I reject the cynical view that politics is a dirty business.

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

Calvin Coolidge

If you make music for the human needs you have within yourself, then you do it for all humans who need the same things. You enrich humanity with the profound expression of these feelings.

Billy Joel

They have a plentiful lack of wit

William Shakespeare

Character is always lost when a high ideal is sacrificed on the altar of conformity and popularity.

Source Unknown

I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.

Eleanor Roosevelt

My eyes went straight to a soft woman who sat facing the wrong way at the bar top. Soft, because I knew if I were to touch her skin, it would feel like a peach, the kind of woman you could almost smell from inside the building. Instead of facing Andy, she had her back to him, keeping an eye on the door. That must be her. Her hair was exquisite. She was really the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. A golden crown of braids and curls complimented her sun-kissed skin. Her dress draped perfectly over her body, and in that moment, I needed her more than I needed air.

Chelsie Shakespeare

An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.

Kazuo Ishiguro

Water, water, everywhere,And all the boards did shrink.Water, water everywhere,Nor any drop to drink.The very deep did rot: O Christ!That ever this should be!Yea, slimy things did crawl with legsUpon the slimy sea.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rim

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.

Thomas Jefferson, From a letter

How poor are they that have not patience. What wound did ever heal but by degrees?

William Shakespeare

The student body was huge at UT and you had to mature pretty quick, very quick actually. I enjoyed it and it helped me a lot in my life in general - not only in the classroom but on the baseball field as well.

Roger Clemens

When I was young there was no respect for the young, and now that I am old there is no respect for the old. I missed out coming and going.

J. B. Priestley