Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship

After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.

The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.

Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.

Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.

Wit and puns aren't just décor in the mind; they're essential signs that the mind knows it's on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.

Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.

At any given moment the choice to be happy is present- we just have to choose to be happy.

Extending gratitude to another says, “I see what you’ve done and I thank you for the energy you put forth.

The world becomes so much larger the smaller you live.

Survival is triumph enough.

Look, I can carry a baby! I'm gaining weight right, everything's going well.

The decision to give ourselves to others is a daily taking up of the cross.

Universities are the custodians not only of the many cultures of man, but of the rational process itself.

I know that I'm freer as a hip-hopper than as an executive. Even as a black man, I enjoy more freedom as a hip-hopper than as a black man. That, s controversial to say, but it's the truth.

History is something that never happened told by someone who wasn't there.

Opportunity has power over all things.