“We aren’t even fighting disease. Its poverty. Money for food, medicines… that helps.”

Another day in paradise’ was his inevitable pronouncement when he settled his head on his pillow. Now I understand what that meant: the uneventful day was a precious gift.

The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.

As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.

What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?

And pray, why would this number interest us?” “It is the only number that describes itself when you read it, ‘One zero, two ones, three twos, two threes’.

I think we can see how blessed we are in America to have access to the kind of health care we do if we are insured, and even if uninsured, how there is a safety net.

The only way to know where you are is by where you have just been.

It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.

I think we learn from medicine everywhere that it is, at its heart, a human endeavor, requiring good science but also a limitless curiosity and interest in your fellow human being, and that the physician-patient relationship is key; all else follows from it.

Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities.

There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, ‘You must read this.’

If seems almost un-American to enjoy delays, and perhaps enjoy is not the best word, but certainly a delayed flight

This is my life, I thought…I have excised the cancer from my past, cut it out; I have crossed the high plains, descended into the desert, traversed oceans, and planted my feet in new soil

That’s the funny thing about America–the blessed thing. As many people as there are to hold you back, there are angels whose humanity makes up for all the others.

It’s an eerie feeling, as if my old mentor is not just in the room, but in my shoes, using me as his mouthpiece.

According to Shiva, life is in the end about fixing holes. Shiva didn’t speak in metaphors. fixing holes is precisely what he did.

Even if the whole human race dies off because we keep fighting and killing each other and being heartless, the planet will take care of itself. Eventually, after millions of years.

When you’re fighting for economic and social justice, you’re always fighting for the minority.

He doesn’t have super powers or the biggest, baddest gun. The point isn’t how many people you can kill or how you kill them. He is there to fight piracy, greed, and cruelty in all their forms on land and sea

Very few people on earth ever get to say: ‘I am doing, right now, the most important thing I could possibly be doing.’ If you’ll join this fight that’s what you’ll get to say

An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias.

The terrorists exist, and I think we must speak to them, not to establish a dialogue-since for serious terrorists that is unfortunately out of the question – but to learn how their brains work, to be better able to fight them.

Before you can win the fight, You’ve got to be in the fight.

Nobody can count Shane Mosley out. He is a good, good fighter, especially when he fights an aggressive opponent like Manny Pacquiao.