We admitted we were powerless over alcohol-that our lives had become unmanageable. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves would restore us to sanity.

Honesty with ourselves & others gets us sober, but it is tolerance that keeps us that way.

True ambition is not what we thought it was. True ambition is the profound desire to live usefully and walk humbly under the grace of God.

No personal calamity is so crushing that something true and great can't be made of it

In God's economy, nothing is wasted. Through failure, we learn a lesson in humility which is probably needed, painful though it is.

We know that permanent sobriety can be attained only by a most revolutionary change in the life and outlook of the individual.

Guilt is really the reverse side of the coin of pride. Guilt aims at self-destruction, and pride aims at the destruction of others.

We lose the fear of making decisions, great and small; as we realize that should our choice prove wrong we can, if we will, learn from the experience.

Because of our kinship in suffering, our channels of contact have always been charged with the language of the heart.

AA is no success story in the ordinary sense of the word. It is a story of suffering transmuted, under grace, into spiritual progress.

Almost without exception alcoholics are tortured by loneliness.

How history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws.

Politicians are judged by what they say and they don't do

Do not let circumstances control you. You change your circumstances.

The beauty of science hugely outranks the charms of superstition.

Melodies die out, like the pipe of Pan, with the ears that love them and listen for them.

So when Putin goes out to buy a Coke, thirty seconds later it is known in Washington DC.

A more complex - but only slightly more original - way to feel out of it is available at the hip and pretentious nightclubs and bars along the Sunset Strip.

Consider England. Within a few score years how many unsettling changes in religion has the whole kingdom made, according to the change of its rulers, in the various religions which they embraced.

What moves me is neither ethnocentric pride nor sectarian arrogance. I make no claim that Jewish culture is superior to other cultures. But it is mine.

I have no ambition to govern men; it is a painful and thankless office.