There are lots of people in the world who do have the advantage of going to a good drama school and just decide that they want to be actors. There's nothing wrong with an untrained actor; they have to get their training somehow, they have to learn.
Every year, some 65,000 high school students - many of them star students and leaders in their communities - are unable to go to college or get a good job because they have no legal status.
I was out in L.A. and I had gone to film school and I was out here for a couple of years. For a lot of years, I was bartending and having a good time.
Good schools, good jobs, good government. These are not unreasonable demands. But sadly, some of our people have already lost heart and have left Hawaii to look for these things elsewhere.
If you go to an elite school where the other students in your class are all really brilliant, you run the risk of mistakenly believing yourself to not be a good student.
Schools and libraries are the twin cornerstones of a civilized society. Libraries are only good if people use them, like books only exist when someone reads them.
I went to 13 schools in 12 years. We moved all over the place. Music was the only thing that I could get behind... I wasn't that good at socializing. I'm still not.
I was put off by people at school - my cabbage wasn't as good as other people's, you know, so that put me off.
There will always be places in the world where good schools don't exist and good teachers don't want to go, not just in the developing world but in places of socioeconomic hardship.
I think life is sort of like a competition, whether it's in sports, or it's achieving in school, or it's achieving good relationships with people. And competition is a little bit of what it's all about.
My feeling is, if you're going to be called a celebrity, you might as well use it for some good. It's better to testify for school lunches in front of Congress than get drunk in a bar somewhere and misbehave.
Running a school where the students all succeed, even if some students have to help others to make the grade, is good preparation for democracy.
I applied to only one college - the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania - and was fortunate to be accepted. After graduation, I headed to Wall Street and worked as I had dreamed.
It is soooooo necessary to get the basic skills, because by the time you graduate, undergraduate or graduate, that field would have totally changed from your first day of school.
While I do commend the Administration on its commitment and focus on high school reform, I believe that we must focus on graduation as the key accountability measure.
The government gets it right on Head Start. We are providing opportunities for children in underserved areas where parents may not be able to afford preschool so they can begin their schooling with a running or Head Start.
When a nation is over-reliant on one or two commodities like oil or precious minerals, corrupt government ministers and their dodgy associates hoard profits and taxes instead of properly allocating them to schools and hospitals.
Just as playgrounds didn't even make the priority list of most of those responding to Katrina, they all too often slip off the radar of those building our schools, designing our neighborhoods, and drafting government budgets.
Senators say they fear the N.R.A. and the gun lobby. But I think that fear must be nothing compared to the fear the first graders in Sandy Hook Elementary School felt as their lives ended in a hail of bullets.
I've spoken in front of members of the U.S. Congress about a new dream of living in communities where everybody is welcome and everyone can live and go to school and work without facing the fear of bullies.
Few if any teenagers can relate to getting up for school and finding famous comics like Pryor and Williams hanging out in your living room after a hard night of partying. But that's Hollywood.
