One of the things I advised Donald Trump to do was to make sure that, before he commits to certain courses of action, he has really dug in and thought through how various issues play themselves out.

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 Holy Spirit puts ideas into the heart of the believer

Choosing to be an artist . . . is choosing to mine deep caverns. It's like getting lost in the darkness and spending the rest of your life trying to find your way.

Death is, in fact, oddly pleasant, and certainly an improvement on what comes immediately before it.

There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.

Love is big; love can hold anger, love can even hold hatred. It's about the intention of what you want it to do.

I think the Democratic Party has the chronic problem of appearing to be weak, of not standing and fighting for what it believes in, not fighting for its own.

Around us, life bursts with miracles, a glass of water, a ray of sunshine, a leaf, a caterpillar, a flower, laughter, raindrops.

Blaming guns for murder is like blaming forks for obesity.

I'm not sure how anyone with a soul can make jokes about the passing of one of the most talented artists this generation will see.

I'm reading a manuscript by Rodney Jones, "Village Prodigies",it's one of the best contemporary poetry books I've ever read ever.