotic love may lead to Friendship between the lovers. But this, so far from obliterating the distinction between the two loves, puts it in a clearer light. If one who was first, in the deep and full sense, your Friend, is then gradually or suddenly revealed as also your lover you will certainly not want to share the Beloved’s erotic love with any third. But you will have no jealousy at all about sharing the Friendship. Nothing so enriches an erotic love as the discovery that the Beloved can deeply, truly and spontaneously enter into Friendship with the Friends you already had; to feel that not only are we two united by erotic love but we three or four or five are all travelers on the same quest, have all a common vision.”

“Are you worrying about tomorrow when you should be focusing on today? Trust God to equip you for whatever comes today, tomorrow, and in the future, so that you can receive the fullness of His gifts today.”

“To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being.”

“If you're going to binge, literature is definitely the way to do it.”

“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.”