We've been able to build up the Afghan security forces and stabilize it.

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.

And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.

Ignorance is the Mother of Opposition

In our age of increasing distractions it's more important than ever to find ways to maintain perspective and remember that life is brief and tender.

I'm English and I'm used to coming from a world of period dramas, where there's a very polite restraint to everything. Everybody's sort of sitting in drawing rooms.

Watch out for life ... It's harder than it looks.

Being a Georgia author is a rather specious dignity, on the same order as, for the pig, being a Talmadge ham.

He’d pleasured Hera and a few thousand others, and when Hera learned about those thousand others…heads had rolled.

Why does a tragedy like 9/11 change everything about air travel, but numerous gun massacres CHANGE NOTHING?

One can acquire certainty only by amputating inquiry.

What we are tempted to call a disaster is sometimes the first, painful stage of a blessing.