People From Oklahoma

"Without-it ministries can be filled with very sincere Bible-believing Christians; unfortunately, they're simply more concerned about themselves than the lost."

"Across the board, almost every with-it church I've observed is virtually obsessed with reaching those who don't know Christ."

"Is your ministry becoming more faith-filled or more risk-aversive?"

"Get out of the boat. Face your fears. Fail. Learn. Adjust. Try again. And watch God do more than you can imagine."

"The it-rich are those who have chosen to face their fears rather than live with regrets."

"Stuntmen and stuntwomen are paid to fall. They fall, get beat up, and get blown up...gracefully. We need to learn to fail gracefully."

"Let God turn fear into faith. Instead of becoming a hesitant leader, ask God to make you bold and aggressive."

"Sometimes the fruit of your steps of faith is measured not so much by what God does through you as by what God does in you."

"As you seek God and he rekindles it in your heart, I believe he is going to speak to you."

"The it-ish understand: failure is a part of success."

"It-owners know that setbacks can be setups for better things to come. They study their failures and learn from them."

"Failing often can help a ministry experience it. Being overly cautious can kill it."

"Ministries without it are usually the ones playing it safe, doing only what is sure to succeed."

"Don't put your faith in the innovations. Keep your faith in Christ."

"Don't get tricked into trusting your spiritual bells and whistles or you might become too slick, lose your edge, then lose it."

"Don't let the rules of man stop you from following God. When he gives it to you, go with it."

"As God blesses your ministry with it, remember that those without it tend to criticize those with it, especially when you do things differently."

"For the sake of those who don't know Christ, think big."

"What obstacle are you facing? Ask God for breakthrough thinking. Don't think about small changes. Think radically."

"Your greatest ministry innovation could come from your greatest limitation - if you have a sincere passion to reach and care for people."

"Limitations often reveal opportunities."

"Passion creates motivation, which leads to innovation."

"Those with it recognize that God brings it. It is not found in the things the eye can see."

"If you don't have something you think you need, maybe it's because God wants you to see something you've never seen."

"Whenever you're tempted to whine about what you don't have, remember that God has given you everything you need to do everything he wants you to do."

"Have you hit an obstacle that appears impenetrable? Maybe God will guide you to see something that you couldn't have seen if he'd just removed the wall."

"While many lament, "We don't have what it takes to make a difference," innovative leaders say, "God is our provider; we have more than enough.""

"I pay low wages. I can take advantage of that. We're going to be successful, but the basis is a very low-wage, low-benefit model of employment."

"We should also implement a 10 percent surtax on the value of estates above $1 billion to break up the extreme wealth of the 540 billionaires in the United States-the wealthiest 0.0002 percent of America-and end tax breaks for dynasty trusts. This includes eliminating the so-called "grantor retained annuity trust," and the "generation-skipping tax," whose loopholes have allowed billionaires like Sheldon Adelson and the Walton family, the owners of Wal-Mart, to legally manipulate the rules for trusts passed on from one generation to the next without paying estate or gift taxes, resulting in savings of $100 billion in taxes since 2000."

"It's quite interesting to think about Wal-Mart starting from a single store in Bentonville, Arkansas against Sears, Roebuck with its name, reputation and all of its billions. How does a guy in Bentonville, Arkansas with no money blow right by Sears, Roebuck? And he does it in his own lifetime — in fact, during his own late lifetime because he was already pretty old by the time he started out with one little store.... He played the chain store game harder and better than anyone else. Walton invented practically nothing. But he copied everything anybody else ever did that was smart — and he did it with more fanaticism and better employee manipulation. So he just blew right by them all. He also had a very interesting competitive strategy in the early days. He was like a prizefighter who wanted a great record so he could be in the finals and make a big TV hit. So what did he do? He went out and fought 42 palookas. Right? And the result was knockout, knockout, knockout — 42 times. Walton, being as shrewd as he was, basically broke other small town merchants in the early days. With his more efficient system, he might not have been able to tackle some titan head-on at the time. But with his better system, he could destroy those small town merchants. And he went around doing it time after time after time. Then, as he got bigger, he started destroying the big boys. Well, that was a very, very shrewd strategy."

"Remember, Aristotle's De Anima is a seamless mixture of the science and philosophy of his time. We can aim at something similar, i.e. we should feel very comfortable using scientific results in philosophy. It does not mean philosophers must become scientists."

"Modern experimentation is often like driving an automobile. The details and theory of the instruments being used in the experiment are not known to the experimenter except in a very general way. (...) Experimenters are taught in an explicit way, often, how to write up reports of their experiments. But the tradition here is like sports reporting. Only the results of the experiment are reported in any serious detail. The procedures are not."

"Implement now, perfect later."

"The family is in flux, and signs of trouble are widespread. Expectations remain high. But realities are disturbing."

"However painful the process of leaving home, for parents and for children, the really frightening thing for both would be the prospect of the child never leaving home."

"While there are practical and sometimes moral reasons for the decomposition of the family, it coincides neither with what most people in society say they desire nor, especially in the case of children, with their best interests."

"Leaving home in a sense involves a kind of second birth in which we give birth to ourselves."

"We don't do body counts."

"Colin Powell said recently that he was disappointed that some of the intelligence on Iraq's WMD program was "inaccurate and wrong and in some cases deliberately misleading." That, of course, is the nature of human intelligence. The issue is not whether the source of the intelligence information was telling the truth, but whether George Tenet, Colin Powell, and President George W. Bush believed that the information was true. I believe they did. I know I did. And I do not regret my role in disarming Iraq and removing the Baathist regime."

