“The iron may not be hot early if you want to wait for it to get heated; it will get hot if you strike it hardly! Strike it now!”

“It turns out that the governor of California has more authority to name appointees than any elected official in America except the president of the United States and the mayor of Chicago.

“Yes I am, I am also a Muslim, a Christian, a Buddhist, and a Jew.”

“There can be no freedom without order, and there is no order without virtue. Now, that’s a simple enough formulation, but it’s an insight found not only in the writings of Founding Fathers like Washington or great political thinkers like Edmund Burke; it is also found in a great part of our Judeo-Christian tradition.”

“Jesus said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26).” 

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” 

“Positive words left unsaid are like sachets of currency notes burnt in vain. Positive deeds left undone are like deep wells filled with soil to the brim. Do the undone, say the unsaid and turn the unturned.”

“Don’t give Satan a foothold, but discipline yourself to stay close to God. He alone is your security.”

“God did not intend for us to be idle and unproductive. There is dignity in work.”

“There is inherited wealth in this country and also inherited poverty.”

“What I’ve realized is that life doesn’t count for much unless you’re willing to do your small part to leave our children — all of our children — a better world. Any fool can have a child. That doesn’t make you a father. It’s the courage to raise a child that makes you a father.”

“Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment...But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times.”

“Above all, we are coming to understand that the arts incarnate the creativity of a free people. When the creative impulse cannot flourish, when it cannot freely select its methods and objects, when it is deprived of spontaneity, then society severs the root of art.”

“...God doesn't wait for you to reach maturity before he starts liking you. He loves and enjoys you at every stage of your spiritual development.”

“Until the Good News of Jesus Christ burst onto the human scene, the word love was understood mostly in terms of seeking one’s own advantage. Loving the unlovely was incomprehensible  A loving God reaching down to sinful humans was unthinkable.”