The belief that the world is getting worse, that we can’t solve extreme poverty and disease, isn’t just mistaken. It is harmful.

I’m like a recovering perfectionist. For me it’s one day at a time.

The malaria parasite has been killing children and sapping the strength of whole populations for tens of thousands of years. It is impossible to calculate the harm malaria has done to the world.

Some of the generals are saying, ‚We’re making progress. We are clearing an area.‘ But you really don’t defeat the Taliban by clearing an area. They move.

The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.

I grew up in an era of pretty severe poverty. My parents weathered the Great Depression, and money was always a very big concern. I was weaned on a shortage mentality and placed in foster homes largely because there simply wasn’t enough money to take care of the most basic of needs.

And we have done more in the two and a half years that I’ve been in here than the previous 43 Presidents to uphold that principle, whether it’s ending ‚don’t ask, don’t tell,‘ making sure that gay and lesbian partners can visit each other in hospitals, making sure that federal benefits can be provided to same-sex couples.

As we dread any disease that undermines the health of the body, so should we deplore contention, which is a corroding canker of the spirit.

The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far – the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We’re obviously in a very upward cycle right now, and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.

I do not look upon these United States as a finished product. We are still in the making.

We always live in an uncertain world. What is certain is that the United States will go forward over time.

Satan is wiser now than before, and tempts by making rich instead of poor.

I think technology really increased human ability. But technology cannot produce compassion.

If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.

In a universe that’s an intelligent system with a divine creative force supporting it, there simply can be no accidents. As tough as it is to acknowledge, you had to go through what you went through in order to get to where you are today, and the evidence is that you did.

The surest way to remain poor is to be an honest man.

The progress of India is the destiny of one-sixth of humanity. And it will also mean a world more confident of its prosperity and more secure about its future.

We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old – and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.

America is not nearly done. We’re only in the beginning. Who knows who we will be? Who knows… what color we will be? It is all something that, maybe, our descendants – if they survive that long – will see.

All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.

I think the positive competition between states in India is one of the most positive dynamics that the country has.

Each generation goes further than the generation preceding it because it stands on the shoulders of that generation. You will have opportunities beyond anything we’ve ever known.

It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

The first decade of the twentieth century was not a great time to be born black and poor and female in St. Louis, Missouri, but Vivian Baxter was born black and poor, to black and poor parents. Later she would grow up and be called beautiful. As a grown woman she would be known as the butter-colored lady with the blowback hair.

It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion.

It’s a question of whether we’re going to go forward into the future, or past to the back.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles of justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.

Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past?

At the end of 2003, my game was complete. Shooting, defense, using the dribble, transition, midrange stuff was all there. Then it was about fine-tuning and trying to improve in each area.

Trouble brews when we steal from the poor and give to the rich.

If you’ve spent a long time developing a skill and techniques, and now some 14 year-old upstart can get exactly the same result, you might feel a bit miffed I suppose, but that has happened forever.

You have to come to your closed doors before you get to your open doors… What if you knew you had to go through 32 closed doors before you got to your open door? Well, then you’d come to closed door number eight and you’d think, ‚Great, I got another one out of the way’… Keep moving forward.

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

Eradications are special. Zero is a magic number. You either do what it takes to get to zero and you’re glad you did it; or you get close, give up and it goes back to where it was before, in which case you wasted all that credibility, activity, money that could have been applied to other things.

Measures must always in a progressive society be held superior to men, who are after all imperfect instruments, working for their fulfilment.

The world moves, and ideas that were once good are not always good.

Oh, how I would like a poor Church, and for the poor.

The greatest progress is in the sciences that study the simplest systems. So take, say, physics – greatest progress there. But one of the reasons is that the physicists have an advantage that no other branch of sciences has. If something gets too complicated, they hand it to someone else.

I think a simple rule of business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.

But just as they did in Philadelphia when they were writing the constitution, sooner or later, you’ve got to compromise. You’ve got to start making the compromises that arrive at a consensus and move the country forward.

Human development thus far has been fueled and guided by the feeling that things could be, and are probably going to be, better.

There is nothing I fear more than waking up without a program that will help me bring a little happiness to those with no resources, those who are poor, illiterate, and ridden with terminal disease.

Practice yourself, for heaven’s sake in little things, and then proceed to greater.

At the bottom of education, at the bottom of politics, even at the bottom of religion, there must be for our race economic independence.

We welcome the scrutiny of the world – because what you see in America is a country that has steadily worked to address our problems and make our union more perfect.

If we take the route of the permanent handout, the American character will itself be impoverished.

We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

The slogan of progress is changing from the full dinner pail to the full garage.

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.

Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.

Actually oddly enough, I think my work, the activism, will be forgotten. And I hope it will. Because I hope those problems will have gone away.

If we could do high-speed rail in California just half a notch above what they’ve done on the Shanghai line in China, and if we had a straight path from L.A. to San Francisco, as well as the milk run, at least that would be progress.

I try to give to the poor people for love what the rich could get for money. No, I wouldn’t touch a leper for a thousand pounds; yet I willingly cure him for the love of God.

Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.

Nothing recedes like progress.

The poor don’t know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.

All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil show it evidently to be a great evil.

Unfortunately, in a recession, the people who suffer the most aren’t the rich, but the wanna-be rich and the poor.