I am an opponent of Saddam Hussein, but an opponent also, of the sanctions that have killed a million Iraqi children and an opponent of the United States' apparent desire to plunge the Middle East into a new and devastating war.

All of us grow up in particular realities - a home, family, a clan, a small town, a neighborhood. Depending upon how we're brought up, we are either deeply aware of the particular reading of reality into which we are born, or we are peripherally aware of it.

Chaim Potok

But rules only work when everyone plays by them. What happens when someone doesn't, and the fallout bleeds right into his life? Whats stronger- the need to uphold the law, or the motive to turn one's back on it?

Jodi Picoult

All of childhood's unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.

Maya Angelou

I saw as a teacher how, if you take that spark of learning that those children have, and you ignite it, you can take a child from any background to a lifetime of creativity and accomplishment.

Paul Wellstone

It's amazing how I can just ramble on for hours, isn't it? And so unentertaining or uninteresting. But I can ramble on for hours. It's a sort of terrible gift, isn't it?

Graham Norton

The road to excellence is always under construction

Source Unknown

If American politics are too dirty for women to take part in, there's something wrong with American politics.

Edna Ferber

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.

Nelson Mandela, A Long Walk to F

What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not do we are told expressly.

Jonathan Swift

The American experience influenced my understanding of individuality, basic human rights, freedom of expression and the rights and responsibilities of citizens.

Ai Weiwei

Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

George Orwell