The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept.

Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.

Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all.

The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursuing his education.

Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community.

Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.

True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.

Some people strengthen the society just by being the kind of people they are.

History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable.

The cynic says, "One man can't do anything". I say, "Only one man can do anything."

If you have some respect for people as they are, you can be more effective in helping them to become better than they are.

He'd sooner die trying to hold the world on his shoulders than running away. Better always to run toward. And so he did.

Paying attention to the ethical implications of our choices has never been more pressing—or more complicated—than it is today.

Seek goodness and be goodness. Seek beauty and be beauty. Seek love and be love.

My father was the guy on the block who said hi to everyone.

The truth is funny. Honest discovery, observation, and reaction is better than contrived invention.

The hungry and the homeless don't care about liberty any more than they care about cultural heritage. To pretend that they do care is cant.

Obedience leads to true freedom. The more we obey revealed truth, the more we become liberated.

Give sustenance, Allah. Give sustenance to me.

Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets -- they're more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away.

That's the curse of the reading class. We can be seduced by a good story even at the most inopportune moments.