For me, Lincoln is like just a handful of people - a Gandhi, or a Picasso, or a Martin Luther King Jr. - who is an original and captures something essential.

You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

Keep exploring. Keep dreaming. Keep asking why. Don’t settle for what you already know. Never stop believing in the power of your ideas, your imagination, your hard work to change the world.

When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, you don't really have to do anything, you just let them talk.

Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.

Change is never easy, but always possible.

Don’t ever let anybody tell you that your efforts don’t matter or that your voice doesn’t count. Don’t ever believe that you can’t make a difference. You have.

Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up.

Learning to stand in somebody else's shoes, to see through their eyes, that's how peace begins. And it's up to you to make that happen. Empathy is a quality of character that can change the world.

If somebody is different from you, that's not something you criticize, that's something that you appreciate.

Hold the flame of faith, it quench all doubt of darkness.

If history repeats itself, I am so getting a dinosaur!

I feel like a paper cut just waiting to bleed.

If you think Independence Day is America's defining holiday, think again. Thanksgiving deserves that title, hands-down.

I don't think you're entitled to read my mail between my daughters and me.

Even after the child, the life of the black child was saved, but that same white man will have to toss him right back into the discriminate, into discrimination, segregation, and these other things.

Manual labor to my father was not only good and decent for it's own sake but, as he was given to saying, it straightened out one's thoughts.

Do we have to have the 'don't lie to the telepath' talk again? It won't take long. I say 'don't lie to the telepath, it never works,' you glare at me, and then you go find something you can hit.

Life is not for show, but for real.

Traveling is my priority, because it drives the writing, so I teach around the travel, and sometimes the travel is the teaching.