“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.”

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.

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

The first and most imperative necessity in war is money, for money means everything else — men, guns, ammunition.

Since we have literally targeted our enemies, the Pentagon assumes that, sooner or later, rogues will take out our cities, presumably from spaceships.

Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.

Every economic opinion is associated with a set of assumptions.

It is true that classical libertarian thought is opposed to state intervention in social life, as a consequence of deeper assumptions about the human need for liberty, diversity, and free association.

Rational discussion is useful only when there is a significant base of shared assumptions.

The universe is full of dead people who lived by assumption.

Begin challenging your own assumptions.