More prized by his parents than good grades, Chris mentioned, was “Yankee ingenuity”—putting your smarts to work. “It’s better to be tough than strong, better to be clever than intelligent,” he said, repeating a family maxim. “I was tough
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“If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg. Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals . . . We are all human beings, individuals, fragile eggs. We have no hope against the wall: it's too high, too dark, too cold. To fight the wall, we must join our souls together for warmth, strength. We must not let the system control us -- create who we are. It is we who created the system. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009)”
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“You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, I told him, like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again.”
― Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
― Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
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“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn't matter whether you're the lion or a gazelle-when the sun comes up, you'd better be running.”
― Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
― Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― The Happy Prince and Other Stories
― The Happy Prince and Other Stories
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