Quotes about Impact

He said it without greeting, as if they had parted the day before. Because it took her a moment to regain the art of breathing, she realized for the first time how much that voice meant to her.

It does not matter that only a few in each generation will grasp and achieve the full reality of man's proper stature—and that the rest will betray it. It is those few that move the world and give life its meaning—and it is those few that I have always sought to address.

The man who has no purpose, but has to act, acts to destroy others. That is not the same thing as a productive or creative purpose.

You might be locked in a world not of your own making, her eyes said, but you still have a claim on how it is shaped. You still have responsibilities.

Once I found an issue enough people cared about, I could take them into action. With enough actions, I could start to build power. Issues

Money is not the only answer, but it makes a difference.

A change happens because ordinary people do extraordinary things.

The cynics may be the loudest voices, but I promise you, they will accomplish the least.

Faulkner reminds us, the past is never dead and buried - it is not even past.

Maybe nothing would come of my Cairo speech. Maybe the dysfunction of the Middle East would play itself out regardless of what I did. Maybe the best we could hope for was to placate men like Mubarak and kill those who would try to kill us. Maybe, as the Pyramids had whispered, none of it mattered in the long run. But on the only scale that any of us can truly comprehend, the span of centuries, the actions of an American president sixty-five years earlier had set the world on a better course.

Our history has always been the sum total of the choices made and the actions taken by each individual man and woman. It has always been up to us.

Whenever I write a letter to a family who has lost a loved one in Iraq, or read an email from a constituent who has dropped out of college because her student aid has been cut, I'm reminded that the actions of those in power have enormous consequences—a price that they themselves almost never have to pay.