And I love that even in the toughest moments when we're all sweating it - when we're worried that the bill won't pass and it seems like all is lost - Barack never lets himself get distracted by the chatter and the noise. Just like his grandmother he just keeps getting up and moving forward... with patience and wisdom and courage and grace.

Every man has his own courage and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.

Growing up politics never trickled down to the areas we come from. But people from Obama's camp and Obama himself reached out to me and asked for my help on the campaign. We've sat and had dinner and we've spoken on the phone. He's a very sharp guy. Very charming. Very cool.

Part of Obama's persona is self-reliance. He's calm he's cool he's self-possessed. In many ways he has tried to define himself in opposition to Clinton's sometimes needy often undisciplined emotionalism.

Draco's not really a bully. He's not exactly the biggest strongest guy in the world. He's more a rich snobby person. He thinks of himself as really cool.

The great work must inevitably be obscure except to the very few to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary.

He that communicates his secret to another makes himself that other's slave.

For an introvert his environment is himself and can never be subject to startling or unforeseen change.

Few expected very much of Franklin Roosevelt on Inauguration Day in 1933. Like Barack Obama seventy-six years later he was succeeding a failed Republican president and Americans had voted for change. What that change might be Roosevelt never clearly said probably because he himself didn't know.

I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that he tries to make some sort of change - within himself not on the outside.

Men may change their climate but they cannot change their nature. A man that goes out a fool cannot ride or sail himself into common sense.

What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.

It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may by change of circumstances become his own.

Everyone thinks of changing the world but no one thinks of changing himself.

Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself the engineer is explained by natural selection.

It is very sad for a man to make himself servant to a single thing his manhood all taken out of him by the hydraulic pressure of excessive business.

No person will make a great business who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit.

It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.

The leader who exercises power with honor will work from the inside out starting with himself.

Nothing so conclusively proves a man's ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself.

There is small risk a general will be regarded with contempt by those he leads if whatever he may have to preach he shows himself best able to perform.

The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatizes and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

There's a victory and defeat the first and best of victories the lowest and worst of defeats which each man gains or sustains at the hands not of another but of himself.