“I want freedom for the full expression of my personality.”

“If you don’t cut off negative information it will depress you. Step out of the natural and say, “This may be impossible with men, but I know with God all things are possible.”

“Nobody achieves anything great by giving the minimum. No teams win championships without making sacrifices and giving their best.”

“we shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will. And we shall continue to love you.”

“people continued—regardless of all that leads man forward—to try to unite the incompatibles: the virtue of love, and what is opposed to love, namely, the restraining of evil by violence.”

“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.”

“Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere. Anyone who lives inside the US can never be considered an outsider anywhere in the country”

“The more your dreams evolve into reality, the closer you get to Destiny, the greater target you become for the negative opinions of others. People who don’t even know you may form impressions about who they think you are and what you do. They will critique whether you’re qualified, intelligent, attractive, competent, sophisticated, or savvy enough for whatever you’re doing. They’ll always conclude that you’re not enough and you have no business going after Destiny. You can’t please a hater.”

“How happy a person is depends upon the depth of his gratitude. You will notice at once that the unhappy person has little gratitude toward life, other people and God.”

“Every time you speak to people, give them something to feel, something to remember, and something to do.”

“One of the things I learned when I was negotiating was that until I changed myself, I could not change others.”

“Golly,' said Edmund under his breath, 'He's a retired star.”

“If you can’t do great things, do small things in a great way.”

“Women need a reason for having sex, men just need a place”

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”