John Powell Quotations

More than 90 percent of all the prisoners in our American prisons have been abused as children.

Blacks are about seven times more likely to live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty than whites.

We're not asking to be treated in any special way. We're asking for the regular process.

You can't reinvent yourself for every movie.

I wanted to play music from the age of seven. I suddenly fell in love with it and that's what I was going to do, or to be involved with music. It was just speaking to me at a level that as a seven year old I suddenly realized the world was capable of supporting in my head a lot more than what I was understanding verbally and visually.

You just don't make decisions about what you're going to be like when you are old. I know that I am making that decision right now. Every time we perceive ourselves, others, life, the world and God in a certain way, we are deepening the habits that will take over in old age. Every time I act on the insights that I am getting now I am deciding my future and choosing to be a kindly or cynical old man. Our yesterdays lie heavily upon our todays and our todays will lie heavily upon our tomorrows.

There is no such thing as a peace of soul approach to religion. It makes of God a gigantic Bayer Aspirin; take God three times a day and you won't feel any pain.

God alone can make a man a believer. Our part is to accept or reject his initiative.

There's the whole myth about rocket science. It's really not that hard. It's not brain surgery.

I have to be honest in asking myself: Do I really want to know and do God's will? Or is it rather that I want God to do my will? Do I go to God with the assurance that I want only to know and do his will? Or do I rather first make my own plans and then insist that God make my dreams come true?

By afflictions God is spoiling us of what otherwise might have spoiled us. When he makes the world too hot for us to hold, we let it go.

Old cranks have practiced all their lives, just as old saints have likewise practiced all their lives. They just practiced different life principles.

Attitudes are capable of making the same experience either pleasant or painful.

God is to us like the sky to a small bird, which cannot see its outer limits and cannot reach its distant horizons, but can only lose itself in the greatness and immensity of the blueness.

Comparison is the death of true self-contentment.

Our lives are shaped by those who love us

Growth is always a gradual process, a bridge slowly crossed and not a corner sharply turned.

To tell you my thoughts is to locate myself in a category. To tell you about my feelings is to tell you about me.

What are the "ifs" and "buts" that limit my enjoyment of life?

Loneliness is the prison of the human spirit. When we are lonely, we pace back and forth in small, shut-in worlds.

We must be trying to learn who we really are rather than trying to tell ourselves who we should be.

Pain is a teacher from whom we can learn much.

He who has no inclination to learn more will be very apt to think that he knows enough.

When Marconi suggested the possibility of wireless transmission of sound (the radio),he was committed to a mental institution. But people like Lincoln, Edison, and Marconi were strongly motivated. So they didn't give up. They somehow knew that the only real failure is the one from which we learn nothing. They seemed to go on the assumption that there is no failure greater than the failure of not trying, and so they continued to try in the face of repeated failures.

God isn't calling us to a lonely, joyless existence with the promise of a delayed reward. God is calling us to live, to love and enjoy the challenge. God's formulas are roadmaps to freedom and peace. God is saying to us: "The only way to live is to be free. So save your heart for love and save your love for persons. Don't ever let any 'thing' own you. Don't let money or fame or power or the pursuit of pleasure put a ring in your nose and lead you around. Love persons and use things." And of course, this is the only way to live, to be free.

Playing is much, much harder than composing in my opinion, becoming a player. If you want to be a player for all your life either you decide not to do it professionally and just enjoy it and just do it every weekend, but if you want to be a professional musician- hardest thing I could imagine and I really wasn't capable of doing it.

We cannot "psychologize" the grace of God. God's actions are outside and above our human sciences.

Love demands that I learn how to focus my attention on the needs of those I love.

If you knew me in the past, please do not think that I am the same person that you are meeting today. I have experienced more of life, I have encountered new depths in those I love, I have suffered and prayed and I am different.

Let us consider the reason of the case. For nothing is law that is not reason.

Life is something like a remarkable, exciting puzzle. It comes piece by piece in packages marked days.

The genius of Christian spirituality is to integrate [the] spirit of possession with the spirit of dispossession. The spirit of dispossession implies that all the good and delightful things of this world are never allowed to own, possess, or shackle me. Dispossession implies that I am always free, my own person, liberated from the tyranny that possession can easily exercise over us.

If you knew me yesterday, please do not think that it is the same person that you are meeting today.

The real gift of love is self disclosure.

Honest, open communication is the only street that leads us into the real world... We then begin to grow as never before. And once we are on this road, happiness cannot be far away.

What is disgraceful and outrageous is that 18,000 children die of hunger every day, every one of them a preventable death. That's what the controversy should be about.

A person can grow only as much as his horizon allows.

There is no fixed, true and real person inside of you or me, precisely because being a person necessarily implies becoming a person, being in process.

Each child is sent into this world by God with a "Unique Message" to deliver, a new personal act of love to bestow

When we contact each other, we change each other. We are constantly making each other.