"The family plots are close together in the sparse shade. My father, Ray. My mother, Lorene. Aunt Mildred and Uncle Bob, Docie, Betty, Johnny and Doris Jean. All of them there, all of them at rest. Seeing my father's grave, I smile, remembering something he told me when I was a teenager, conflicted over some long-forgotten crisis. "What do you think you should do about it, Tommy Ray?" He'd asked. "I dunno," I'd said. "It's all so confusing." He looked at me with a gentle smile. "Remember this, son. You don't necessarily need to know anything to have an opinion." Since that day, I've been what you might call opinionated, although as an adult, I like to believe I've earned the opinions I have."

"As the night passed, Rifle updated me on the readiness of our forces, the locations of our aircraft carrier battle groups, and the "Global power" timelines for missions by B-2 stealth bombers flying from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. I had received an intelligence alert that as many as thirty additional terrorist strikes were possible worldwide. But there had been no more attacks... so far. Maybe this was because we'd buttoned up, sealing our vulnerabilities by going to Threat Con Delta. By now, CNN was running tape of President Bush flying back to Andrews and landing in Marine One on the White House lawn. The immediate crisis was over: the President was back in the Oval Office, the Secretary of Defense was in the wounded Pentagon. America was putting on her "game face". I was proud of my country."

"Later that evening, with exhaustion setting in and nothing left to do but wait for clearance to fly, Cathy and I took the aircrew to dinner; the members of our traveling staff stayed behind, chained to their phones and computers. We walked through the quiet waterfront to the lamp-lit, sandstone-block courtyard of the Mylos Taverna. As we filed to our corner table, the normally-effusive chatter of the Greek patrons dropped to a whisper. I scanned the nearby tables; faces everywhere were drawn with sadness. Yiannis, our usually-smiling waiter, approached silently and shook my hand as if at a funeral. "Everyone is so sorry, General," the man said."

"Sitting back in the hard plastic chair on the hotel roof, I reflected on that talk I'd given to the CENTCOM intelligence staff the previous Friday. America was in deep shock, reeling from the images of airliners smashing into buildings and those proud towers collapsing like flaming tinsel. Would my fellow citizens now be persuaded to abandon their hard-won individual freedoms to earn a bit more security in a clearly insecure world? As I stood up, another thought struck me. Today is like Pearl Harbor. The world was one way before today, and will never be that way again. We stand at a crease in history."

"Bill Cohen had a will-earned reputation as a thoughtful, decisive Secretary of Defense. When the staff lit up the plasma screens and ran the tapes of the Bright Star exercise, showing how the friendly coalition "Greenland" had defeated the aggressors of "Orangeland", Cohen asked all the right questions. He seemed especially impressed that we had assembled the system using commercially available hardware. Our staff officers and sergeants were on their toes. They answered all the secretary's questions, and he left with a smile on his face. I was proud of the command post- and of the young men and women who had made it such a success."

"When I was six, we moved to the small town of Stratford, about fifteen miles northeast of Wynnewood. My father had worked as a banker, a grain farmer, a fix-it man, and a mechanic. Now he was ready for a new line of work. When I was young, his restless streak seemed perfectly normal. A few years later, I realized that he was an optimistic dreamer, convinced that the next job or business would make us rich. And the fact is that my dad was good at everything he took on. Maybe too good. There wasn't a refrigerator, an outboard motor, a gas or diesel engine that he couldn't repair. If somebody drove over a backfiring John Deere Model 60 tractor to have Ray Franks "take a little look at the damn timing chain," my father would rebuild the engine. And if they'd shaken hands on a price of ten dollars for the job, he would not accept a nickel more, even if he'd spent fifteen dollars on spare parts."

"Another hallway led to a green steel door. "This is the execution chamber," the officer said. "The day of the execution, we take the man through this door." He opened the green door, and we blinked at the bright lights inside. A big chair filled the room. I could smell leather. "All right, boys," he said. "Line up." The kids made a straight line that led out the green door, then moved ahead, one at a time, to sit in the big wooden chair. "This is the electric chair, Tommy Ray," my dad explained. "It's where murderers are executed." The boys inched forward. Some sat longer in the chair than others. Executed meant killed, that much I knew. "This is the ultimate consequence for the ultimate act of evil," my father told the troop. When all the boys had sat in the chair, it was my turn. I reached up and felt the smooth wood, the leather straps with cold metal buckles. There was a black steel cap dangling up there like a lamp without a bulb. "Up you go, Tommy Ray," Dad said, hoisting me into the chair. The boys were staring at me. But I wasn't even a little bit afraid. My father stood right beside me. I could feel his warm hand next to the cool metal buckle. As the school bus rumbled out of the prison parking lot that afternoon, I stared back at the high walls. I had learned another important lesson. A consequence was what followed what you did. If you did good things, you'd be rewarded with further good things. If you broke the law, you'd have to pay the price. I have never forgotten that lesson."

"To all who serve... and those who love them."

"General Tommy Franks, the man in charge of the initial invasion, bluntly told reporters, “We don’t do body counts.” One survey found that most Americans thought Iraqi deaths were in the tens of thousands. But our calculations, using the best information available, show a catastrophic estimate of 2.4 million Iraqi deaths since the 2003 invasion."

"Terms like "liberty" and "individual freedom" invoked by generations of Americans who battled to widen the 1787 promise to "promote the general welfare" have been perverted to create a government primarily dedicated to the state and the political class that runs it. Yes, Virginia, there is a class war and ordinary people are losing it."

"I was also pleased to have been on the Bill Moyers program on PBS on several occasions."