“What we are fighting isn’t godlessness–this is the most godly country on earth.”

My VIP patients often regret so many things on their deathbeds. They regret the bitterness they’ll leave in people’s hearts.

When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.

At times, with today’s advances in technology, medicine in rural America looks very like it does in America’s cities, but the variety of practices is enormous.

When you win, you often lose, that’s just a fact. There’s no currency to straighten a warped spirit, or open a closed heart, a selfish heart.

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

The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.

Patients know in a heartbeat if they’re getting a clumsy exam.

I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient; it’s only at the bedside that I can figure out what is important.

Tell us please, what treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?”….I met his gaze and I did not blink. “Words of comfort,” I said to my father.

If it does nothing else, allows one the opportunity to make prolonged observations about one’s fellow travelers.

What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it.

We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot.

When I use the word ‘healing’, by that I mean that every disease has a physical element that we’re very good at handling, but there’s always a sense of the violation. ‘Why me?’ ‘

Pray tell us, what’s your favorite number?

Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.

Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation.

I will fight for what I believe in until I drop dead. And that’s what keeps you alive.

I have worked with some horrible idiots in my life. You learn the pattern of how architects work and the thing is not to fight it. Just to be very quiet, let them get on with it and let them really mess it up.

I believe that we are who we choose to be. Nobody is going to come and save you. You’ve got to save yourself. Nobody is going to give you anything. You’ve got to go out and fight for it.

Fighting is easy to understand. You just hit the guy as hard as you can.

All people, however fanatical they may be in their zeal to disparage and to fight capitalism, implicitly pay homage to it by passionately clamoring for the products it turns out

Keep fighting for animals by making compassionate, cruelty-free choices every day and encouraging those around you to do the same.

Regarding fighting terrorism, we are ready to cooperate with anyone in this world with no conditions. That’s crux of our policy, not today, not yesterday; for years, even before the war on Syria, we always said that.

I’ve never heard of soft war.There’s no soft war. War is war. Any war is ruthless. When you fight terrorists, you fight them like any other war.