“There is no excuse for not trying.”

The best judge of whether or not a country is going to develop is how it treats its women

You can put lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig.

Change is never easy, but always possible.

Who you are and who you love should never be a fireable offense.

You might be locked in a world not of your own making, her eyes said, but you still have a claim on how it is shaped. You still have responsibilities.

No, you can’t deny women their basic rights and pretend it’s about your ‘religious freedom’. If you don’t like birth control, don’t use it. Religious freedom doesn’t mean you can force others to live by your own beliefs.

One of the best investments we can make in a child’s life is high-quality early education.

Reading makes all other learning possible. We have to get books into our children’s hands early and often.

We don’t turn back. We leave no one behind. We pull each other up.

The worst thing that colonialism did was to cloud our view of our past.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that, in our democracy, government is us.

Don’t just get involved. Fight for your seat at the table. Better yet, fight for a seat at the head of the table.

If you’re walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you’ll make progress.

Climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security.

Greatness is never free; it must be earned.

A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.

A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.

It is He who is revealed in every face, sought in every sign, gazed upon by every eye, worshipped in every object of worship, and pursued in the unseen and the visible. Not a single one of His creatures can fail to find Him in its primordial and original nature.

We must complain. Yes, plain, blunt complaint, ceaseless agitation, unfailing exposure of dishonesty and wrong – this is the ancient, unerring way to liberty and we must follow it.

Some of us learn control, more or less by accident. The rest of us go all our lives not even understanding how it is possible, and blaming our failure on being born the wrong way.

Am I more afraid of failing or succeeding?

Temerity is not always successful.

In the end, it’s not about failure, it’s about how much you love what you do.