I know that gaps can be closed. And they can be closed substantially, more than I think we believe.

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.

What was I was dying for? The sins of the past? The wrongs of the present? Did it even matter?

I often wonder if we could not solve the world's problems on a similar basis of harmony.

Great changes start with individuals; the basis of world peace is inner peace in the hearts of individuals.

No more free steps to heaven.

If you took any of my radio shows and you took the music out of them, they wouldn't be remotely the same thing. Music is really important.

You get a role like this in a big action movie [like Jack Reacher] and you can go one of two ways: you can paint in broad strokes, which happens a lot in action films, or you can get very detailed.

We have duties to others, and duties to ourselves, and we cannot shirk either.

I reject that. I would rather recruit a Racist left winger than a right winger.

I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.

Sometimes I feel that the people I'm writing are more real to me than the people around me. When you take that imaginative leap, you're living so much in that world.