Gold medal quotes from the London Olympics

Athletes and others have their say before and during the 30th Olympiad of the modern era in England.

Compare and contrast

Matt Slocum/AP
Musician Mick Jagger, left, and Sebastian Coe, chairman of the London 2012 Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games attend an evening session of athletics in the Olympic Stadium at the 2012 Summer Olympics, London, Monday, Aug. 6.

“I’ve competed at a really high level in my own sport. But I think probably for consistent focus, consistent day-by-day, hour-by-hour focus, this is every bit as challenging as winning to two Olympic titles.”

Sebastian Coe, the Olympic 1,500-meter running champion in 1980 and 1984, on serving as chairman of the London Olympic organizing committee

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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