One of the main lessons I have learned during my five years as Secretary-General is that broad partnerships are the key to solving broad challenges. When governments, the United Nations, businesses, philanthropies and civil society work hand-in-hand,...
I decided I wanted to be a musician when I saw the movie 'Amadeus' around 1987. I was five years old, so it was a good time to start piano lessons after seeing Tom Hulce who played Mozart play the harpsichord on his back with his hands crossed. Such ...
Consciously or not, we are all on a quest for answers, trying to learn the lessons of life. We grapple with fear and guilt. We search for meaning, love, and power. We try to understand fear, loss, and time. We seek to discover who we are and how we c...
Real faith is when you believe in something that you can't see. When things are going really bad and you can still get up and say I believe that they're gonna get better, that there's a higher lesson to what I'm going through. It can be hard sometime...
I have to have three or four books going simultaneously. If I'm not impressed in the first 20 pages, I don't bother reading the rest, especially with novels. I'm not a book-club style reader. I'm not looking for life lessons or wanting people to thin...
When you're at a public pool or in your friend's backyard, knowing that your kids can get in and out of the water and protect themselves can make all the difference in the world. Something as simple as being able to flip over and get to the ladder ca...
If you're eight and you live in Los Angeles and everybody has toys and you go to a country that has a Marxist dictatorship and there are no toy stores and nobody speaks English and it's blazing hot every day and they only have fish, which you don't l...
I tend to be freer on the piano. I never took guitar lessons, so my reach exceeds my grasp - what I hear in my head I don't always know how to play. But I love to play over something else. I'm not a self-starter. I get kind of bored with the same thr...
When I was six years old my friend was auditioning for 'Annie,' and I decided I wanted to audition with her. My mom was worried I would fall flat on my face because I'd never opened my mouth to sing, so she sent me to vocal lessons. I did the auditio...
Before failure comes, it casts it's shadow. But we often entangle ourselves with the fantasies and fallacies of life such that we do regard the shadows of a pending failure as sign of success. To turn a coming failure into a successful success, ponde...
I don't know French at all. I took some lessons when I was younger but all I know are the numbers. I've been told basically everyone in Monaco speaks English because of it being a huge vacation spot so I'm excited about that. I might not need to lear...
I want you to learn the lesson of the lotus. This flower springs forth from muddy waters. It raises its delicate petals to the sun and perfumes the world while, at the same time, its roots cling to the elemental muck, the very essence of the mortal e...
Jesus kept it simple. The lesson wasn't complicated. 'I speak; you believe My word; your son will be fine.' We complicate what God has made simple by seeing the world through human eyes. We want to see in order to believe and presume that our limitat...
Yes, a deep lesson from the postage stamp. It attaches itself to a moveable material, the envelope and gets going. A good relationship keeps you going forward; a bad one keeps you static. Attach yourself to someone who is also going forward and you w...
The distance between number one and number two is always a constant. If you want to improve the organization, you have to improve yourself and the organization gets pulled up with you. That is a big lesson. I cannot just expect the organization to im...
After Lockerbie, everyone thought, now we've learned the lesson of how to be proactive instead of being reactive. Unfortunately, September 11 came and we know the result. Thousands of people lost their lives. Security totally failed, not at one airpo...
Look at where I lived! Four blocks from Lincoln Center. I used to play in the fountain. And then I started taking dance lessons. I was in 'The Nutcracker' for the N.Y. City Ballet when I was 8 and dancing in 'The Firebird' for George Balanchine when ...
In terms of the idea of long-term occupation - I have been reading a little bit more about this period - and you can see in that occupation are many lessons for the current occupation of Iraq. So we have these connections that go way back that people...
Life's experiences are not woven with a constant thread; Life in our world is constantly changing. We must repurpose what we have endured and the lessons we have learned; creating a renewed sense of hope. Life is what it is. The question is... What a...
How can we teach our children to be responsible beyond themselves and care for other human beings' welfare and for the welfare of the planet and all that it contains? It's a difficult lesson to convey, when, more than 20 years after the Exxon Valdez ...
Believe it or not the war on Iraq is based on a sound scientific principle, The bee hive principle. Which clearly states that if you are stung by a bee, you should follow it back to its nest and then proceed to beat nest to a pulp with a baseball bat...