‘Cause it’s next. ‘Cause we came out of the cave and we looked over the hill and we saw fire. And we crossed the ocean and we pioneered the West and we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on a timeline of exploration and this is what’s next.
Rob Lowe, The West Wing
Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Whatever else kayaking is, it is a form of work, and work, starting with the taking of small actions, is the only reliable way I know to escape from those insomniac anxieties that can strike even in broad daylight.
David Gessner, My Green Manifesto: Down the Charles River In Pursuit of a New Environmentalism
No one understands and appreciates the American Dream of hard work leading to material rewards better than a non-American.
Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
The further you go, the more you have to be proud of. At the same time, in order to come a long way, you have to be behind to begin with. IN the end, though maybe it’s not how you reach a place that matters. Just that you get there at all.
Sarah Dessen, Lock and Key
Maybe this is how enlightenment happens. Not with a thunderclap or a bolt of lightening but as a steady drip, drip, drip until one day you realize your bucket is full.
Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World
Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire; what led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation; what led young women and young men to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom’s cause. Hope is what led me here today — with a father from Kenya, a mother from Kansas; and a story that could only happen in the United States of America. Hope is the bedrock of this nation; the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us; by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is; who have courage to remake the world as it should be.
President Barack Obama [January 3, 2008]

It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn’t make everything all right. It didn’t make ANYTHING all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird’s flight. But I’ll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting.
Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
We haven’t come a long way, we’ve come a short way. If we hadn’t come a short way, no one would be calling us baby.
Elizabeth Janeway
On the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons.
Douglas Adams
None of us has gotten where we are solely by pulling ourselves up from our own bootstraps. We got here because somebody bent down and helped us.
Thurgood Marshall
And it’s too hard to focus through all this doubt, I keep making these to-do lists, but nothing gets crossed out.
Conor Oberst, Nothing Gets Crossed Out
The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is today.
Chinese proverb
If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run the walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.
Martin Luther King Jr