The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

The measure of a society is found in how they treat their weakest and most helpless citizens.

What are the things that you can't see that are important? I would say justice, truth, humility, service, compassion, love...They're the guiding lights of a life.

America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense human rights invented America.

We cannot be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of the weapons of war.

All I want is the same thing you want. To have a nation with a government that is as good and honest and decent and competent and compassionate and as filled with love as are the American people.

We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.

The test of a government is not how popular it is with the powerful and privileged few but how honestly and fairly it deals with the many who must depend on it.

America has no functioning democracy at this moment.

If you fear making anyone mad, then you ultimately probe for the lowest common denominator of human achievement.

It is difficult for the common good to prevail against the intense concentration of those who have a special interest, especially if the decisions are made behind locked doors.

Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale..

In war, our elders may give the orders...but it is the young who have to fight.

Your mindset determines your reality. Think positive, Act positive and Live positive.

When I prepare, then I become pregnant... and then I produce. When I produce, then I praise the Lord... and then I become prosperous and then the cycle repeats!

Sometimes I just hit the keyboard in a way I'd like the rhythm of the tracks to sound.

A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living.

Life offers you a thousand chances... all you have to do is take one.

Either I'll never get rich from the show but remain intensely proud of the work and stand behind every second of it, or it catches on and I'll make my money down the road.

I follow no doctrine. I don't belong to a church or a temple or a synagogue or an ashram.