“Together we resolve that a great nation must care for the vulnerable and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune.”

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.

It is the task of a good man to help those in misfortune.

There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one’s own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.

Physical deformity, calls forth our charity. But the infinite misfortune of moral deformity calls forth nothing but hatred and vengeance.

Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.

People exaggerate both happiness and unhappiness; we are never so fortunate nor so unfortunate as people say we are.

Great minds always tend to see virtue in misfortune.

It is just as often a great misfortune to be the child of the rich as it is to be the child of the poor. Wealth has its misfortunes. Too much, too great opportunity and advantage given to a child has its misfortunes.

Even when the winds of misfortune blow, amazing things can still happen.