“I like the rough impersonality of New York … Human relations are oiled by jokes, complaints, and confessions-all made with the assumption of never seeing the other person again.”

The point of the game is not how well the individual does, but whether the team wins. That’s the beautiful heart of the game, the blending of personalities, the mutual sacrifices for the group success.

When we engage people positively, we create a receptive platform for the ideas and information we wish to communicate.

Classic Christmas cookies are really time-consuming. Instead, make a bar you can bake in a pan and just cut up, like a brownie or a blondie or a shortbread, which still has that Christmas vibe.

Leadership is not something that is done to people, like fixing your teeth. Leadership is unlocking people’s potential to become better.

Give to another human being without the expectation of a return.

Trying to take money out of politics is like trying to take jumping out of basketball.

I might lose because I wasn’t tall enough; I might lose because I wasn’t fast enough. But I wasn’t going to lose because I wasn’t ready.

Imagination allows us to escape the predictable. It enables us to reply to the common wisdom that we cannot soar by saying, ‘Just watch!’

A lot of people want to change the world, but only a few people want to change themselves. When it comes to the issue of race in America, we have to do both.

When you’re not practicing, someone somewhere is. And when the two of you meet, assuming roughly equal ability, the other person will win.

Tax (reform) is ultimately a decision about values.

Sports is a metaphor for overcoming obstacles and achieving against great odds. Athletes, in times of difficulty, can be important role models.

Every time I have some moment on a seashore, or in the mountains, or sometimes in a quiet forest, I think this is why the environment has to be preserved.

Basketball can serve as a kind of metaphor for ultimate cooperation. It is a sport where success, as symbolized by the championship, requires that the dictates of community prevail over selfish impulses.

Working with the UN’s diplomacy and development arms, we can prevent minor differences from escalating into wars.

When you make speeches you elicit expectations against which you will be held accountable.

Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity.

The assumption that women are a subgroup, that men’s culture is the ‘real’ world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the ‘great’ or ‘liberalizing’ periods of history have been the same for women as for men.

Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.

Motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.

Written with courage and passion, this is a book whose often counterintuitive clarity shakes entombed assumptions like an earthquake.

This profound book shatters that assumption, showing that the more vital skill is asking the right questions….

Negative relationships are unpleasant but predictable.

Indeed, not all attacks-especially the bitter and ridiculing kind leveled at Darwin-are offered in good faith, but for practical purposes it is good policy to assume that they are.