America must be the moral leader. It is not enough to have power. Power must be used to protect freedom and give all people hope for the opportunity to see the fruit of their own labor.
For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?
I can plunk out enough chords to write a song, but I'm completely afraid to play guitar in front of other people. It's a fear of failure, I guess.
It has to be real, and I think a lot of the problems we have as a society is because we don't acknowledge that family is important, and it has to be people who are present, you know, and mothers and fathers, both are not present enough with children.
Skype is easy enough to use so that people don't need to be tech savvy - a lot of users just want to communicate with their friends and family, and they find this is the easiest, cheapest way.
Many people you think are individual achievers in fact have either a strong spousal partner over many years or a business partner who's either in the background, not given enough publicity or less egocentric.
Having created a business that is a success, when you are in a nepotistic situation, people who don't do anything themselves, well, it is easy for them to say it's never good enough.
So, it takes a lot of chance and luck. I mean I was lucky enough to get in the program where people with the same skills never made it to the program. So keep trying.
A lot of filmmakers from my generation were lucky enough to have their work more or less perpetuated by people who saw them originally on TV and on HBO and certainly on home video.
All I want is for people to listen to it with unbiased ears, and decide for themselves. I just don't want them to be dictated to by the media, or have preconceptions about it. If you like it, great. If you don't, fair enough.
I didn't want to play these people any more songs and have them say that they weren't good enough. So my response was to just not be able to write anymore. I know that's not the healthiest of responses.
There's a lot of complacency in philanthropy. People figure organizations are trying to do good, and that's enough, even if the results aren't there. But that's wasteful and inefficient. It crowds out better programs.
But my Arabic is pretty good. It's good enough to have conversations with people, to understand what they say, to understand what they're feeling.
Sometimes if you have very confident people, you have to tell them please, be polite, there are other players are good enough as you and you should never speak out of an orchestra.
For people to come to you and say, 'Would you like to be a part of our show?' after years of 'Please tell me I'm good enough,'... I can't tell you how wonderful it feels.
It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.
If people just want to be famous, that's just not enough to get you up at 4 in the morning to go to work. You have to love what you're doing.
In Europe they call geeks 'smart people,' and frankly I think we live in a culture that doesn't value intelligence enough; so I am very proud in saying that I am a geek.
Whatever you want in life, other people are going to want it too. Believe in yourself enough to accept the idea that you have an equal right to it.
My feeling on therapy is it's a luxury, and if you're fortunate enough to get some smart people to talk to about life, then that's fortunate and you should go for it.
In life, we do not give employees enough leeway. If you look around Semco's office, there are plenty of empty desks. The question is - where are these people? I do not have the slightest idea, but I am not interested.
