The business of peace requires more than showing up with paint brushes, foodstuffs and an oil pipeline or two.

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best, knows the triumph of high achievement; and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt, speech title

Inauthenticity is endemic in American politics today. The political backrooms where I spent much of my career were just as benighted as my personal life, equally crowded with shadowy strangers and compromises, truths I hoped to deny. I lived not in one closet but in many.

James McGreevey

I will never have a drink and get behind the wheel of a car. It's not illegal to drink and drive, but there becomes a certain point where it does become a crime.

Tracey Gold

There's a fine line between character building and soul destroying.

Colin Hay

To keep the Golden Rule we must put ourselves in other people's places, but to do that consists in and depends upon picturing ourselves in their places.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

Find out who you are and be that person. That's what your soul was put on this Earth to be. Find that truth, live that truth and everything else will come.

Ellen DeGeneres

Hell, he said. Just when it was getting interesting, too. And he leaped into the water after his friend.

Cassandra Clare

It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt.

Mark Twain

If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. And if they don't, they never were.

Khalil Gibran

My dad used to flush my mother's head down the toilet. I was so screwed up.

Jessica Hahn

History isn't about dates and places and wars. It's about the people who fill the spaces between them.

Jodi Picoult

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted, for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things -- some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor -- who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

Barack Obama