A president has an inescapable responsibility to provide direction: What are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to prevent? Why? To do that, he has to both analyze and reflect.

Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

I think it’s my responsibility, as a person of influence… to sometimes try to do what I can.

Inability to make decisions is one of the principal reasons executives fail. Deficiency in decision-making ranks much higher than lack of specific knowledge or technical know-how as an indicator of leadership failure.

I’m reflective only in the sense that I learn to move forward. I reflect with a purpose.

The action we take and the decisions we make in this decade will have consequences far into this century. If America shows weakness and uncertainty, the world will drift toward tragedy. That will not happen on my watch.

You should do what other people do, unless you have a very good reason not to.

Our goal is to make the best devices in the world, not to be the biggest.

Leaders who are kind of insecure or egocentric, they basically sabotage themselves.

Traveling around the world and preaching for over 70 years did not give much time for reflection.

Most businesses think that product is the most important thing, but without great leadership, mission and a team that deliver results at a high level, even the best product won’t make a company successful.

One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.

In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom… in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.

Young people are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and more fit for new projects than for settled business.

I said on the equality side of it, that it is essential to a woman’s equality with man that she be the decision-maker, that her choice be controlling.

Waste brings woe, and sorrow hates despair.

To lead people walk behind them.

When you give everyone a voice and give people power, the system usually ends up in a really good place. So, what we view our role as, is giving people that power.

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence.

A President’s hardest task is not to do what is right, but to know what is right.

The measure of a man is what he does with power.

It is a common saying, and in everybody’s mouth, that life is but a sojourn.

I am rather inclined to silence.

Stupidity is a talent for misconception.

A people free to choose will always choose peace.

Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.

In matters of truth the fact that you don’t want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it.

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.

You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.

I wear a hat on stage so that people won’t be blinded by the reflection from my head. Also, if I don’t wear a hat, there’s no way that the hat can be at that level by itself on the stage.

My father, who was jailed for stealing on more than one occasion, just abandoned his fatherly responsibilities and disappeared. I grew up working from the time I was nine years of age. Money was a big issue everywhere I lived.

We have lived long enough to experience the hollowness of earth and the rottenness of all carnal promises.

It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are.

To govern means to pillage, as everyone knows.

History reminds us that dictators and despots arise during times of severe economic crisis.

People want to go out and travel around and meet cool people. I could just go live in Vermont, but is that what I really want?

In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right- for you’ll be criticized anyway. You’ll be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.

I delayed my father’s funeral because of cricket.

The more a person seeks security, the more that person gives up control over their life.

I loved being Secretary of State, that’s probably evident to everyone who watched me.

On every front there are clear answers out there that can make this country stronger, but we’re going to break through the fear and the frustration people are feeling. Our job is to make sure that even as we make progress, that we are also giving people a sense of hope and vision for the future.

Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face nothing new under the sun.

Imagine for yourself a character, a model personality, whose example you determine to follow, in private as well as in public.

Politics I supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.

People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working.

I definitely connected to the fact that life gets out of control and you end up doing things and wishing you were doing other things instead.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

A general is just as good or just as bad as the troops under his command make him.

What matters in the Sun-tzu universe are not positions of strength and power, but situations in which you have options, full of potential force.

Christmas is a tonic for our souls. It moves us to think of others rather than of ourselves. It directs our thoughts to giving.

Someone told me something that stuck with me: ‚You have to envision your life, and then go backwards.‘ I’ve been living by that motto for a while, so I see where I need to be. Now I’m just backtracking and trying to get back up there.

Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll; charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.

The greatest day in your life and mine is when we take total responsibility for our attitudes. That’s the day we truly grow up.

Death obsesses me, yes it does. I can’t really understand why it doesn’t obsess everyone – I think it does really, I’m just a little more out about it.

A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.

To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.