My stiffest earthly assignment is ended and my major life's work is done. My country is now free and I have been honoured to be its first indigenous head of state. What more could one desire in life?

Regarding factory-farmed animals We owe them a merciful death, and we owe them a merciful life. And when human beings cannot do something humanely, without degrading both the creatures and ourselves, then we should not do it at all.

Matthew Scully, Our companions i

To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given a chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy.

Bette Davis

Responsibility is a tremendous engine in a free government

Thomas Jefferson

Take courage! It is I. Don't be afraid. Matthew 14:27

Bible

Instead of asking -- How much damage will the work in question bring about? why not ask -- How much good? How much joy?

Henry Miller

I was doing stand-up at a restaurant and there was a chalkboard on the street out front. It said, Soup of the Day: Cream of Asparagus. Ellen DeGeneres.

Ellen DeGeneres

I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

My dad served in the Air Force as ground crew for several years, and doesn't really talk about it. I know that it's there. I think my main thing about direct or indirect experiences as near to home as it were is the idea of self-sacrifice really.

Jeremy Northam

Law describes the way things would work if men were angels.

Christopher Dawson

Having a child, that's always been my biggest fear. I want a child and I fear a child.

Marilyn Monroe

So wie die Verruecktheit in einem hoeheren Sinn, der Anfang aller Weisheit ist, so ist die Schizophrenie der Anfang aller Kunst, aller Phantasie. (As insanity in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so is schizophrenia the beginning of all art, all fantasy.)

Hermann Hesse

The river itself portrays humanity precisely, with its tortuous windings, its accumulation of driftwood, its unsuspected depths, and its crystalline shallows, singing in the Summer sun. Barriers may be built across its path, but they bring only power, as the conquering of an obstacle is always sure to do. Sometimes when the rocks and stone-clad hills loom large ahead, and eternity itself would be needed to carve a passage, there is an easy way around. The discovery of it makes the river sing with gladness and turns the murmurous deeps to living water, bright with ripples and foam.

Myrtle Reed