Martin Seligman

It's no surprise that optimistic athletes, managers and teams do better. What's interesting is where they do better. It's in coming back from defeat and acting in the clutch.

The word 'happiness' always bothered me, partly because it was scientifically unwieldy and meant a lot of different things to different people, and also because it's subjective.

When we take time to notice the things that go right - it means we're getting a lot of little rewards throughout the day.

When millions applaud you seriously ask yourself what harm you have done; and when they disapprove you, what good.

Well, I actually wrote her a letter a couple of days ago congratulating her. The tone I tried to convey in the letter is, look, you are a part of a great American historical process.

We do foreign assistance for altruistic reasons, certainly for humanitarian reasons, of course. But the main reason we do foreign assistance is we do it in the American national interest.