"The ideas of directing attention outward, trying to imagine other people complexly, trying not to see myself as the center of the universe - these concepts have become important to me, and I hope they're at work in my life on a minute-by-minute basis."

“Look into your own heart, discover what it is that gives you pain and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else.”

Source : "How Can We Make The World More Compassionate?". Interview with Guy Raz, www.npr.org. December 19, 2014.

“I was not influenced by concerts as a child, but I was very strongly influenced by the ballets I saw.”

“I know that I am a black man in a white world. . . I know that I never had it made.”

Source : I Never Had It Made introduction (1972)

“People are always making rules for themselves and always finding loop-holes.”

“Before you speak, my friend, remember, a spiritual man contain his anger. Angry words are like slap in de face.”

Source : Chris Abani (2005). “GraceLand: A Novel”, p.9, Macmillan

“I'd met Simon [Segars] for the first time in London. He struck me as a quiet, natural-born engineer and an orthodox successor [to East]. He has a home in Silicon Valley, and he said it's just a few minutes' drive away from mine.”

“Recognition is the most inexpensive, easy-to-use motivational technique available to management.”

Source : Jim Clemmer, Barry Sheehy (1992). “Firing on All Cylinders”, p.229, Jim Clemmer

“Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.”