Love supposes, is, and does many things, but basically it is practiced in the act of sharing.

Love is not a feeling to be felt, it's an action to be learned.

A good listener truly wants to know the speaker.

It is essential that our love be liberating, not possessive. We must at all times give those we love the freedom to be themselves. Love affirms the other as other. It does not possess and manipulate another as mine.

Human beings, like plants, grow in the soil of acceptance, not in the atmosphere of rejection.

There are only two potential tragedies in life, and dying young isn't one of them. These are the two real tragedies: If you go through life and you don't love ... and if you go through life and you don't tell those whom you love that you love them.

A life of love is difficult, but it is not a bleak or unrewarding life. In fact, it is the only true human and happy life, for it is filled with concerns that are as deep as life, as wide as the whole world, and as far reaching as eternity. It is only when we have consented to love, and have agreed to forget ourselves, that we can find our fulfillment. This fulfillment will come unperceived and mysterious like the grace of God, but we will recognize it and it will be recognized in us.

You have a unique message to deliver, a unique song to sing, a unique act of love to bestow. This message, this song, and this act of love have been entrusted exclusively to the one and only you.

The only love worthy of a name is unconditional.

Communication works for those who work at it.

Since the inception of E-911, the rates have not gone up, but the cost of business has gone up, ... ... We have to do something in order to secure the revenue stream for E-911.

Now we'll be able to work those cases in house more efficiently,

He'd run around, pretend like he was boxing everybody, ... Everyone kind of laughed at how he was. But the main thing I would say about him, he was so focused on it.

He came into town just to get those 6-inch custard pies,

What is disgraceful and outrageous is that 18,000 children die of hunger every day, every one of them a preventable death. That's what the controversy should be about.

We have tightened just as tight as we can go including the elimination of personnel,

Partnerships of this scale reflect an understanding that has long existed within the open source community. That is what we can accomplish as a group is almost always more than we can do alone.

Our lives are shaped by those who love us and by those who refuse to love us

When I repress my emotions, my stomach keeps score

We want to let people know we're here.

This year was exceptional for ice, but none of it's easy to get to.

We've joked we should just print it on the form.

We've been notified a couple of times. The last notification was last week. So we've taken steps to replace them without that fiber.

We tend to think if a kid isn't knocked unconscious, he's okay, ... aren't like an ankle sprain that is clearly identifiable.

We're trying to get a realistic picture of just what E-911 will pay for,

You folks are not willing to go beyond any step beyond what we agreed. I am not even interested in continuing the housing development,

Blessed is he who has learned to laugh at himself, for he shall never cease to be entertained

Communications is the linchpin. You can't have command and control without communications.

After being with the Russians and the Germans and others, ... their skin was white, and he was put on sort of a pedestal among them. When he came back here, he realized that over there, they didn't look at him for his color, only for his attributes as a boxer. He got a little different after that, because he came back here and things were still the same.

There's a penalty for missing a day. Then you don't find out about the penalty for three months and they charge interest for the three months. It's very difficult to keep track unless you spend a lot of time to do that.

It remains a huge problem. If the Los Angeles River is filled with water, and you have a policeman on one side and a fire department truck on the other side, to coordinate operations they have to call dispatchers and dispatchers have to relay messages.

Food Force continues to be a great success all over the world, from the USA to China, kids and teachers love this game. They can learn about world hunger while having fun. It is an opportunity for Italian students and teachers to use this education tool without any language obstacles.

It's always important for people to prioritize. Separating tasks, finding good work environments, whether you put that into religious framework or not, these things are still fundamental.

The value of the training alone plus the equipment is a win-win for the community,

Once he became the champ, he told me he didn't really know who his friends were any more, ... He told me he felt like his only real, true friends were in Louisville. ... This is where the people really knew him and made him feel the most comfortable.

Anytime we can take narcotics off the street it is significant because it takes them out of the hands of children. ...It certainly is not going to stop the drug problem, we have to work very, very hard.

Certainly, these emerging technologies can lead to better communications in the future,

He came around to the neighborhood before his fight with Jimmy Ellis (in 1971),

I also see the world of religion. I see some of my brothers and sisters trying to be religious without being fully human. They seem a little rigid and narrow at times, wanting to be holy, but not human. They seem to be winning a place in heaven, without realizing or enjoying the beauty of earth. They keep the ten commandments, but their observances look so joyless. Such a world seems small and the air in that world is stale.

You and I can profit by asking ourselves: What do I see when I look through the lens of my attitude toward myself? Am I more a critic than a friend? Do I look beyond the surface blemishes to find the truly beautiful and unique person that I am? Or do I play the destructive "comparison game"? What verdict does the juror of my mind pass on me: "good at heart" or "guilty on all counts"?

The glories and the beauties of form, color, and sound unite in the Grand Canyon - forms unrivaled even by the mountains, colors that vie with sunsets, and sounds that span the diapason from tempest to tinkling raindrop, from cataract to bubbling fountain.