My dad was the district attorney of New Orleans for about 30 years. And when he opened his campaign headquarters back in the early '70s, when I was 5 years old, my mother wanted me to play the national anthem. And they got an upright piano on the back of a flatbed truck and I played it.

Nothing strengthens authority as much as silence.

Leonardo da Vinci

While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.

Karl Marx

What on earth are you doing for Heaven's sake?

Source Unknown

Having made the decision to love, had I chosen life instead of death?

Richard Bach

I'm the lead singer of the Beach Boys and an ambassador of this amazing music that touched a generation.

Mike Love

Write because you love the art and the discipline, not because you're looking to sell something.

Ann Patchett

My family and I would never receive royalties on the revenue that my materials brought into the church materials that were created on our own personal time.

Robert H. Schuller

It is not always easy to diagnose. The simplest form of stupidity - the mumbling, nose-picking, stolid incomprehension - can be detected by anyone. But the stupidity which disguises itself as thought, and which talks so glibly and eloquently, indeed never stops talking, in every walk of life is not so easy to identify, because it marches under a formidable name, which few dare attack. It is called Popular Opinion...

Robertson Davies, Can a Doctor B

Abortion and racism are both symptoms of a fundamental human error. The error is thinking that when someone stands in the way of our wants, we can justify getting that person out of our lives. Abortion and racism stem from the same poisonous root, selfishness.

Alveda King

But those musics do not address the larger kind of architecture in time that classical music does, whatever each one of us knows that classical music must mean.

Michael Tilson Thomas

God's extraordinary work is most often done by ordinary people in the seeming obscurity of a home and family.

Neal A. Maxwell

I'm not up on the Internet, but I hear that is a democratic possibility. People can connect with each other. I think people are ready for something, but there is no leadership to offer it to them. People are ready to say, 'Yes, we are part of a world.'

Studs Terkel