“While wisdom dictates the need for education, education does not necessarily make one wise.”

“You can have everything you want in life if you just help enough people get what they want in life.” 

“God knew that children grow and mature best in a stable, loving family, and this was one reason He gave marriage to us.”

“Making products we sell around the world, stamped with three proud words, ‘Made in the USA!”

“Excellence is a habit acquired by continuous improvement on the little things you do with a firm belief that it's going to be better than before!”

“When the author walks onto the stage, the play is over”

“Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.”

“Every minute you spend in planning saves 10 minutes in execution; this gives  you a 1,000 percent Return on Energy!”

“Usually at summit conferences, the real work is done in advance by diplomats and specialists on each side who, based on guidance from their superiors, do the spadework and work out any agreements that are to be signed at the meeting, after which the top leaders come in and preside over the formalities.”

“I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?”

“Any married man should forget his mistakes—there’s no use in two people remembering the same thing.”

“All we can know is that we know nothing. And that's the height of human wisdom.”

“Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.”

“Your life only gets better when you get better.” 

“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.”