I admired Truman, among many other things, because he integrated the Army. I admired JFK because the very first civil rights legislation was passed at his insistence. JFK showed what you could do, though he was a deeply flawed person, as we all now k...
I made so many jokes about poor Russell Crowe, he once knocked on my dressing room door, and told me he wanted to go out on this chat show we were on to laugh with me. Now he's ruined it. I can't make another joke about him.
You're sort of programmed a certain way because of your environment. That's all you know. But we don't have that anymore because of the internet. Because of the internet we're all communicating with each other all across the board, so you're getting ...
From the moment we were first dumped in Jamestown and had our teeth checked before getting sold off and later considered three-fifths of a human being, an abundance of 'likability' hasn't been something blacks have had to stockpile. Instead, it's bee...
I vividly remember my first day on the White House staff. My office, of course, was in the Old Executive Office Building. I didn't rate one in the West Wing; but don't try to tell me or any of the rest of us working there that we weren't working in t...
They were heading out to the middle of the bay - the Gulf - that's another thing that became kind of standard practice, we didn't hurry the destroyers around the beach any more, when it got dark, we'd take 'em out thirty or forty miles out in the mid...
Most of my childhood revolved around wondering when we would be blown up by the Russians. I couldn't stand the news, I knew that if the missile were launched, mortality would arrive in half an hour, so I spent a lot of my childhood feeling that I was...
If the day gets really bad, I can always pull out fan mail. Who else gets mail where kids write to you and say, 'Dear Mr. Scieszka, we were supposed to write to our favorite author, but Roald Dahl is dead. So I'm writing to you.'
I remember in 2000, when President Clinton came to Cartagena just before Plan Colombia started, the country was on the verge of becoming a failed state. Today, we are one of the most solid democracies, where institutions are working, where the scanda...
In my experience, there never seems to be a man or woman who will walk in and literally sweep you off your feet, or away, when you're in the biggest distaster of your life. If it happens, it'll be guaranteed he or she won't be the one you've longed f...
We can't talk about it, or I know she won't so I don't even try, but it's what goes unsaid between people tat builds up like masonry. You have to either knock the bricks out with other things, or let them keep stacking until eventually you are alone ...
That's the way blacks have been encouraged to think: that we got to stick together. You've got a situation today where if a black person says he thinks O.J. Simpson's guilty, other blacks will cut their eyes at him and say, 'You ought to go somewhere...
In 2008, as a matter of fact, I had people accusing me of being a Senator Obama supporter because I wouldn't slam him. I said, 'Well, consider the fact that I voted for impeachment for President Clinton, but it wasn't a personal vote. I voted based o...
I came to the conclusion months ago, and I said it to members of Congress, that the only way people are going to fully appreciate what this reform is if we pass it and implement it and it becomes not a caricature but a reality, and I still believe th...
I think I was a shy kid. I grew up without television. I had a dog, and we lived up in the White Mountains in the summer, and I had no friends up there. And I would just go play hide-and-seek with my dog and probably had some imaginary friends.
We just kind of relied on written scouting reports through the eighties and even the early nineties. I've really been amazed by some of the data that's out there, especially with regards to tendencies of hitters, and certainly tendencies of pitchers ...
President Obama inherited a broken country mired in two wars, a financial crisis, a mortgage mess and more than we all probably even know about and has in my opinion brought us back from the brink. But I still see my friends in no better shape and th...
My father is the reason I am the way I am today. He's why I acted up and he's why I prayed to be the opposite of him. We made up before he died but I vowed to never raise my kids like how he raised me.
A failing grade does not denounce a child to fail in life. An IQ is what I would call an 'inadequate question', it may state our brain capacity or tell us how smart we are, but it does not predict our future. Happy Character Traits and positive Reinf...
I listen to all these complaints about rudeness and intemperateness, and the opinion that I come to is that there is no polite way of asking somebody: have you considered the possibility that your entire life has been devoted to a delusion? But that�...
A sheep walking in a dark forest one sheep found him and bring him to shepherds house but he didn't realize there still wolves in that place, he run into the dark forest and still keep running he need to hide, where he can be safe.Lesson’s learned ...
