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

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.

Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country - bigger than all the Presidents together.

Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.

Soon, he would become an adult. And when he did, there would be not going back because adulthood was akin to what his father had once said about being a war hero: one you became one, you died one.

It is the task of youth not to reshape the church, but rather to listen to the word of God.

I think one of the things which always is forgotten in music class, is the first thing you have to do as a musician is you have to learn how to listen.

At least I have a plan to fight ISIS.

You have to work hard AND well. There are a lot of people who work hard but not well.

The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb.

Art provides us with clues about how to live our own lives more fully... art becomes our entree to the sublime.

Anytime I am around a male body part it is kind of exiting.

I'm more Jewish than you think I am...I read the part of the Bible that said the Jews are God's chosen people.