“Serenity comes from the ability to say “Yes” to existence. Courage comes from the ability to say “No” to the wrong choices made by others.”

Source: World of the Five Gods series, The Hallowed Hunt (2005), Chapter 24 (pp. 442-443)

PBS' Newshour with Jim Lehrer, December 20, 1999. http://renewamerica.us/archives/media/interviews/99_12_20lehrer.htm.
1999

Source: Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

2013, "Let Freedom Ring" Ceremony (August 2013)
Context: The March on Washington teaches us that we are not trapped by the mistakes of history; that we are masters of our fate. But it also teaches us that the promise of this nation will only be kept when we work together. We’ll have to reignite the embers of empathy and fellow feeling, the coalition of conscience that found expression in this place 50 years ago. And I believe that spirit is there, that truth force inside each of us. I see it when a white mother recognizes her own daughter in the face of a poor black child. I see it when the black youth thinks of his own grandfather in the dignified steps of an elderly white man. It’s there when the native-born recognizing that striving spirit of the new immigrant; when the interracial couple connects the pain of a gay couple who are discriminated against and understands it as their own. That’s where courage comes from -- when we turn not from each other, or on each other, but towards one another, and we find that we do not walk alone. That’s where courage comes from.

Q magazine, April 2000

as quoted by Mike Carlowicz in WHOI Waypoints: Remembrance: Cecil Howard Green, Woods Hole Currents: Volume 10, Number 2, 2003 http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=14940

From Hayley's Twitter. September 10, 2010. http://twitter.com/#!/yelyahwilliams/status/24055172040