History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy and it always feels uncomfortable.

Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.

Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all.

The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursuing his education.

Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community.

Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.

True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.

Some people strengthen the society just by being the kind of people they are.

History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable.

The cynic says, "One man can't do anything". I say, "Only one man can do anything."

If you have some respect for people as they are, you can be more effective in helping them to become better than they are.

If the butterfly wings its way to the sweet light that attracts it, it's only becasue it doesn't know that the fire can consume it.

Everything I do in its essence is about helplessness. That's the story I want to tell all the time. It's the story I wanted to live - somebody who appears to be, or is, weak becoming stronger.

Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument - learning to do your craft - that's the most important thing! It's not about what goes on in a computer!

In one and the same fire, clay grows hard and wax melts.

How beautiful life is and how sad! How fleeting, with no past and no future, only a limitless now.

Disappointment is the gap that exists between expectation and reality.

The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.

In every woman's wardrobe, there are certain accessories that cannot be separated from their back stories.

When I was pregnant, I felt filled with life, and I felt really happy. I ate well, and I slept well. I felt much more useful than I'd ever felt before.

I found myself pinned to the hallway wall by six feet, two inches of hard, hot male.