“Every problem is a character-building opportunity, and the more difficult it is, the greater the potential for building spiritual muscle and moral fiber.”

“You don't say how slim the odds are but rather how you can improve the odds.”

“Despite their differences in wealth, the framers were careful to avoid anything resembling class warfare, keeping any idea of wealth redistribution out of the Constitution. Many of the framers were familiar with the deleterious effects of class warfare, which was prominent throughout Europe. They hoped that a more egalitarian atmosphere would characterize American culture. They envisioned a country where people would rise and fall based on their abilities and contribution rather than their pedigree. To that end, they put aside their socioeconomic differences and worked together.”

“Gone! And you and I quite crestfallen. It’s always like that, you can’t keep him; it’s not as if he were a tame lion.”

“But whenever I tried to pin down this idea of self-esteem, the specific qualities we hoped to inculcate, the specific means by which we might feel good about ourselves, the conversation always seemed to follow a path of infinite regress. Did you dislike yourself because of your color or because you couldn’t read and couldn’t get a job? Or perhaps it was because you were unloved as a child—only, were you unloved because you were too dark? Or too light? Or because your mother shot heroin into her veins … and why did she do that anyway? Was the sense of emptiness you felt a consequence of kinky hair or the fact that your apartment had no heat and no decent furniture? Or was it because deep down you imagined a godless universe? Maybe one couldn’t avoid such questions on the road to personal salvation. What I doubted was that all the talk about self-esteem could serve as the centerpiece of an effective black politics. It demanded too much honest self-reckoning from people; without such honesty, it easily degenerated into vague exhortation. Perhaps with more self-esteem fewer blacks would be poor, I thought to myself, but I had no doubt that poverty did nothing for our self-esteem. Better to concentrate on the things we might all agree on. Give that black man some tangible skills and a job. Teach that black child reading and arithmetic in a safe, well-funded school. With the basics taken care of, each of us could search for our own sense of self-worth.”

“Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you. Don’t waste your pain; use it to help others.”

“Chicago, a town that’s accustomed to its racial wounds and prides itself on a certain lack of sentiment.”

“When your opponent fears you, then’s the moment when you give the fear its own rein, give it the time to work on him. Let it become terror. The terrified man fights himself. Eventually, he attacks in desperation. That is the most dangerous moment, but the terrified man can be trusted usually to make a fatal mistake. You are being trained here to detect these mistakes and use them.”

“The single best and easiest thing you can do for your health is to recalibrate your taste buds and learn to enjoy pure clean water.”

“To see the universal and all-pervading Spirit of Truth face to face one must be able to love the meanest of creation as oneself.”

“We know that man has the faculty of becoming completely absorbed in a subject however trivial it may be, and that there is no subject so trivial that it will not grow to infinite proportions if one's entire attention is devoted to it.”

“He Himself bore my sins in his body on the tree, so that I might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds I have been healed. —1 PETER 2:24 (NIV)”

“I did not have an unlimited library to choose from on Robben Island. We had access to many unremembered mysteries and detective novels and all the works of Daphne du Maurier, but little more.”

“The mass of your visions depends on the size of your dreams and distance they can cover within a given period of your life.”

“You have strengths and weaknesses, and you do things right and you do things wrong. You sin, just as everyone else does. And sin is sin, despite its nature or magnitude. Regardless of how hard we try, none of us will ever be completely perfect in this life, but not being perfect at everything we do does not mean we have no worth or value. You are special—unique—and that means there is only one like you, imperfections and all.”