Conflict is the primary engine of creativity and innovation. People don't learn by staring into a mirror; people learn by encountering difference.

Your behavior reflects your actual purposes.

But to practice leadership, you need to accept that you are in the business of generating chaos, confusion, and conflict

And leadership then is about mobilizing and engaging the people with the problem rather than trying to anesthetize them so you can go off and solve it on your own.

Progress on problems is the measure of leadership; leaders mobilize people to face problems, and communities make progress on problems because leaders challenge them and help them to do so.

Values are shaped and refined by rubbing against real problems, and people interpret their problems according to the values they hold.

Knowing how the environment is pulling your strings and playing you is critical to making responsive rather than reactive moves.

Exercising adaptive leadership is about giving meaning to your life beyond your own ambition.

The activity of interpreting might be understood as listening for the 'song beneath the words.

If you find what you do each day seems to have no link to any higher purpose, you probably want to rethink what you're doing.

Worry not that your child listens to you; worry most that they watch you.

In the shimmering ignorance of illiteracy of compassion and faith the stoic desire of loving without temporal gains rules the hearts and minds in deeds and care

You can't make people right by making them feel wrong!

People will say to you, "Oh, you are fearless." That is so not true. We should stop saying that about people. It's a slander, really.

The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.

I am endlessly busy, bringing up five young kids, and trying to keep up with the three older ones. I still spend most of my life driving car pools.

Now I don't have anything against Mexican people, but for God's sakes, sign the gust book on the way in.

The key to happiness ... is tolerance of those who do not do as you do.

If you've got a guitar and a lot of soul, just bang something out and mean it. You're the superstar.

Money often determines not only who gets elected, but what gets done. Which voices do lawmakers listen to, the banks or home owners, coal companies, or asthma sufferers, the CEOs or the unemployed?

Certainly Dracula did bring a hell of a lot of joy to a hell of a lot of women. And if this erotic quality hadn't come out we'd have been very disappointed.