“You never really know something until you teach it to someone else.”

“It's time now to turn this mush into muscles”

“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.”

“If a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.”

“I wondered--not for the first time--whether one was ever justified in neglecting the welfare of one's own family in order to fight for the welfare of others. Can there be anything more important than looking after one's aging mother? Is politics merely a pretext for shirking one's responsibilities, an excuse for not being able to provide in the way one wanted?”

“no people can be both ignorant and free.”

“Of all the things a leader should fear, complacency should head the list. —John C. Maxwell”

“الظلم يسلب كلاً من الظالم والمظلوم حريته” 

“Most of the Houses have grown fat by taking few risks. One cannot truly blame them for this; one can only despise them.”

“I think one travels more usefully when they travel alone, because they reflect more."

“I'm not where I need to be, but Thank God I'm not where I use to be. I'm okay and I'm on my way!”

“Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

“to put it as philosopher-poet Ralph Waldo Emerson did, “To be simple is to be great.”

“Conviction is a good motive, but a bad judge.”

“It's said that people who give excuses for the reason not do something always formulate those excuses, waiting for the reason to surface to justify their excuses!”