There is nothing that 'Sesame Street' can't teach you, if you let it.

People who are given whatever they want soon develop a sense of entitlement and rapidly lose their sense of proportion.

If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.

Music - not just the lyrics, but the music itself - expresses confused or illicit passions: rage, lust, envy, frustration, channeling these energies and creating an outlet for them.

Facts might be false if they challenge the conviction of a mind already made up.

Art cannot, perhaps, impose order on life—but it teaches us to admire even the unruliest of revelations.

History is prone to mistakes in identity, and facts are not always solid things.

Racism is an effect of slavery, not the other way around. Once slavery was abolished, not only did racism not disappear, neither did the economic system it upheld.

Some people are oil and water.

When storms come, we naturally want to run. What might happen in your friendships if you learned instead tasty put when storms hit?

I didn’t say you weren’t smart. I said you were stupid.”“I guess I’m too dumb to see the difference.

There were moments of despondency when Shakespeare thought himself no poet, and Raphael no painter; when the greatest wits have doubted the excellence of their happiest efforts.

I'm amazed at the adolescent nature of some of the religious fanatics in our government. And they're full of double standards.

Anyone can be killed.

Conceptually, we may call truth what we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us.

People sort of know me for that solo piano music I did.

From the very start of my career, it was clear to me that achievement was built on discipline.

If you do a good act, it cancels the effects of your evil deeds. If one prays, takes the Name of God and thinks of Him, the effects of evil are cancelled.