“Prayer is not an option but a necessity.”

“Giving does not only preceed receiving; it is the reason for it. It is in giving that we receive.”

“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.”

“Peace is the greatest weapon for development that any person can have.” 

“The dream in your heart may be bigger than the environment in which you find yourself.”

“If you do not connect with others, influence is out of the question.”

“The question of how things will settle down is the only important question...”

“I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” 

“Every time you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.” 

“I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet.”

“Bagaimana bisa Amerika mengirimkan orangnya ke ruang angkasa, namun masih membuat batasan bagi penduduknya yang berkulit hitam?”

“For as he thinks in his heart, so is he. PROVERBS 23:7”

“I don’t think people can live without hope. What oxygen is to the lungs, hope is to our survival in this world. And the Bible is filled with hope.”

“Complaining is a vain way of explaining pain without gaining relief. Keep complains distances away from you.”

“the old and simple truth that it is natural for men to help and to love one another, but not to torture and to kill one another, became ever clearer, so that fewer and fewer people were able to believe the sophistries by which the distortion of the truth had been made so plausible.”