My friend Quincy Jones says we won our first Grammys together in 1963. I have no recollection. I don't even remember the room. When he showed me the picture, I remembered what I wore. But it's like awards don't mean anything.
Establishing a 0.03 percent Wall Street speculation fee, similar to what we had from 1914-1966, would dampen the dangerous level of speculation and gambling on Wall Street, encourage the financial sector to invest in the productive economy and reduce...
We were playing a fair, and a few people were handing me stuffed animals and flowers, but one person handed me a paper sack. So I took all the stuff back to the bus. I put the sack in my lap and opened it, and a live iguana jumped out of the sack and...
We writers constantly try to build up our own confidence by getting published, making sales, winning prizes, joining cliques or proclaiming theories. The passion to write constantly strips this vanity aside and forces us to confront that loneliness a...
In Mudcrutch we all wrote songs, and when it got to the focus on Tom and the Heartbreakers, I kept writing songs, but it wasn't anything that was up the Heartbreakers tree, I didn't think - and I don't think they did, either. So I kept writing songs ...
It is easy to romanticize poverty, to see poor people as inherently lacking agency and will. It is easy to strip them of human dignity, to reduce them to objects of pity. This has never been clearer than in the view of Africa from the American media,...
We also must pull from our highest ideals of justice and protect against those ills that destabilized our economy - like predatory lending, over-leveraged financial institutions and the unchecked avarice of the past that trumped fairness and common s...
We designate the spirit of the well as 'she' because in most of her personifications she takes a female form, though not invariably. She appears in many guises - ghost, witch, saint, mermaid, fairy, and sometimes in animal form, often as a sacred fis...
I've always said there is a boulevard that exists between compromising your principles and getting everything you want. Now, we should never compromise our principles. And I never have. Those are the things that people vote for you on, that's the cor...
The job of a leader, the job of a governor, the job of a president, is to get the people in the room and bang enough heads together and rub enough arms and cajole enough to have them put the country and the state's greater interest ahead of their own...
I said we are going to balance an $11 billion budget deficit in a $29 billion budget, so by percentage, the largest budget deficit in America, by percentage, larger than California, larger than New York, larger than Illinois. And we're going to balan...
From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzying rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon society will go plummeting dow...
I have always felt comedy and tragedy are roommates. If you look up comedy and tragedy, you will find a very old picture of two masks. One mask is tragedy. It looks like it's crying. The other mask is comedy. It looks like it's laughing. Nowadays, we...
The school I went to was a little farm school in Wannaska, student body 61 or something. There was a kid, the only black kid in our county, Dustin Byfuglien. He won the Stanley Cup a couple years back with the Blackhawks. Out of a class of 21 kids, h...
I've gone to skin doctors and they'll say to you, 'We should remove this because it's pre-cancerous,' and I'll say, 'Explain pre-cancerous to me.' I'll listen for about twenty minutes and I'll say excuse me, 'Is pre-cancerous like pre-dead? So you're...
I think the ethos for Gov. Romney is to use a whole variety of policies, of which tax policy is one, to try to raise the rate of growth. We've had a recovery from the financial crisis that would be well below what one might normally expect for a reco...
The fact is, when people choose to be brave instead of smart, their courage is generally so threatening to those who are smart rather than brave that they end up being maligned, not congratulated. This is what the Bible says we can expect.
If you're wrestling with some sort of decision, reflect for a moment and ask yourself, Am I being brave, or am I being safe? In the end, it depends on whether we think God can be trusted.
Though my work may be menial, though my contribution may be small, I can perform it with dignity and offer it with unselfishness. My talents may not be great, but I can use them to bless the lives of others.... The goodness of the world in which we l...
Mother Teresa said that she couldn't imagine doing her work for more than thirty minutes without prayer. Do you and I have work that we can't imagine doing for thirty minutes without prayer?
Do dogs understand death? Do they have souls? Do they go to heaven? I have alway believed so, but this [event] confirmed that all of God's creatures , humans and animals, have a soul and that we will all be reunited in heaven. My pastor once told me,...
