“The same process that makes AA so effective-the power of a group to teach individuals how to believe-happens whenever people come together to help one another change. Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.”

If you want to do something that requires willpower – like going for a run after work – you have to conserve your willpower muscle during the day.

Habits are malleable throughout your entire life.

The best agencies understood the importance of routines. The worst agencies were headed by people who never thought about it, and then wondered why no one followed their orders.

Companies aren’t families. They’re battlefields in a civil war.

Small wins are a steady application of a small advantage.

Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.

If you believe you can change – if you make it a habit – the change becomes real.

The problem is that your brain can’t tell the difference between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, it’s always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards.

Since the 17th century, insurance agents have been the foremost experts on risk.

Once you understand that habits can change, you have the freedom and the responsibility to remake them. Once you understand that habits can be rebuilt, the power of habit becomes easier to grasp and the only option left is to get to work.

Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.

It is facile to imply that smoking, alcoholism, overeating, or other ingrained patters can be upended without real effort. Genuine change requires work and self-understanding of the cravings driving behaviours.

The Golden Rule of Habit Change: You can’t extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it.

This is the real power of habit: the insight that your habits are what you choose them to be.

Champions don’t do extraordinary things. They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the orther team to react. They follow the habits they’ve learned.

For a habit to stay changed, people must believe change is possible.

The emerging whole manifests locally. It manifests in particular communities, groups, and, ultimately, in us as individuals.

The people came to fear even their closest neighbors. At the level of the individual, the community, and the nation, people sought signs of others’ ill intentions; and everywhere they looked, they found them, for this is what looking does.

Saddam Hussein has been brutal against his people, but when he was committing those crimes, the international community did not come to the rescue of the Iraqis.

Refugees of all kinds were constantly fleeing from Christendom to the Islamic lands. Jews of course and Muslims of course, but even some Christians and the movement of refugees went overwhelmingly that way.

Muslims have their own tradition on limited government. Now in Islam, there is a very strong political tradition. Because the different circumstances, Islam is political from the very beginning.

If we dwell in a community that is comfortable, then it’s probably not broad enough a coalition.

The international community would like to see an agreement in Libya before Ramadan, let me be very cautious about the possibilities for an agreement.

I came up in the community center. I used to be physical director of the South Central Community Center in Chicago on 83rd. It’s still there. It used to be around there when I was a kid.