If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?

The art of communication is the language of leadership.

Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today.

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.

If you set your goals ridiculously high and it's a failure, you will fail above everyone else's success.

Every time you have to speak, you are auditioning for leadership.

A river cuts through rock, not because of its power, but because of its persistence.

One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can't utter.

People trample over flowers, yet only to embrace a cactus.

The great appear great to us.

The Irish people will only be free, when they own everything from the plough to the stars

My eyes are different sizes, my nose is too broad at the bridge and squishes up when I laugh, and my lips are sorta funny when I smile.

Someone asked me yesterday if Dracula met Saruman and there was a fight, who would win. I just looked at this man. What an idiotic thing to say. I mean, really, it was half-witted.

To make mistakes is human, but to profit from them is divine.

Predigested food' should be inscribed over every hall of learning as a warning to all who do not wish to lose their own personalities and their original sense of judgment.

A well-trained mind has less difficulty in submitting to than in guiding an ill-trained mind.

I was allowed to ring the bell for five minutes until everyone was in assembly. It was the beginning of power.

I make non-fiction partly because I'm not that good of a writer. My talent, if I have any, is in balancing, capturing and directing reality, rather than creating scenarios.

There's capital controls and there's people control. So every time you think of a fence keeping all those bad people out, think about those fences maybe being used against us, keeping us in.

You just need that opening, that moment, when you finally decide to give yourself permission to change.

With us, when you speak of ‘the river,’ though there be many, you mean always the same one, the great river, the shifting, unappeasable god of the country, feared and loved the Mississippi.