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

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.

There has never been a great athlete who died not knowing what pain is.

When conflicts do break out, UN peacekeepers should play a role in defusing and settling them. Without giving up our sovereignty, we can help the UN with better training and better command and control in order to develop more effective peacekeeping forces.

The only way to be true to our American tradition is to maintain absolute governmental neutrality regarding religious beliefs and practices

Leaders should be collaborative, modest, and generous

When the playing is over, one can sense that one’s youth has been spent playing a game, and now both the game and youth are gone.

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.

I wish I were the type who could walk into a place and have everybody love me. But I’m not, and there’s no use wishing

My second novel, “Good Benito”, was not finished. I wished that I had spent another year with it.

I wish Monkeys could Skype. Maybe one day.

Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.

I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.

Kind of wish I was dead. Maybe, I’ll blow my brains out, mama, or maybe I’ll go bowling.

Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.

The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.