I stand before you as the governor of Texas but also stand before you the son of two tenant farmers. Ray Perry who came home after 35 bombing missions over Europe to work his little corner of land out there and Amelia who made sure that my sister Milla and I had everything that we needed, included hand sewing my clothes until I went off to college.

Racial segregation has come back to public education with a vengeance.

Jonathan Kozol

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Carl Sandburg

The most imaginative people are the most credulous, for them everything is possible.

Alexander Chase

The divine is perhaps that quality in man which permits him to endure the lack of God.

Jean Rostand

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

Joseph Brodsky

A lot of people, because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion, think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed, to be the repository of other people's hope.

Christopher Hitchens

If you join government, calmly make your contribution and move on. Don't go along to get along; do your best and when you have to -- and you will -- leave, and be something else.

Peggy Noonan

Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.

Oscar Wilde

We need to reach that happy stage of our development when differences and diversity are not seen as sources of division and distrust, but of strength and inspiration.

Josefa Iloilo

Time has no meaning in itself unless we choose to give it significance.

Leo Buscaglia

I love crime, I love mysteries, and I love ghosts.

Stephen King

You must expect great things of yourself before you can do them.

Michael Jordan