We've got to figure out a way that we give a private sphere for our public leaders. We're not gonna get the best people in public life if we don't do that.

Good leadership requires you to surround yourself with people of diverse perspectives who can disagree with you without fear of retaliation.

The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.

That is what leadership is all about: staking your ground ahead of where opinion is and convincing people, not simply following the popular opinion of the moment.

Once a president gets to the White House, the only audience that is left that really matters is history.

As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.

Go ahead, and fear not. You will have a full library at your service.

Better to have your enemies inside your tent pissing out, then to have them outside your tent pissing in.

I still think about that one Jamiroquai video a lot.

Excitement about things became a habit, a part of my personality, and the expectation that I should enjoy new experiences often engendered the enjoyment itself.

Whatever it is that you do, if you have that passion and desire for it, that's the most important thing.

It's as if a child with a brush and too much enthusiasm has been set free with a tin of black paint inside me.

Meditation is a microcosm, a model, a mirror. The skills we practice when we sit are transferable to the rest of our lives.

And the scary thing is, I’m on a fast track to that same aviary. Unless I find my wings.

The intellectual takes as a starting point his self and relates the world to his own sensibilities; the scientist accepts an existing field of knowledge and seeks to map out the unexplored terrain.

Barack Obama heard the American people.

Misery is the end of those with unbridled mouths.

The fact that you see a manifold world with different times, places and conditions -this exists only because of a lack of humility.

I'm a musician. Anything I've done as an actor has come from that.

Half of humanity has been accepting the inner world but denying the outer world.

Racism is a grown-up disease and we must stop using our children to spread it.