I'm still very connected to my family to the world I grew up in. I understand what it means to be afraid that you can't pay a doctor's bill. Or to have to make the choice between buying a band uniform for a seventh-grader and making the insurance payment on time. That will never leave me. It was how I lived until I was well into my adult years.

For more than 200 years materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs.

We know the past and its great events the present in its multitudinous complications chiefly through faith in the testimony of others.

An investigator starts research in a new field with faith a foggy idea and a few wild experiments. Eventually the interplay of negative and positive results guides the work. By the time the research is completed he or she knows how it should have been started and conducted.

The Christian faith can never be separated from the soil of sacred events from the choice made by God who wanted to speak to us to become man to die and rise again in a particular place and at a particular time.

Failure is not a single cataclysmic event. You don't fail overnight. Instead failure is a few errors in judgement repeated every day.

Remember that failure is an event not a person.

I don't believe in the so-called Olympic spirit. I speak from personal experience. When China hosted the Games it failed to include the people. The event was constructed without regard for their joy.

When they call the slightest spending reductions 'painful' we will say 'If government spending prevents pain why are we suffering so much of it?' And 'If you want to experience real pain just stay on the track we are on.'

My time at Shell was a most valuable experience because it taught me to look at the world in a long-term way. Shell takes a 20-year view on events and plans for different scenarios. It makes you see the world as a kind of large matrix.