If you look at how I've tried to and how I'll continue to try to govern, I'm not driven by some ideological agenda. I'm a pretty practical guy and I just want to make sure that things work.

You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

Keep exploring. Keep dreaming. Keep asking why. Don’t settle for what you already know. Never stop believing in the power of your ideas, your imagination, your hard work to change the world.

When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, you don't really have to do anything, you just let them talk.

Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.

Change is never easy, but always possible.

Don’t ever let anybody tell you that your efforts don’t matter or that your voice doesn’t count. Don’t ever believe that you can’t make a difference. You have.

Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up.

Learning to stand in somebody else's shoes, to see through their eyes, that's how peace begins. And it's up to you to make that happen. Empathy is a quality of character that can change the world.

If somebody is different from you, that's not something you criticize, that's something that you appreciate.

...Changelessness is decay.""A paradox. There is no decay without a change for the worse.""Changelessness is a change for the worse...

I have the happiness of the passing moment and what more can mortal ask?

When thou art at Rome, do as they do at Rome.

There may come a time in the career of every sociologist when it is his solemn duty to raise hell.

Artists aren't looking for you to write them something; they're looking for you to give them something new.

It is awkward to listen to oneself being praised, and I was always a shy man.

Imagination without culture is crippled and moves slowly; but it can be pure imagination, and rich also, as folk-lore will tell the vainest.

As it says in Bible, God fights on side of heaviest artillery.

This morning in the Washington Post there was a statistic about how 85% of Americans are Christians.

I know what I like—I like art—and I like what I know.