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Alexander McCall Smith

"Mr Mandela, who had given his whole life for justice and had never once thought of himself. How unlike these people were modern politicians, who thought only of power and tricks."

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"Mr Mandela, who had given his whole life for justice and had never once thought of himself. How unlike these people were modern politicians, who thought only of power and tricks."

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A.E. Samaan

"Employment sells out the future life."

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Personal Development

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A.E. Samaan

"Love costs us much, but we still need it. Wisdom costs us much, but we still seek it. Faith costs us much, but we still practice it. Life costs us much, but we still desire it."

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Personal Development

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A.E. Samaan

"Love is always by definition a choice."

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Personal Development

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A.E. Samaan

"I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it."

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Personal Development

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A.E. Samaan

"You have to lose something to gain anything."

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Personal Development

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A.E. Samaan

"The greatest gains that we will ever experience arise from the greatest sacrifices that we have ever known."

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Personal Development

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A.E. Samaan

"More so God didn't choose to resolve the problem of the earth by sending PRAYERS but by sending his son."

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Personal Development

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A.E. Samaan

"Sacrifice precedes any success."

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Personal Development

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A.E. Samaan

"The sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices."

Author Name

Personal Development

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A.E. Samaan

"The sacrifice 'of' self for the greater good is the greatest calling imaginable, and it is the bedrock of the greatest nations. The sacrifice 'for' self is the most pathetic calling imaginable, and it is the quicksand within which nations perish."

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Alexander McCall Smith
"Men, she thought, were odd about their clothes: they liked to wear the same things until they became defeated and threadbare."

Observation

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Alexander McCall Smith
"Bertie stared at his mother. She spoils things, he thought. All she ever does is spoil things. He had not started this conversation, and it was not his fault that they were now talking about Grey Owl. He sounded rather a nice man to Bertie. Any why should he not dress up in feathers and live in the forests if that was what he wanted to do? It was typical of his mother to try to spoil Grey Owl's fun."

Lifestyle

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Alexander McCall Smith
"When people ask for advice they very rarely want your advice and will go ahead and do what they want to do anyway, no matter what you say. That applied in every sort of case; it was a human truth of universal application, but one which most people knew little or nothing about."

Life

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Alexander McCall Smith
"Did it make a difference if the remark never got back to the person about whom it was made? She thought not. The harm is done when the words are uttered: that is the act of belittlement, the act of diminishing the other, and it is that act which would cause pain to the victim. You said that about me? The wrong was located in the making of the cruel remark, rather than in the pain it might later cause."

Ethics

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Alexander McCall Smith
"It was hard to disappear completely in Botswana, where there were fewer than two million people and where people had a healthy curiosity as to who was who and where people had come from. It was very difficult to be anonymous, even in Gaborone, as there would always be neighbours who would want to know exactly what one was doing and who one's people had been."

Society

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Alexander McCall Smith
"He had been thinking of how landscape moulds a language. It was impossible to imagine these hills giving forth anything but the soft syllables of Irish, just as only certain forms of German could be spoken on the high crags of Europe; or Dutch in the muddy, guttural, phlegmish lowlands."

Language

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Alexander McCall Smith
"She knew that she had a tendency to allow her mind to wander, but surely that's what made the world interesting. One thought led to another, one memory triggered another. How dull it would be, she thought, not to be reminded of the interconnectedness of everything, how dull for the present not to evoke the past, for here not to imply there."

Mind

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Alexander McCall Smith
"How often have I noticed or, indeed, listened to him? We talk, but do I actually listen, or is our conversation mainly a question of my waiting for him to stop and for it to be my turn to say something? For how many of us is that what conversation means - the setting up of our lines?"

Listening

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Alexander McCall Smith
"Memories of that which we have lost are curious things - weeks, months, even years may pass without recollection of them and then, quite suddenly, something will remind us of a lost friend, or of a favourite possession that has been mislaid or destroyed, and then we think: Yes, that is what I have had and I have no longer."

Memory

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Alexander McCall Smith
"So it was in Botswana, almost everywhere; ties of kinship, no matter how attenuated by distance or time, linked one person to another, weaving across the country a human blanket of love and community. And in the fibres of that blanket there were threads of obligation that meant that one could not ignore the claims of others. Nobody should starve; nobody should feel that they were outsiders; nobody should be alone in their sadness."

Society

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