Self-government does not and should not imply the use of political agencies alone. Progress is born of cooperation in the community – not from governmental restraints.

Self-government can succeed only through an instructed electorate.

There’s pros and cons of a big church. Cons is I don’t get to know everybody, I don’t get to go to their ballgame, I don’t get to marry everybody, but the pros are you get all this community, 800 ushers come in to serve, getting there at 7 in the morning on their day off and coming in on Saturday to make all those wafers.

Information helps you to see that you’re not alone. That there’s somebody in Mississippi and somebody in Tokyo who all have wept, who’ve all longed and lost, who’ve all been happy. So the library helps you to see, not only that you are not alone, but that you’re not really any different from everyone else.

March on. Do not tarry. To go forward is to move toward perfection. March on, and fear not the thorns, or the sharp stones on life’s path.

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.

It takes a long time to bring the past up to the present.

Africa will thrive.

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

Yes, we’ve still got more work to do. More work to do for every American still in need of a good job or a raise, paid leave or a decent retirement; for every child who needs a sturdier ladder out of poverty or a world-class education; for everyone who has not yet felt the progress of these past seven and a half years.

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

When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That’s one of the great feelings – to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.

While the rest of the world has been improving technology, Ghana has been improving the quality of man’s humanity to man.

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

My grandmother took me to church on Sunday all day long, every Sunday into the night. Then Monday evening was the missionary meeting. Tuesday evening was usher board meeting. Wednesday evening was prayer meeting. Thursday evening was visit the sick. Friday evening was choir practice. I mean, and at all those gatherings, we sang.

Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.

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.

When I take my kid to school, all the parents stop and stare.

Whether we’re Democrats, Republicans, or independents – it does not matter. We all understand that an attack on any one of us is an attack on all of us.

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 to understand that we as citizens and as a government in any community throughout this country have no more important obligation than to educate those who are going to replace us.

I rely on other people every day of my life.

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.

I am a slow walker, but I never walk back.

The spirit of America has nurtured responsibility and community unlike any other country.

America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn’t standing still.

With the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine.

For me life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer.

Virtue is not left to stand alone. He who practices it will have neighbors.

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

I want to thank God, obviously for the health, for the talent He’s given me, for my family who supports me, for the things that basketball’s taught me on and off the court. For the people that I’ve been able to meet through the game of basketball.

Traditions are a common part of our lives. They can be good, and not all traditions are wrong, but sometimes they can take the joy out of life.

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.

In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.

Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men.

In America today, we are nearer a final triumph over poverty than is any other land.

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

There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New, but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

I tend not to look back and dwell on a project once it is finished.

Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.

Progressively saved by the machine from the anxieties that bound his hands and mind to material toil, relieved of a large part of his work and compelled to an ever-increasing speed of action by the devices which his intelligence cannot help ceaselessly creating and perfecting, man is about to find himself abruptly plunged into idleness.

My real dream is to have a whole, like, buy a whole piece of land. Imagine, like, a long driveway. Like, a cul de sac-type street, with maybe, like, seven houses. Me be right here. Have my mom be able to be right here. My brother over here. My girl’s grandmother and family right here. Friends over there. That’s my real dream.

Let it be our delight to find our society in the circle of which Jesus is the center, and let us make those our friends who are the friends of Jesus.

I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done.

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

The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or ethnic leaders. Such leaders have too many incentives to promote polarizing attitudes and actions that are counterproductive for minorities and disastrous for the country.

The best road to progress is freedom’s road.

The community which has neither poverty nor riches will always have the noblest principles.

Our brand of democracy is hard. But I can promise that a year from now, when I no longer hold this office, I’ll be right there with you as a citizen – inspired by those voices of fairness and vision, of grit and good humor and kindness that have helped America travel so far.

In my case Pilgrim’s Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.

Success is like reaching an important birthday and finding you’re exactly the same.

It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things.

Developing nations want to become developed nations.

America thrived in the 20th century because we made high school free. We sent a generation to college. We cultivated the most educated workforce in the world.

I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts.

The pace of progress on Mars depends upon the pace of progress of SpaceX.

In order for us to have a future that’s exciting and inspiring, it has to be one where we’re a space-bearing civilization.

Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.