I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this. I would be very glad to tell you my life if you want to hear of it.

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.

Do it because you WANT to, not just because you HAVE to. When you do what you want, you create an Unstoppable POWER.

The world is crazy about amassing guns, bombs and wealth of humongous proportions, but it will not give knowledge a second glance!

In order to heal themselves, people must recognize, first, that they have an inner guidance deep within and, second, that they can trust it.

What we call strategy is mainly just crossing rivers on bridges and passing mountains though cols.

It's true that some of us become better writers by living long enough. But this is also how we become worse writers. The trick is to die in between.

I learned that telling the truth was a big part of loving yourself.

The state is the executive committee of the ruling class.

Muscle has memory: the body knows things the mind will not admit.

Books showed me there were possibilities in life, that there were actually people like me living in a world I could not only aspire to but attain. Reading gave me hope. For me, it was the open door.

I know to argue against our online lives seems like the argument of the grumpy, old Luddite novelist, but I really always try to make the argument from the perspective of personal pleasure.