Long

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom.

Human rights, security, and development, taken together, make up the idea of 'larger freedom.' A young man who has HIV, who cannot read or write, and who lives on the brink of starvation is not truly free — even if he can vote to choose his rulers.

Do not think you can look away from the injustice, the suffering, or the lack of true freedom that is the lot of so many people in our world today. Your future depends on their future.

In a free and compassionate society, the public good depends on private character. That character is formed and shaped in institutions like family, faith, and the many civil and social organizations.

Our Founders rejected both a radical individualism that makes no room for others, and the dreary collectivism that crushes the individual. They gave us instead a society where individual freedom is anchored in communities.

Wealth isn't measured in bling and Bentleys. It's measured in the richness of the human spirit. It's measured not in what we take from this world, but what we give to it.

Self-confidence — quiet self-confidence — is the key to winning. A quiet, deep-seated belief in yourself and what you stand for. Cockiness has nothing to do with confidence.

Feel life in all its pain and mystery. If you can't feel pain, you won't feel joy, either. There's plenty of time to be comatose, like for the rest of eternity.

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. It is our default setting, hardwired into our boards at birth.