If you're an American and you are, you know, subscribing to the ideals and the creed and the values that we believe in as a country, you know, then we don't have a religious test in this country.

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.

The Gospel is the good news, not the grouse news. Preaching is not beating, it´s informing in a christlike way.

When someone points out your past mistakes, look at them dead in the eyes and follow with, 'and I’d do it all again to have the life I have now.

Write to exhaustion so that you can no longer manage to avoid writing the truth.

I remember meeting a mother of a child who was abducted by the North Koreans right here in the Oval Office.

If you take from a theory only the conclusions you like and discard the rest, you are using the theory as a drunkard uses a lamp post-for support rather than illumination.

I try to stay under the radar.

I also really pay attention to whether the script embodies a full female character or if they're just wanting a two-dimensional objectified woman. So I also have that aspect to take care of as well.

You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession.

I have learnt to be even more patient.

When I was a kid, I didn't collect stamps, or weird toys, or anything. I don't even have music - I don't even have a CD collection. So that's not really my thing.