"How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these." - George Washington Carver

"The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government." - Thomas Jefferson

"Life's most urgent question is, "What are you doing for others?" - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Although the world is very full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it." - Helen Keller

On February 3, 1994, Mother Teresa spoke with President Bill Clinton at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. The frail nun spoke simply, yet with a powerful directness to America: "If we remember that God loves us, and that we can love others as He loves us, then America can become a sign of peace for the world. From here, a sign of care for the weakest of the weak... must go out to the world. If you become a burning light of justice and peace in the world, then really you will be true to what the founders of this country stood for. God bless you!" - Mother Teresa

"I now make it my earnest prayer that God would have you, and the State over which you preside, in His holy protection... that He would most graciously be pleased to dispose us all to do justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that charity, humility, and pacific temper of mind, which were the characteristics of the Divine Author of our blessed religion, and without an humble imitation of whose example in these things, we can never hope to be a happy nation." - George Washington

"We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren scepter in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame, the altar fires before which they worshiped." - Calvin Coolidge

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan -- to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations." - Abraham Lincoln