But I decline to say who has ever listened to them, who has written them, or other people who have sung them.

I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other.

Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't.

Some of my ancestors were religious dissenters who came to America over three hundred years ago. Others were abolitionists in New England in the eighteen forties and fifties.

It's a very important thing to learn to talk to people you disagree with.

I tell kids, don't trust the media. The media with their emphasis on fame is helping to destroy this country, helping destroy the human race. It's the plug-in drug.

Shh. Listen to the sounds that surround you. Notice the pitches, the volume, the timbre, the many lines of counterpoint. As light taught Monet to paint, the earth may be teaching you music.

Songs are funny things. They can slip across borders. Proliferate in prisons. Penetrate hard shells. I always believed that the right song at the right moment could change history.

This world is so full of hypocrisy, the only way you can be honest is to be a hermit.

Long live teachers of children, because they can show children how they can save the world.

If it can’t be reduced, reused, repaired, rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold, recycled or composted, then it should be restricted, redesigned or removed from production.

I will never deny that life isn't fair. It seems as though when a woman leaves a man she is strong and independent, but when a man leaves a woman he is a pig and a jerk.

Putting the past behind you isn't like stuffing something in the back of a drawer or trimming a loose thread. The past has a life of its own.

Everything passes everything wears out everything breaks.

The fact is that it was bourgeois white feminism that I was reacting against when I stood in my first women's studies classes and said, "Black women have always worked."

Nine Men in Ten are Suicides.

I said I love you and that's forever And this I promise from the heart I could not love you any better I love you just the way you are.

I was haunted by a bear attack that happened in Algonquin Park in 1991. The problem was that I dont believe in ghosts, so that ruled out an exorcism. My other choice was to start writing.

I always tell people that my music should speak to them... and that they shouldn't feel obligated to say why or how. All reactions are valid; the important thing is to have the experience.

Happiness, eternal or temporal, is not the reward that mankind seeks, Happinesses are but his wayside companions. His soul is in the journey and in the struggle.