It is jazz music that called me to be a musician and I have always sang the songs that moved me the most.

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

Elie Wiesel

As a mom, I always feel I have to protect them. I talk about them because they are the most important things in my life but they are private people. I won't use them for my own press.

Jami Gertz

Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. 'Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Because everyone is guilty for everyone else. For all the 'wee ones,' because there are little children and big children. All people are 'wee ones.' And I'll go for all of them, because there must be someone who will go for all of them.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

For all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these, 'It might have been'.

John Greenleaf Whittier

We are sometimes made aware of a kindness long passed, and realize that there have been times when our friends' thoughts of us were of so pure and lofty a character that they passed over us like the winds of heaven unnoticed when they treated us not as what we were, but as what we aspired to be. from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Henry David Thoreau

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

Jean Cocteau

I am not systematic at all when it comes to religion. I just love life. And I'm not judgmental. And I'm a vegetarian.

Erykah Badu

If you would inform, a positive and dogmatic manner in advancing your sentiments may provoke contradiction and prevent a candid attention. If you wish information and improvement from the knowledge of others, and yet at the same time express yourself as firmly fixed in your present opinions, modest, sensible men, who do not love disputation, will probably leave you undisturbed in the possession of your error.

Frank Crane

The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.

Logan Pearsall Smith

It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them.

Henry James

I am convinced that material things can contribute a lot to making one's life pleasant, but, basically, if you do not have very good friends and relatives who matter to you, life will be really empty and sad and material things cease to be important.

David Rockefeller