Philosophical

Nothing in life is more liberating than to fight for a cause that encompasses you but is not defined by your existence alone.

I see the otherness of the other, which appeals to me. In fact, it is the otherness of the other that makes me who I am.

You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

The most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.

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.

The story of your lives will be the story of your struggle to be true to the ideas you believe in.

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.

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.

The most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.

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.