I think I'm more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.

After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.

The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.

Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.

Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.

Wit and puns aren't just décor in the mind; they're essential signs that the mind knows it's on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.

Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.

What a sad thing I thought-- to live in a world so concerned with the lives of others, we forget to live our own.

Nobody wants campaign finance reform more than me. It would save me a fortune.

St. Louis is closer to Minneapolis than Milwaukee is.

No tribute is laid on castles in the air.

Every time we witness an act that we feel to be unjust and do not act, we become a party to injustice.

I think that maybe people comment on the internet because they never know if they're going to be able to meet that one person and they want to have a say so, or what have-you.

When I was 5 years old I started singing in church and I hated my voice because I sounded like a grown woman, not a child. I was ashamed of it.

We will use some kind of option and we will throw the football. I hope it will be at our people.

No, the only way to know what people think is to watch what they do, not what they say. Do they come back for more? Do you cause them to change their behavior? Can you make them smile?

Beauty’s all around me right here. It’s not in a textbook. It’s not in an equation. I mean, take the sunlight … The colors flow into your lungs, into your bloodstream. You are the colors.