My office has a view of low-cost housing, old East German prefabricated apartment buildings. It isn't an attractive view, but it's very helpful, because it reminds me to ask myself, whenever there is a decision to be made, whether the people who live...
I'm telling the story, and if I can't tell the story, I'm not going to sing it. And if I don't agree with the story, and if I got to sing something that portrays me as something I'm not, then I'm not going to sing it either. I didn't even want to sin...
There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘w...
My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That's how I see business: great things in business are ...
That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains. [Busin...
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven'...
I went to law school. And I became a prosecutor. I took on a specialty that very few choose to pursue. I prosecuted child abuse and child homicide cases. Cases that were truly gut-wrenching. But standing up for those kids, being their voice for justi...
I was so surprised because I'm not too sure whether I could win a Nobel Prize, you know, because basically, physics, it means that usually people was awarded for the invention of the basic theory. But in my case, not a basic theory, in my case just m...
The abortion cases produced an enormous amount of mail to my chambers, vastly more than to the other chambers, I am sure. I sometimes thought there wasn't a woman in the United States who didn't write me a letter on one side or the other of that issu...
The present Arab uprising didn't stem from Israel. The old guard is trying to keep down the young chickens. The old guard is better organized. They may win elections, but unless they have a solution to poverty, to corruption, to oppression, they will...
'Rolling Stone,' my first single, was only a hit in Portugal, but when we recorded my second single, 'Can The Can,' I got that hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck feeling, and I knew it would be huge. It topped the charts in the U.K. and Australia in 1973, ...
Well, Nigeria has played a constructive role in peacekeeping in various parts of West Africa. But unless and until Nigeria itself is democratic and respects human rights, it too may well be a source of much greater instability as political repression...
Knowledge empowers people with our most powerful tool: the ability to think and decide. There is no power for change greater than a child discovering what he or she cares about. (Speech about Global Warming read on the National Mall for the 40th anni...
The evangelical wing of the Church spends a lot of energy on being "born again" but little time on "growing up" again. There is a failing to encourage newborn believers out of the maternity ward and into a big world where they will spend the rest of ...
When cyclones tear up Oklahoma and hurricanes swamp Alabama and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, the rest of the country, for billions of dollars to recover. And the damage that your polluters and deniers are doing doesn't just hit Oklahoma an...
Five states - Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Illinois and North Carolina - have been identified by the EPA as contributing significantly to Rhode Island pollution. As of 2010, 284 tall smokestacks - stacks over 500 feet - were operating in the Un...
Rhode Island works hard to reduce air pollution in our communities. We passed laws to prohibit cars and buses from idling their engines and to retrofit school buses with diesel pollution controls. But there is only so much a single state can do, part...
When one doesn't want the limelight, but is also creative in developing whatever it is they are, then you can have two equal people that aren't competing against each other. I think when you are in the same field, it's difficult to leave it outside a...
When I think about moguls, I think like Donald Trump who... owns NYC practically. That's a mogul. I feel like I'm on my way to a lot more, but mogul is a really serious thing. I think it's a word that gets thrown around easily.
I'm always amused when the 'New York Times' writes editorials trying to be helpful to Republicans and say, 'This is the way Republicans can save themselves.' Look, the 'New York Times' disagrees with us. They're entitled to disagree with us, but it's...
Over the years, I've had a lot of different jobs - newspaper boy, dish washer, naval flight officer, Amtrak board member, Governor and chairman of the National Governors Association - just to name a few. But my most cherished job - and frankly my mos...
