You can hand out condoms, drop bombs, build roads, or put in electricity, but until the girls are educated a society won’t change.

When you take the time to actually listen, with humility, to what people have to say, it's amazing what you can learn. Especially if the people who are doing the talking also happen to be children.

If you teach a boy, you educate an individual; but if you teach a girl, you educate a community.

If you really want to change a culture to empower women improve basic hygiene and health care and fight high rates of infant mortality the answer is to educate girls.

My father ended up starting the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre, which is on the slopes of Kilimanjaro. My mother started a school.

In times of war, you often hear leaders—Christian, Jewish, and Muslim—saying, ‘God is on our side.’ But that isn’t true. In war, God is on the side of refugees, widows, and orphans.

Slow down and make building relationships as important as building projects.

If you really want to change a culture... empower women.

When your kids accomplish something it means much more than anything you've done.

Trust in Allah, but tie up your camel.' Sign in Skardu

The tune was too ingrained for Mortenson to consider the novelty of this moment- an American, lost in Pakistan, singing a German hymn in Swahili.

UNDERTAKER!” the head boomed. “BOY, DO I HAVE A JOB FOR YOU!

I gamble with one foot pointed toward the door.

Deeper meaning resides in the fairy tales told to me in my childhood than in the truth that is taught by life.

Melancholy characterizes those with a superb sense of the sublime.

Chicks dig a dude who’s sporting the latest eggplant turtleneck styles.

If I am incompetent, I am useless, the people of India will see that.

Some women think they need to be overpowering in order to be powerful. This is so far from the truth. What is so great about being a women is how powerful we are quite naturally.

Computers are not good or bad; they are powerful.

When you get a man, you have to nurture him. Treat him like a king. If you put that little work in in the beginning, it pays off.

Criticizing to destroy is easy, thinking in order to build is much more difficult to achieve