I think it is important for Europe to understand that even though I am president and George Bush is not president, Al Qaeda is still a threat.

You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

Keep exploring. Keep dreaming. Keep asking why. Don’t settle for what you already know. Never stop believing in the power of your ideas, your imagination, your hard work to change the world.

When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, you don't really have to do anything, you just let them talk.

Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.

Change is never easy, but always possible.

Don’t ever let anybody tell you that your efforts don’t matter or that your voice doesn’t count. Don’t ever believe that you can’t make a difference. You have.

Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up.

Learning to stand in somebody else's shoes, to see through their eyes, that's how peace begins. And it's up to you to make that happen. Empathy is a quality of character that can change the world.

If somebody is different from you, that's not something you criticize, that's something that you appreciate.

There were two immediate results of my forced loneliness: I began to find company in books, and greater pleasure in music.

Nostalgia is a dangerous emotion, both because it is powerless to act in the real world, and because it glides so easily into hatred and resentment against those who have taken our Eden from us.

Good dialogue is very important.

I always wanted to be a cowboy. But alas! I was burdened early with certain inescapable obligations to world literature.

Cant is the twin sister of hypocrisy.

"Books ... books, ..." he exclaims. It is those that teach us to refine on our pleasures when young, and which, having so taught us, enable us to recall them with satisfaction when old.

I think I have become a better writer since having children. It improves creativity, particularly because once you have children it makes you realise the story isn’t about you.

We live in a time of crisis in the secular culture and in the church with regard to the beautiful.

Do more than you have to do, more than your share, and do it as well as you can.

It's good to find common ground with people. When you find common ground and you see things from other people's perspective, you can have a voice in their lives, you can have an influence.