I’m asking myself, ‚What do my girls, what do all our children deserve in their president? What kind of a president do we want for them?‘ Well, to start with, I think we want someone who is a unifying force in this country: someone who sees our differences not as a threat, but as a blessing.

Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.

People buy into the leader before they buy into the vision.

The diversity of India, of our civilization, is actually a thing of beauty, which is something we are extremely proud of.

The bottom line is that everyone thinks differently.

Surely wisdom will come as we listen to learn from children, parents, partners, neighbors, Church leaders, and the Lord.

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to trust your team. It’s a lesson I’ve had to relearn quite a few times.

I knew I was blessed with a gift of having both parents.

In our seeking for economic and political progress, we all go up – or else we all go down.

Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor.

What I really want to say: That what the world really needs is a real feeling of kinship. Everybody: stars, laborers, Negroes, Jews, Arabs. We are all brothers.

Isn’t it funny how babies laugh a lot? I read a toddler, a young child laughs 300 times a day. The average adult laughs, like, four times a day. God put it in them. He put the laugh in us, but I think sometimes we let life get us down, you know, have bad breaks, and we lose our breaks.

You can’t choose up sides on a round world.

A general is just as good or just as bad as the troops under his command make him.

I have also seen children successfully surmounting the effects of an evil inheritance. That is due to purity being an inherent attribute of the soul.

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

Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.

We also can’t try to take over and rebuild every country that falls into crisis. That’s not leadership; that’s a recipe for quagmire, spilling American blood and treasure that ultimately weakens us. It’s the lesson of Vietnam, of Iraq – and we should have learned it by now.

My kids are coming up in a different time then me. Interracial couples are of the norm. With me, it’s about making sure my kids understand the importance of education and having opportunities that I didn’t. My goal as a parent is to make sure they don’t take what they have for granted.

Just as discipline and freedom are opposing forces that must be balanced, leadership requires finding the equilibrium in the dichotomy of many seemingly contradictory qualities between one extreme and another.

If you’re a quarterback, you want everything on your shoulders. You want to be the one to make the decisions.

Nations consist of people. And with their effort, a nation can accomplish all it could ever want.

When a team takes ownership of its problems, the problem gets solved. It is true on the battlefield, it is true in business, and it is true in life.

It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.

People ask the difference between a leader and a boss. The leader leads, and the boss drives.

Anything important is never left to the vote of the people. We only get to vote on some man; we never get to vote on what he is to do.

Music is one of the most powerful things the world has to offer. No matter what race or religion or nationality or sexual orientation or gender that you are, it has the power to unite us.

I’ve been really, really fortunate.

Man gives you the award but God gives you the reward.

The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free.

Nobody has ever convinced me that race is real.

Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well.

A revolution can be neither made nor stopped. The only thing that can be done is for one of several of its children to give it a direction by dint of victories.

Leadership is hard. It’s a skill. It’s a technique.

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.

Familiarity breeds contempt – and children.

The memory of that scene for me is like a frame of film forever frozen at that moment: the red carpet, the green lawn, the white house, the leaden sky. The new president and his first lady.

Unlike grown ups, children have little need to deceive themselves.

We boil at different degrees.

Yeah, I wasn’t chosen to be first. I was just chosen to command that flight. Circumstance put me in that particular role. That wasn’t planned by anyone.

A wise ruler ought never to keep faith when by doing so it would be against his interests.

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.

God tells us not to judge one another, no matter what anyone’s sexual preferences are or if they’re black, brown or purple.

It is good to realize that if love and peace can prevail on earth, and if we can teach our children to honor nature’s gifts, the joys and beauties of the outdoors will be here forever.

My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‚blackness‘ than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong.

Gentleness, self-sacrifice and generosity are the exclusive possession of no one race or religion.

How easy it is to govern when one follows a system of consulting the will of the people and one holds as the only norm all the actions which contribute to the well being of the people.

It’s absolutely normal that different human beings want to go different ways.

If I made a commitment, I stood by that commitment – and try to make it real. Because when you become leaders, the most important thing you have is your word, your trust. That’s where respect comes from.

What kind of people do they think we are? Is it possible they do not realize that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?

Everywhere I go, the kids call me ‚the book lady.‘ The older I get, the more appreciative I seem to be of the ‚book lady‘ title. It makes me feel more like a legitimate person, not just a singer or an entertainer. But it makes me feel like I’ve done something good with my life and with my success.

People and organizations don’t grow much without delegation and completed staff work because they are confined to the capacities of the boss and reflect both personal strengths and weaknesses.

If you have fear, you are bound by tradition, you follow some leader or guru. When you are bound by tradition, when you are afraid of your husband or your wife, you lose your dignity as an individual human being.

People are underestimating the force of angry kids.

America isn’t Congress. America isn’t Washington. America is the striving immigrant who starts a business, or the mom who works two low-wage jobs to give her kid a better life. America is the union leader and the CEO who put aside their differences to make the economy stronger.

I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end… I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside of me.

The true measure of the value of any business leader and manager is performance.

The worst disease which can afflict executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it’s egotism.

The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I’m against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.

I’ve used the prestige and influence of having been a president of the United States as effectively as possible. And secondly, I’ve still been able to carry out my commitments to peace and human rights and environmental quality and freedom and democracy and so forth.

If a leader doesn’t convey passion and intensity then there will be no passion and intensity within the organization and they’ll start to fall down and get depressed.