The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.

You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.

Won’t it be wonderful when black history and native American history and Jewish history and all of U.S. history is taught from one book. Just U.S. history.

It might be said now that I have the best of both worlds. A Harvard education and a Yale degree.

What’s real freedom? Real freedom is being able to not have my way and still be just as happy as if I did.

You can see neurosis from below – as a sickness – as most psychiatrists see it. Or you can understand it as a compassionate man might: respecting the neurosis as a fumbling and inefficient effort toward good ends.

‚Thank you‘ is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.

No evil propensity of the human heart is so powerful that it may not be subdued by discipline.

Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.

But by reading them again and again finally I was able to grasp the essential part. What emotion, enthusiasm, enlightenment and confidence they communicated to me! I wept for joy.

Anything you put your mind to and add your imagination into can make your life a lot better and a lot more fun.

Find your voice and inspire others to find theirs.

True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.

The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.

God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.

My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.

For me, genres are a way for people to easily categorize music. But it doesn’t have to define you. It doesn’t have to limit you.

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

I don’t hate women – they just sometimes make me mad.

They are resilient children, but they are children, and as much as they need help to understand the hard truths in life, they also need what we all need – protection and love.

I made my fair share of mistakes.

I try to speak plainly so that my constituents who don’t follow the nuances of government like I do, because they’re too busy earning a real living, can understand the issues before me. None of this stuff is brain surgery.

The highly functional infrastructure that surrounds us, particularly in the West, is a gift from our ancestors: the comparatively uncorrupt political and economic systems, the technology, the wealth, the lifespan, the freedom, the luxury, and the opportunity.

When we’re looking for compassion, we need someone who is deeply rooted, is able to bend and, most of all, embraces us for our strengths and struggles.

Never have we stolen the intelligences of other peoples. On the contrary, in Cuba we have trained tens of thousands of doctors and other top-level professionals, for free, in order to send them back to their own countries.

No country can really develop unless its citizens are educated.

The magic of America is that we’re a free and open society with a mixed population. Part of our security is our freedom.

Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.

Be smarter than other people, just don’t tell them so.

I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another.

Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.

The only way you gain mental toughness is to do things you’re not happy doing. If you continue doing things that you’re satisfied and make you happy, you’re not getting stronger. You’re staying where you’re at. Either you’re getting better, or you’re getting worse. You’re not staying the same.

It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.

Our whole life is set up in the path of least resistance. We don’t want to suffer. We don’t want to feel discomfort. So the whole time, we’re living our lives in a very comfortable area. There’s no growth in that.

If your treat an individual… as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.

To try to become happy is to try to build a machine with no other specifications than it shall run noiselessly.

The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.

With realization of one’s own potential and self-confidence in one’s ability, one can build a better world.

As his vice president for eight years, I learned more from Ronald Reagan than from anyone I encountered in all my years of public life.

Being humble matters.

We should seek the greatest value of our action.

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.

The wise use of your freedom to make your own decisions is crucial to your spiritual growth, now and for eternity.

Instead of being concerned that you have no office, be concerned to think how you may fit yourself for office. Instead of being concerned that you are not known, seek to be worthy of being known.

There’s plenty about God that I don’t understand and can’t explain. But I come back to my core belief that God is good, that He’s for us.

A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.

You know how big love is? Love is big. love can hold anger; love can even hold hatred.

I wish everyone well, but you need to focus on yourself. You need to stop putting your hand out. Everyone wants hand outs. Everyone wants things for free. You’ve got to put in the work. You’ve got to grind. You’ve got go through the struggle, and you’ve got to get it.

No one has a right to consume happiness without producing it.

Anybody who tells you that a two-day conference, you’re going to turn into the General Patton of leadership, they’re not telling you the truth. But you can learn the fundamentals; you can absolutely understand the fundamentals.

All respect for the office of the presidency aside, I assumed that the obvious and unadulterated decline of freedom and constitutional sovereignty, not to mention the efforts to curb the power of judicial review, spoke for itself.

Time and money spent in helping men to do more for themselves is far better than mere giving.

It’s hard for me to grasp the concept of somebody being nervous when I’m talking to them.

Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.

Untutored courage is useless in the face of educated bullets.

Men’s actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.

White people just don’t want their slaves to be free. That’s the whole thing.

Choose the life that is most useful, and habit will make it the most agreeable.

We will invest in our people, quality education, job opportunity, family, neighborhood, and yes, a thing we call America.

We were poor. But my mom never accepted that. She worked hard to become a residential contractor – got her master’s with honors at the University of New Orleans. I used to go to every class with her. Her father was my paternal figure.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.