Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.

To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.

Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

Don't do what you can do - try what you can't do.

There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn't fool with booze until he's fifty; then he's a damn fool if he doesn't.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.

You remarked once in a fit of pique you had made me famous. You were wrong, my dear. You have made me.

Audition requires different neurological processes than vision, or smell. And I would suggest that we hear more than we see while we are reading.

The map showed human places I'd never heard of - places that had once been great civilizations, until humans forgot the world wasn't theirs to claim.

This is to the world and how god damn beautiful it is.

Sometimes WRONG is worth the FUNNY!

In the mere observation of yourself, you begin the process of healing and transformation.

Maidana is a young, strong and tough competitor. He's a guy that I can't overlook. You can never take any fighter for granted because anything can happen.

Our wisdom is no less at fortune's mercy than our wealth.

When I play live, it's a conversation that we're all having with the song, and the audience... their response and relationship with the songs is as valid as my relationship with the songs.