After six years without seeing one, I love just seeing a smile - every smile I see gives me hope.

I was discovering that the most precious gift someone can give us is time, because what gives time its value is death.

In this condition of the most devastating humiliation, I still possessed the most precious of liberties, that no-one could take away from me: that of deciding who I wanted to be.

What we have in Colombia is a war against the poor and the guerillas from the left side are against the poor.

It is said that the compensation for the effort courage, tenacity, and endurance displayed during the journey was not happiness. Nor glory. What God offered as a reward was only rest.

In Colombia today we have 16% of the population, which is a very small amount of the population owning 90% of the land and 20 years ago it wasn't like that.

I knew of no instruction manual for reaching a higher level of humanity and a greater wisdom. But I felt intuitively that laughter was the beginning of wisdom, as is was indispensable for survival.

If you believe what you say, words will become reality.

I no longer knew whether it was raindrops or my own tears that were flowing down my cheeks, and I hated to have to drag along this relic of a sniveling child.

Hostages want to survive - they are very focused on their own little view of things.

Sometimes I'm fragile, sometimes too emotional, but I'm putting everything I can on my side to be a happy person.

Each of us has a family tree full of stories inside of us, Dirk thought. Each of us has a story blossoming out of us.

You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful. Like any other girl, I wanted to be beautiful. But I was filled with hate.

A strong determined spirit is unstoppable.

Practice Golden-Rule 1 of Management in everything you do. Manage others the way you would like to be managed.

Every great success is an accumulation of thousands of ordinary efforts that no one else sees or appreciates.

Is it indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we draw our conception of the divine life.

We have all the numbers we need to turn this system on its head.

The great powers claim that whatever they possess is theirs by right, but whatever we, the smaller countries possess is negotiable.

There's something every woman wants, and that's a man to blame.

Sometimes I'll ask the book writer to write a monologue, not to be performed, just as if they were notes for the character.