“Servants think about their work, not what others are doing.”

“When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened.”

“I cannot live without books . . .”

“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our thinking. Thus, we are drifting toward catastrophe beyond conception. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.”

“Don't tell me that I can't do it. Go and tell God that story. After all, He is the one who gave me the air to breath and be able to do it well! Go!”

“manageable problem. “If we are not allowed to deal with small problems, we will be destroyed by slightly larger ones. When we come to understand this fact, we live our lives not avoiding problems, but welcoming them as challenges that will strengthen us so that we can be victorious in the future.”

“Abraham Lincoln said, “I am profitably engaged in reading the Bible. Take all of this Book upon reason that you can and the balance upon faith, and you will live and die a better man.” Coleridge said he believed the Bible to be the Word of God because, as he put it, “It finds me.” “If you want encouragement,” John Bunyan wrote, “entertain the promises.”

“We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick.”

“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.”

“As a leader, you don't earn any points for failing in a noble cause. You don't get credit for being "right" as you bring the organization to a halt. Your success is measured by your ability to actually take the people where they need to go. But you can do that only if the people first buy into you as a leader. That's the reality of the Law of Buy-In.”

“Let us touch the dying, the poor, the lonely and the unwanted according to the graces we have received and let us not be ashamed or slow to do the humble work.”

“The price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life--we went soft, we lost our edge.”

“I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for President, who happens also to be a Catholic.”

“I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”

“One cannot alter a condition with the same mind set that created it in the first place.”