“Many times it takes just one member of a family to initiate the action to bring a family back together again.”

“The Bible is intensely practical, and one of the reasons God gave it to us is so we’ll be better prepared to deal with life’s problems and temptations. All too often we respond to these in ways that don’t reflect Christ . . .when we do that, Satan is the winner and the cause of Christ suffers.”

“A person without a purpose is a human being merely breathing because he does not know where he is, let alone knowing where he is going. Purposelessness is lifelessness.”

“People who will not turn a shovel full of dirt on the project nor contribute a pound of material, will collect more money from the United States than will the People who supply all the material and do all the work. This is the terrible thing about interest ...But here is the point: If the Nation can issue a dollar bond it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets the money broker collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%. Whereas the currency, the honest sort provided by the Constitution pays nobody but those who contribute in some useful way. It is absurd to say our Country can issue bonds and cannot issue currency. Both are promises to pay, but one fattens the usurer and the other helps the People. If the currency issued by the People were no good, then the bonds would be no good, either. It is a terrible situation when the Government, to insure the National Wealth, must go in debt and submit to ruinous interest charges at the hands of men who control the fictitious value of gold.”

“You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.”

“Encourage everyone you meet with a smile or compliment. Make them feel better when you leave their presence and they will always be glad to see you coming.”

“If I have to build a big company by mistreating other people then the Bible says WOE to me. I don't know what that is, but I don't want any of it.” 

“At school he had done things which had formerly seemed to him very horrid and made him feel disgusted with himself when he did them; but when later on he saw that such actions were done by people of good position and that they did not regard them as wrong, he was able not exactly to regard them as right, but to forget about them entirely or not be at all troubled at remembering them.”

“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.”

“Much about success is just the result of simply the ability to follow up, follow through, and finish what we started.”

“An injured friend is the bitterest of foes.”

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

“A quitter never wins and a winner never quits.”

“Don’t you know who I am? I’m an individual!