I've been to the White House a number of times.

Good leadership requires you to surround yourself with people of diverse perspectives who can disagree with you without fear of retaliation.

The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.

That is what leadership is all about: staking your ground ahead of where opinion is and convincing people, not simply following the popular opinion of the moment.

Once a president gets to the White House, the only audience that is left that really matters is history.

As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.

Go ahead, and fear not. You will have a full library at your service.

Better to have your enemies inside your tent pissing out, then to have them outside your tent pissing in.

I still think about that one Jamiroquai video a lot.

Excitement about things became a habit, a part of my personality, and the expectation that I should enjoy new experiences often engendered the enjoyment itself.

Whatever it is that you do, if you have that passion and desire for it, that's the most important thing.

I will go to campus alone dressed in antique silk slips and beat-up cowboy boots and gypsy beads, and I will study poetry. I will sit on the edge of the fountain in the plaza and write.

Not all friends know they have lost you.

We each begin in innocence. We all become guilty.

You know what's better than building things up in your imagination? Building things up in real life.

Words do not pay for my dead people.

C++ is a language strongly optimized for liars and people who go by guesswork and ignorance.

I wrote a lot of poetry in the last two years of high school, all about the same girl I was in love with. That was pretty awful. Did you know that in poetry, every line does not need to rhyme?

Don't blame the marketing department. The buck stops with the chief executive.

Everyone has a conflict inside of them - the conflict between what you should do and what you want to do.

I would encourage them never to forget that they were not always vegans. The self-righteousness of the recently converted hurts, it does not help, other animals.