“When I applied to graduate school many years ago, I wrote an essay expressing my puzzlement at how a country that could put a man on the moon could still have people sleeping on the streets. Part of that problem is political will; we could take a lot of people off the streets tomorrow if we made it a national priority. But I have also come to realize that NASA had it easy. Rockets conform to the unchanging laws of physics. We know where the moon will be at a given time; we know precisely how fast a spacecraft will enter or exist the earth's orbit. If we get the equations right, the rocket will land where it is supposed to--always. Human beings are more complex than that. A recovering drug addict does not behave as predictably as a rocket in orbit. We don't have a formula for persuading a sixteen-year-old not to drop out of school. But we do have a powerful tool: We know that people seek to make themselves better off, however they may define that. Our best hope for improving the human condition is to understand why we act the way we do and then plan accordingly. Programs, organizations, and systems work better when they get the incentives right. It is like rowing downstream.”

“But in life people come and go. We don't always have control over it. But we can control how we respond. We can keep going, keep living the best we can. We can love the people we have instead of shutting them out. We can do our best to get to know them in the time we have.”

“When it’s just you, just me, no one around to tell us how we should be—I know we could have made it. I know we could have fought it. I know we could have conquered.”

“We human beings have enormous difficulty in focusing on the present; were always thinking about what we did, about how we could have done it better, about the consequences of our actions, and about why we didn't act as we should have.”

“This is hard to say to people without offending them, but it’s a universal truth even for the most high-performing people on the planet, so here it is: your self-image could be a lot better, and you ought to be a lot more congruent in how you engage the world. How we think of ourselves (our self-image) and how we behave in accordance with that image in the real world is the stuff of congruence. It’s one of the most profoundly powerful drives we have as humans—to live in consistent alignment with who we think we are, how we want others to perceive us, and who we want to become. When we don’t behave as the person we believe ourselves to be, we feel “off,” “out of sorts,” and, often, frustrated or angry. If we think we’re lions, for example, but we act as mice, we secretly loath our- selves. From THE CHARGE”

“How fortunate we were who still had hope I did not then realise; I could not know how soon the time would come when we should have no more hope, and yet be unable to die”