“The crocodiles that frighten from crossing the rivers of our destinies are easily drowned with personal confidence but not team courage. It means you owe it to yourself to defeat your own crocodiles and cross over to the other side!”

“Same thing with the distinction Johnnie made between good kids and bad kids—the distinction didn’t compute in my head. It seemed based on a premise that defied my experience, an assumption that children could somehow set the terms of their own development. I thought about Bernadette’s five-year-old son, scampering about the broken roads of Altgeld, between a sewage plant and a dump. Where did he sit along the spectrum of goodness? If he ended up in a gang or in jail, would that prove his essence somehow, a wayward gene … or just the consequences of a malnourished world? And”

“In spite of Stepan Arkadyevitch's efforts to be an attentive father and husband, he never could keep in his mind that he had a wife and children.”

“The major mistake people pursue in decision making is to surround themselves with negatively minded people. People who are going nowhere will never take you anywhere; people who are going everywhere can take you somewhere.”

“I plan to approach my future as one of great promise.”

“Words which do not give the light of Christ increase the darkness.”

“Be a blessing to someone else.”

“Poverty is the worst form of violence.”

“This power is made up of the principles described in this book. In the story of the Declaration of Independence it will not be difficult to detect at least six of these principles: DESIRE, DECISION, FAITH, PERSISTENCE, THE MASTER MIND and ORGANISED PLANNING.

“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.” 

“El lamento nos deja sin energía. No podemos construir sobre el lamento. El temor al futuro nos distrae y nos llena de aprensión.”

“You don't have to understand the world. You just have to find your own way around in it.”

“You will achieve more in this world through acts of mercy than you will through acts of retribution.”

“Don't forget, when you refuse to make right choices, you have already chosen to live the wrong way! Indecision is a decision to live wrongly!”

“Without doubt, the most common weakness of all human beings is the habit of leaving their minds open to the negative influence of other people. This weakness is all the more damaging, because most people do not recognize that they are cursed by it, and many who acknowledge it, neglect or refuse to correct the evil until it becomes an uncontrollable part of their daily habits.”