Anyone could be in the orchestra, or sports team, or arts club at my school. It was precisely the kind of inclusivity that now meets with a sort of scorn and derision as a prizes-for-all culture that generates only mediocrity. There's something so insulting about the idea that including lots of people means mediocrity.

At 17, the smallest crises took on tremendous proportions; someone else's thoughts could take root in the loam of your own mind; having someone accept you was as vital as oxygen. Adults, light years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked and said, 'This too shall pass' - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something everyone recalled as a milk nuisance, completely forgetting how painful it had been at the time.

Jodi Picoult

Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights.

Thomas Carlyle

What! Would I be turned back from doing a thing that I had determined to do, and that I knew to be right, by the airs and interference of such a person, or any person I may say? No, I have no idea of being so easily persuaded. When I have made up my mind, I have made it.

Jane Austen

I just change with the times. I really don't have a say in what's going on. Music was here before me.

Snoop Dogg

Well, I believe that the depth of your struggle can determine the height of your success. I was inspired to come out of everything I've been through and end up in a place where I never thought that I would be.

R. Kelly

In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning.

A.E. Housman

For the sake of our health, our children and grandchildren and even our economic well-being, we must make protecting the planet our top priority.

David Suzuki

We have defined art as the life form and aesthetic art as the life renewal: the stimulating, animating, agitating, inspiring, inspirational, fermenting, fascinating fanaticising, explosive and outrageous: the renewal of the unknown.

Asger Jorn

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It the British System is the most gigantic system of slavery the world has yet seen, and therefore it is that freedom gradually disappears from every country over which England is enabled to obtain control.

Henry Charles Carey

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

Thomas A. Edison

Foster peace in your own life and then apply the Art to all that you encounter.

Morihei Ueshiba