Oral delivery aims at persuasion and making the listener believe they are converted. Few persons are capable of being convinced; the majority allow themselves to be persuaded.

You can’t change how people treat you or what they say about you. All you can do is change how you react to it.

The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.

If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap, whence every one must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart.

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the induction of a new order of things.

The man who complains about the way the ball bounces is likely the one who dropped it.

To a greater force, and to a better nature, you, free, are subject, and that creates the mind in you, which the heavens have not in their charge. Therefore if the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought.

There are a thousand excuses for failure but never a good reason.

An inability to stay quiet . . . is one of the most conspicuous failings of mankind.

Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.

No problem is so deep that it cannot be overcome, given the will of all parties, through discussion and negotiation rather than force and violence.

Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer.

We don't point a pistol at our own forehead. That is not the way to conduct negotiations.

Wherever there is injustice, war, discrimination against women, gays and the disadvantaged, I did my best to show up and exert moral persuasion.

Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done.

But all my life through, the very insistence on truth has taught me to appreciate the beauty of compromise.

Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another.

People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.

When angry, count to ten before you speak; if very angry, one hundred.

Understanding a question is half an answer.

We know how to speak many falsehoods which resemble real things, but we know, when we will, how to speak true things.

Being aware of a single shortcoming within yourself is far more useful than being aware of a thousand in someone else!

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.

We can secure other people’s approval, if we do right and try hard; but our own is worth a hundred of it, and no way has been found out of securing that.

Most people are on the world, not in it—have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them—undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.

If everyone was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.

You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.

Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.

Only when we realize that there is no eternal, unchanging truth or absolute truth can we arouse in ourselves a sense of intellectual responsibility.

Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life.