Before I start a project, I always ask myself the following question. Why is this book worth a year of my life? There needs to be something about the theme, the technique, or the research that makes the time spent on it worthwhile.

This assumption of Negro leadership in the ghetto, then, must not be confined to matters of religion, education, and social uplift it must deal with such fundamental forces in life as make these things possible.

Carter G. Woodson

If there's no place in the universe for a man to resist the thieves of freedom and still be called a good man, then I don't think there is any good or evil in the universe.

Orson Scott Card

I am odd-looking. I sometimes think I look like a funny Muppet.

Angelina Jolie

It is the nature of the strong heart, that like the palm tree it strives ever upwards when it is most burdened.

Sir Philip Sidney

We are not satisfied with real life; we want to live some imaginary life in the eyes of other people and to seem different from what we actually are

Blaise Pascal

The public good is in nothing more essentially interested than in the protection of every individual's private rights.

William Blackstone, Commentaries

The man who wins may have been counted out several times but he didn't hear the referee.

H. E. Jansen

Courage is grace under pressure.

Ernest Hemingway

One would like to be grand and heroic, if one could; but if not, why try at all? One wants to be very something, very great, very heroic; or if not that, then at least very stylish and very fashionable. It is this everlasting mediocrity that bores me.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Music allows the great opportunity to play with people who turned you on and you love.

Herbie Mann

When I was in school, my mother stressed education. I am so glad she did. I graduated from Yale College and Yale University with my master's and I didn't do it by missing school.

Angela Bassett

Men are what their mothers made them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson