I believe there's not a harder job in the world than being a teacher, and there isn't a job with a more direct impact on the performance of our students.

Ensuring all kids have access to an effective, talented teacher needs to be a national priority.

Teacher compensation isn't the only factor in cultivating great teaching. Other important priorities include changing how we measure student performance, providing more flexibility to teacher-preparation programs, and improving how we train and support principals.

My time at the Denver Public Schools taught me there is no harder, or more important, job than being a teacher.

I feel like I'd be a really good teacher. I would go for middle school... those high schoolers would be difficult to deal with.

Music has a poetry of its own, and that poetry is called melody.

The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.

To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful. This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking.

Music is like the soul of the planet.

I don't need the credits for playing the blues and paying the dues. I've already done it. There are some other things to do here - movies and scores and voice-overs.

The standardization of world culture, with local popular or traditional forms driven out or dumbed down to make way for American television, American music, food, clothes and films, has been seen by many as the very heart of globalization.

Writing songs is an essential part of my life: my mother teaches piano, and I have inherited my grandparents' passion for music, especially from my grandfather Tommy, who was a great drummer. It's no coincidence that I play the drums best, but I am also good with the guitar and the piano.

I didn't want to be the archetypal sponging brother-in-law, so I didn't go into acting when I got to the States. I thought, 'No, I'll go to school and then I'll be an English teacher; that'll be fun.' But I was horrible as a teacher. As hard as I tried, I just couldn't inspire those kids to take an interest in Milton and Shakespeare and Donne.

When you become a parent, or a teacher, you turn into a manager of this whole system. You become the person controlling the bubble of innocence around a child, regulating it.

I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.

Among the great names that adorn the roll of Nobel prize-winners in Medicine is that of Otto Meyerhof, my admired teacher and friend, to whose inspiration, guidance and encouragement I owe so very much.

I treated as few patients as I could as a medical student, and I never practiced medicine.

I decided to take a stab at acting. I entered the American Academy of Dramatic Art, where one teacher told me I'd never make it - I was too tall.

Soul music as we've always known it hasn't changed. There are different players now with different attitudes, but there is nothing new being done musically.

I really believe it's not bad to look back within music. I don't mean retro, but using your own memories to make a song because our memories are what make us who we are.

I don't have the feeling of being motivated by anger, revenge or frustration.

I think of myself as an entertainment arsenal. Like I have my acting bazooka and my music machete. And you don't know what I'm going to come at you with.

You must never underestimate the power of the eyebrow.

When you think about rock at its origin, and you think of the Beatles and millions of kids screaming as loud as they can and running as fast as they can towards the Beatles, there's no one who is that kind of lightning rod, who commands that kind of power and has that kind of creative magma.

Push-ups, sit-ups, and a strict diet of raisins. That's my plan.

You know how a lot of people say, 'I lose myself in music,' or 'I like to escape,' but I want my music to be more of an awakening. I want it to make people to be aware of life; I don't want my music to be a distraction. I want to light a path.

As I got older, I really got into Tupac's poetry, his books and just learning about his life and what he was into.

The only love affair I have ever had was with music.

Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second.

For Debussy the musician and the man I have had profound admiration, but by nature I'm different from him. I think I have always personally followed a direction opposed to that of the symbolism of Debussy.

My intention here is to make it clear that not a single cell of my composition, here in regard to The Raven, is found by chance or intuition, that the composition moved towards perfection with the precision and inevitability of a mathematical equation.

My father's nephew was the blues musician, Lowell Fulson. Every time he came around, he had a pretty car, a beautiful woman and a slick sharkskin suit. Believe it or not, that's how I decided I wanted to get into music.

I think music is so diverse today, and bands are so diverse. If you were a rock band in the Eighties, you kind of had to stick to one thing. Now, in this age of Coachella and European festivals and stuff, it's kind of anything goes, so that allowed us to try different things.

You have to fall. You have to understand what that feels like. For what I want in my life, and for where I want to go with this music, you gotta be humiliated, man. You gotta understand what that feels like. It just makes you stronger.

My homies in Gadsden aren't as exposed as I am culturally, which is awesome - that's why I love going home. I'm in the kitchen with people who don't know anything but the simple life, what's important to them, and what's dope.

There's a lot of music that sounds like it's literally computer-generated, totally divorced from a guy sitting down at an instrument.

The role of the teacher remains the highest calling of a free people. To the teacher, America entrusts her most precious resource, her children; and asks that they be prepared... to face the rigors of individual participation in a democratic society.

As a little girl, I didn't like stories about little girls. I liked stories about dragons and beasts and princes and princesses and fear and terror and the Four Musketeers and almost anything other than nice little girls making moral decisions about whether to tell the teacher about what the other little girl did or did not do.

I love math and was a math teacher for many years, so it was fun for me to write several math books, including 'Fraction Fun,' 'Calculator Riddles,' and 'Shape Up!' 'Fun with Triangles and Other Polygons.'

I am a person who thinks about the music first in trying to achieve something musically valid.

I'm obsessed with the power of music and image together. There's also something about music videos that are incredibly glamorous - there's a fetishistic aesthetic to them that you don't really see in movies in the same way.

'Teen Spirit' is a celebration of the power that music can deliver to the cinematic experience.

Drums just always sounded like the most fun part of that good music for me.

We all love musical architecture; there's no doubt about that.

You got to pick one - pay your medical bills or pay the mortgage. Most people can't do both, and I'm no different.

Old music is the same as new music - it's just a different way of delivering it.

To hear people saying, 'The music you are doing has really touched my life and it's moved me in a lot of ways. It's helped me get through some tough times.' That's the best compliment that you could get.

I always wrote music for my friends, but my focus was on playing piano. I didn't think I'd be quite good enough to be a soloist, but I believed that if I worked hard enough, I could work as a player, a teacher.

I was never that into the movies. Never. Even as a youngster. I became interested in movie music only because of the studio orchestras in Hollywood.

I'm trained as a teacher; that's the only thing I've got a certificate for.